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Sunday 17th April 2022
09:00 BST

  The weather forecasts kept changing yesterday, but it seems the first attempts got it about right, and then they just mucked everything up. As I mentioned yesterday, the early BBC (Meteogroup) forecast was the most optimistic, and it was also the forecast that proved to be most accurate. After a misty start the sun broke through, and the rest of the day was sunny (apart from when a very occasional cloud would pass in front of the sun for a minute or two. I can't say for certain what the afternoon temperature was, but I feel sure it was closer to the BBC's 20° C than the 17° C offered by the Met Office.
   less sunny, or
                              maybe not
  Neither the BBC or Met Office predicted this morning's misty start, but at least the BBC got the full sunshine right after the mist lifted. The BBC website is currently showing full sunshine until sunset, and a top temperature of 18° C. The Met Office seems to have drifted a long way from the current reality by showing it being cloudy, and even in the early morning version of the forecast (as shown above) they only showed sunny spells. The latest revision says sunny spells won't start until 11am, and will finish for the rest of the day after 1pm. Both forecasts seem to agree on 18° C this afternoon. When the forecast for today is apparently so wrong it makes me wonder if it is worth saying what is predicted for tomorrow. For the sake of completeness it is generally predicted to be less sunny, but both forecasts disagree on how less sunny it will be, but both forecasters agree on an afternoon temperature of just 16° C

  After my bad night's sleep, and initially a possible light hangover, I did not feel good. I'm not sure if I did have a hangover because other rough feelings tended to obscure any hangover symptoms. I'm not entirely sure I can blame it all on a lack of sleep. It may have been frequently interrupted sleep, but I probably got over 5 hours of sleep in total, and while my memories about dreams may have been very vague, I know I definitely did dream a lot, and dreams are very important for mental health.

  I think one of my problems yesterday was more in my head than in reality. I do seem to suffer from being unable to change my feeling during the day. To put it a better way, if I wake up feeling bed I tend to feeling bad all day even after the stimulus to feel bad ceased hours previously. The short version of a long story is that I couldn't raise the enthusiasm to do anything yesterday. In fact that is more or less the long version too !

  I did two things yesterday, and one was more important the other. The least important was to spend many hours going through all the scans of the negatives taken in the days when I used a film camera, and picking out all the reasonable, or better, pictures of trains taken in the late 1990s.  I would then edit them before saving them in a special folder ready to be transferred into my ever expanding spreadsheet catalogue of all my train pictures.
class 322 train
  I discovered I had taken a couple of pictures of trains in liveries that only existed for a short while. The picture above of a class 332 train is one such picture. Apparently only 5 of them were built. They were first used on Stanstead Airport Express services from Liverpool Street station where this picture was taken. One one side they said Network SouthEast, and on the other side "Stanstead Express". Sadly I don't have a picture of the other side. These trains are apparently still use in other parts of the country, but carry slightly different numbers now because they keep changing the seating plan in them !

  The other thing I did yesterday was slightly more important. I managed to control what I was eating rather well for a day when there were few distractions from, real or imagined, hunger. I did give in and eat almost all a triangular tube of Doritoes strong cheese flavour "Stax". Previous experiment showed that these corn based snacks carry very little sugar - probably because all the fibre from the corn makes them very similar to cardboard.

  I had a slightly late lunch of a couple of low(ish) fat beefburger patties. I had them on their own except for mustard and some low sugar tomato ketchup. Part of the reason to open the tube of Doritoes, mentioned above, was because I started to think that maybe something to mop up the residual fat in those burgers might be a good thing. I thought I had better play it safe when it came to dinner, and I just had two cans of soup (both selected for their low sugar content).

  Despite thinking I lacked sleep the previous night, I didn't seem to be in much of a rush to go to sleep last night. I read in bed for some time before I turned the light out. I guess I was fast asleep by 10pm. My sleep might have been almost perfect last night had I not woken up freezing at about 1.30am. I had started to go asleep partly covered by my duvet, but I had obviously kicked it aside while sleeping. I didn't have any heating on because my bedroom had been warmed by the sun during that day, but at 1.30am it had cooled down a lot. I turned the heater on low, and I was soon asleep again.

  I know I woke up several times after that, and I think that every time I changed how much my duvet was covering me. By the morning I think I was completely covered (except for my face which I never cover). I had a couple of notable dreams during the night. One of them was much more describable - at least I think it was, but while it might have been exciting at the time, it has completely evaporated from my memory now.

  The other dream is far harder to describe because there was so much of it, and most of it was too bland to describe. It was yet another in a recurring series that pops up quite frequently with slightly changed details. In these dreams I am at some sort of college. Sometimes that college was the BT training school near Old Street, and sometime variations on the college where I did my City And Guilds courses.

  It is obvious to me that the setting of many of these dreams is influenced by my old school. That school had one peculiar feature. The science labs were on the top floor, but the top floor was split into two, and you had to use the right staircase to get to the right lab. In my dreams this is taken to extremes....and worse. Like in last night's dream, going back down a staircase does not guarantee you end up where you started.

  In one part of my dream I had left the classroom to go and find a toilet. I knew there was one on the landing I had come up from to get to the classroom, but everything had changed when I went back down towards that landing. There seemed to be no urgency about finding a toilet (or I would probably have woken up), and I set out on a sort of magical mystery tour. One staircase I went down came out in a shopping mall.  That is a sort of recurring them in many dreams. It seems that many buildings I go in keep getting bigger, and more wings or stories are added that have uses far beyond the original purpose of the building. I guess these dreams reveal something from my deep subconscious, but I just enjoy them - usually.

  My careful eating resulted in my blood glucose dropping to 8.2mmol/l this morning. That was lower than I expected, and so all is good there. What is not so good is that I have to try and plan today so I can go out for a few hours tonight. Chain are playing an early (7pm) gig in The Chatterton Arms tonight, and I would like to go there even if only for 15 minutes. I fear there will be people there whose presence annoys me, and so I will probably just be wanting to get a dozen or two quick snaps and go home again.

  My problem is what to do with myself during the day to ensure I am fit and ready to go out at about 6.15pm to get the bus, and it's long tedious journey to beyond Bromley. I think I will have to stop eating after a lunch at about 1pm. I can't go out for a walk today or I will be too tired to go out later. I can foresee I will be back working on my ever expanding train pictures spreadsheet again. The other consideration is whether my guts will be OK by this evening, At the moment I seem to be constipated, but I am starting to fart a lot so something should happen sooner or later.
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