08:57 BST

  The weather forecast for yesterday changed many times during the day, but the day was probably even better than the mostly gloomy forecasts. There was quite a lot of sunshine through the day - only as sporadic sunny spells, but enough to make it look nice even if at a maximum of 13° C it was a rather cool day. The gloomiest part of the day was the early morning - one of the times when sunny spells were forecast !

  

  It is a shame that this morning is so cold, 7 or 8° C, because the sky is looking very blue, and the sun is shining. The latest revision to the forecast adds sunny spells for midday to the early forecast in the screenshot above, but loses the sunny spells for 7 and 8pm. The latest revision only shows 2 hours at 15° C, but the day looks like it will be milder than yesterday. At the moment the forecast for tomorrow looks almost nasty. There will be hours of light coloured cloud, and hours of dark clouds, but it may not rain, and there may not be any sunshine at any time. The predicted afternoon high will briefly touch 14° C, but 13 and 14° C is likely to be more representative of the day.

    I allowed the gloomy start yesterday to rule the whole day. In some respects it could be said I allowed what turned out to be a fair day to be wasted, and yet I did a lot of useful work yesterday. It's just not the type of work I might have done under other circumstances. There was another deciding factor that made me stick to what I ended up doing, and it was that I was feeling slightly constipated, and so very slightly uncomfortable (although most of the latter was all in the mind).

  Throughout my working days I did what could be called very light manual labour, albeit of a highly skilled nature. It didn't call for any great strength like digging roads, for example would need. It was generally all bench work, although carrying some of the heavier telephone exchange equipment from racks to bench needed a few small muscles. In the 7 years that I was repairing large screen televisions I most definitely needed some muscle power to lug those brutes around, but once on the bench it was almost a sit down job.

  That last paragraph is the lead up to say that I could never imagine what people do who work in offices. It just seems that they push bits of paper around, and often the bits of paper are about other bits of paper, and are unrelated to whatever the company actually makes. Maybe yesterday I began to think otherwise. When I look back at what I did yesterday I see that it was the equivalent to working plus overtime, in an office.

  I never timed things, but I am pretty sure I spent well over eight hours at my PC yesterday. Writing this blog/diary thing takes a couple of hours most mornings. After that I spent possibly another eight hours, still behind my PC, seeking out pictures from my archives, and editing the best train pictures to add to my spreadsheet where I am attempting to make a record of every train I have photographed over the years. I am not including duplicates of the same train unless it is one that has had a change of livery, or other noticeable difference.

  As I think I have mentioned before, the spreadsheet started as just a list of one type of train that was taken out of service in London, and then I added the Networker trains that may soon disappear from local services around here. The next step was to add all the other types of train. Finally, and only recently, I decided to add the old slam door trains. I am still finding loads of pictures of these, and that was what I was doing all day yesterday. The only difficulty is deciding what type of trains they are by class type because they never carried the full number on the front. They just had the last 4 digits, and then I had to decide if it was a 411xxx or a 421xxx. To make matters worse, the first digit of the four digit number on the train may not correspond to the last digit of the three digit class code. It's terribly complicated, and although I appreciate those old trains, I could never say I was an expert about them.

  There were a couple of other things I did yesterday. One was to read more of the book I am currently reading, but I didn't have time to do that until fairly late in the evening. Another thing was to use the PC on the dining room table (principally used just for playing music while we drink in there) to make a back up of a backup disk of Jodie's photographs. The first backup is a copy of the thumb drive she uses to decant pictures from her phone so she can make room on it. I have been copying those pictures, plus anything else she has copied to the thumb drive to a 160GB external hard disk.

  On Sunday Jodie announced she had had to put a new SD memory card in her Canon pocket camera. She wisely suggested that it would be a good idea to take a copy of the old SD card. It was an almost full 64GB card, and that filled up quite a lot of space on the 160GB drive. Yesterday I decided it would be good to copy everything on that 160GB hard disk to a 500GB external hard disk. I had a spare here - it was one that I had had to replace with a larger drive - and I used that.

