07:29 BST

  Yesterday was grey, grey, and greyer - although there were a couple of early morning sunny spells. The worst thing was that it felt very cold. The temperature briefly peaked at 12° C in the afternoon, but 10 or 11° C was more representative of the day. Despite some filthy looking clouds, it stayed dry.

  

  The weather forecast seems to be deteriorating with every revision. 5pm is now shown as just sunny spells instead of full sunshine. The afternoon temperature should reach 17° C, and that will feel very nice in sunshine. After one good day it all goes horribly wrong tomorrow. Tomorrow will be very dull, and there could be a few spots of rain. It is also predicted to be quite cold with the temperature only reaching 12° C, but it will reach there quite early, and then stay there until sunset.
 
   The cold and grey put me in the mood to do almost nothing yesterday, although the odd thing was that I can't seem to remember actually feeling depressed about it. I guess the few days before being good days, left some optimism behind. There was another factor: One thing I did do late in the morning, maybe 11am, was to take three bottles of beer around to Michael. His wife's illness, possibly dementia by the sound of it, has left him very down, and a good lesson of what is actually bad, rather than just thought to be bad.

  I guess there were just two other things I did yesterday, although I must have done more because I didn't seem to have any spare time to lie down and read. One thing I did do was to install the Xsane, document scanning software, on the new dining room PC, and then connect my scanner* to it. I wanted to scan a load of documents of all types. It was some time ago that I realised "digital hoarding" took up no physical space at all - just a little bit of hard disk space. I justify the very existence of this form of hoarding by saying it is interesting to look back as things like prices years ago - particularly things like gas prices which have recently gone up by a huge amount. I wish I had been able to make digital copies of gas bills from 30 years ago. That would be a real eye opener these days !

* I actually have two printer/scanners, but only one prints (if anyone can afford the ink these days). The scanner I was using yesterday came out of a skip, and the printer didn't work because the plastic chassis had broken, and many of the cogs no longer meshed, but the scanner works, and works well. Under Linux it is just a plug and play set up - once you have installed an application that can operate the scanner, but no drivers have to be installed.

  The only other thing I did was to go to Tesco. I only wanted a few bits and that is almost all I bought. It seemed so cold and miserable outside, even at 3pm when I walked to Tesco, that I put on an almost winter coat ! I felt warm in it coming back with some heavy shopping (mostly 4 x 2l bottles of pop), but I didn't feel so warm as to start getting sweaty inside that coat.

  Apart from the drink, I bought another bag of salad leaves, some more fish (lightly dusted haddock fillets), a reduced price shepherds pie ready meal, and two bags of snacks ! Those snacks were bags of Twiglets. I feel sure I couldn't find any in there the last time I looked, but they were there yesterday, and I grabbed two bags. The thing about Twiglets is that they are very moreish, and have a very low sugar content. The vitamin B in the Marmite like coating is actually good for some aspects of nutrition and metabolic processes.

  There was one other thing that I bought, and that I had almost forgotten about. It was a small box of reduced price mini sausage rolls flavoured with caramelised onion. They would probably be nicer if heated, but enjoyed them cold, and ate the lot with no regard to their nutritional values. They were essentially my late lunch. My on time lunch, around midday, was sliced, smoked beef on plain rice cakes with some horseradish sauce. The smoked beef seemed to be rather expensive, but it is so dense that a little goes a long way.

  My dinner was the "lightly dusted" with flour or something, haddocks fillets, and a heap of salad leaves with a very generous amount of mayonnaise on the leaves. Conveniently leaving the mayonnaise out of the equation, although it wasn't that bad, it was quite a healthy meal in some ways. I was hoping that the heap of salad leaves/lettuce would have a soporific effect like they did the previous night. I think they did, but the effect wasn't so pronounced as the previous night when I was also catching up on a poor night's sleep the night before that.

  I watched a bit of TV last night before reading, and then going to sleep. I watched some QI on Dave, and Have I Got News For You - one of the exceedingly rare times I have watched anything on BBC1 for several years now. As usual I have lost track of the time scale last night. I think I was reading in bed soon after 9pm, and I would then have tried to get to sleep at about 9.30pm. Sleep didn't come easily, or so it seemed, but I am sure the reality was that I was fast asleep after as little as 10 minutes.

  I think I did have quite a good sleep last night. I don't seem to recall getting up for a pee more than a couple of times in the night. Maybe that is the benefit of not drinking a lot of beer before bed ! I did seem to have a lot of dreams last night. Some were variations on a common theme of being back at work. Another one that seemed to go on and on, happened towards the end of my sleep, and it is very hard to explain because even I don't understand it.

  The dream was basically about Angela, and was set in the countryside with some hills. It also concerned some sort of vehicle, but all I can remember is a sort of vague amorphous grey outline of something that might have been a car, possibly a small bus, but definitely not a train. I don't know why, but I was trying to find a position where I could get 3 or 4 of the distant vehicles in the same shot. I finally managed it with three vehicles in the same shot, but Angela was included in that shot, and so I couldn't use it because I was not supposed to be seeing her. It was a very vague sort of dream, and it almost feels like I am describing the events as if seen through a mist or something.

  I woke up a lot earlier than expected, but the sun was out, and I couldn't get back to sleep. I slowly got up, and apart from some now standard stiff joints, I seemed to feel fairly good. I am sure it had little to do with finally getting a decent blood glucose reading. It was just 8.1mmol/l, and that took my end of the month average down to 8.59mmol/l. That's not awful, but I had done so much better in the previous few months - January = 8.2mmol/l, February = 7.8mmol/l, March = 8.26mmol/l. It would be great to match, or better last February's figure in May.

  There are two things I want to do today, and one of them is reliant on doing a poo or two this morning - nothing moving yet ! The simple one is to get a bit of laundry done, and hanging on the line to dry. The other depends on feeling comfortable. It is to get the train to Rochester, and to take some photos of The Flame Pilots doing an acoustic set at The Rochester Sweeps Festival. There are other musicians and other stages. If I get there I may see if I can take a few snaps of other stuff and bands, but I particularly want to see The Flame Pilots because I know them (or two of them).