   I am rather glad I had transferred all the stuff I originally had on that hard disk to a new, and larger disk, because I didn't get very far in copying Jodie's stuff to it when it failed ! I wasted  some time trying this and that, even the USB3 cable, to fix the problem, but ultimately I had to declare the hard disk a failure. Fortunately I had a brand new, spare 500GB external hard drive, and I made a perfect (hopefully) copy of the contents of the 160GB hard disk to the new 500GB disk. I shall do the same thing sooner or later to a new 500GB external hard disk, and make the 160GB disk redundant.

  The other thing I did yesterday was to eat, but not all that much. I had instant noodles for breakfast. At lunchtime I tried a tin of Estonian (I think) spicy sausage in beans. It was a make I had not tried before, and I shan't be trying again. The sausage was not very nice, although it was still an improvement on all made-for-England canned sausages and beans. Those sausages are repulsive pink gunge. The other possible bad thing was that I did notice sugar listed as in ingredient in the very fine, and barely readable print on the tin.

  Later in the afternoon I did have one or two snacks of cheese and salad leaves on "lightly salted" rice cakes. They were surprisingly nice for something so simple. When it came to dinner it was another case of keeping it simple. It was a pile of salad leaves, a few baby plum tomatoes, and some slices of corned beef with some horseradish sauce. If I had one complaint about it, it was that the ready sliced corned beef seemed a little bland.

  I watched two episodes of QI last night - one was a QIXL. When they finished I went to bed and started reading. By 11pm I was feeling very tired, and tried to go to sleep. While I was reading I felt comfortable, but I wasn't in a good sleeping position. Maybe I should have stuck in that position because I just couldn't get comfortable to sleep. It seemed that any way I turned something would hurt. At one time I seemed to get sciatica in my right thigh - I only get that when standing up for too long ! In another position my right elbow ached, and I found all sort of weird and wonderful aches in the hour I tried to get to sleep.

  Some of the stranger aches were a toe on my left foot, one side of one of my fingers, a bit of my chin, a spot on the back of my head, and some of the more common joints would add their contributions. Of course none of these aches happened at the same time. On top of everything I had the return of the vertigo I was suffering from two weeks ago. I had cured that, or seemed to, by dripping walnut oil in my ear to soften any build up of wax. I an trying the same thing now, but last nights vertigo was rather different.

  It only happened when my head hit the pillow semi hard. If I lowered my head onto the pillow gently it didn't really happen. It was worse on one side, but I could still get it no matter which side of my head lay on the pillow. For a few moment everything would spin around. I suspect that as I have got older I have learnt to partly ignore, and even slightly enjoys some weird sensations. The best thing was that there was no nausea involved, and because I was laying in bed, I could fall over, or anything like that. In 15 or 20 seconds it was generally all over. It is odd that it only happened when laying down. When I sat up, and got out of bed I was as right as rain.

  At midnight I got up and took a couple of paracetamol tablets to see if they would calm the odd aches down. After an hour they did seem to, and at about 1am I was able to get to sleep. If I have any complaint about my sleep after that it was that I woke up at my normal time after losing at least 2 hours of sleep last night. This morning I feel so-so, not good, but not particularly bad.

  The worst feeling is the feeling of constipation again. I forgot to mention it further up the page, but after not "going" for much of the day I finally "went" at about 4pm. The thing is was that it was all very underwhelming. It was just like how it should be in the morning - an easy and smooth process. The quantity involved strongly suggested that as I had thought, I didn't eat large amounts on Sunday, and that my high blood glucose was down to the sweet and syrupy beers I had drunk the day before.

  This morning my blood glucose has come down to 8.5mmol/l. That is perfectly OK, but I would strongly prefer the lead digit was a seven. It is nice and bright this morning, and it would be a shame to waste the day because I feel constipated.....err, I was, but in the space of 5 full stops I am no longer ! That was the second thing I have done so far today The first was to have a shower. I have to confess I didn't bother to wash at all yesterday.

  So now I am theoretically comfortable, I could go out, but I still can't because I am expecting a delivery of beer today. The last bit of information I found on the couriers website was that at 4am this morning my box of beers was at the local delivery depot, and would be delivered some time today. I am supposed to be notified of an approximate time once the driver has got out of bed, and made it to the depot.... I'm not sure what I will do while I am waiting, and then after the beer arrives, but I suspect it may involve a certain ever growing spreadsheet.