08:25 BST

  The weather forecast promised rain for yesterday, but there was no rain, or none that I was aware of (I got the hose out to water the dry looking garden). I don't think the sun ever managed to break through the clouds, but it did seem to be brighter than expected. I feel sure the temperature didn't exceed the forecast temperature of 14° C.

  

  Once again rain is forecast for today, but it seems to be a moving target. The latest revision to the forecast has moved the heavy rain originally predicted for 8am to 9am. It still says there will be an 80% chance of rain, and so something must happen. The light rain has disappeared in the early afternoon, but is now shown to start at 5pm, and on to 9pm. At 5pm it is shown as a 50% chance, but the chance falls way to just 30% by 9pm. It all sounds unlikely, and when I look at the clouds, I am not even convinced it will rain at 9am. There does seem a good chance that even on the probably sunless day, the temperature this afternoon will reach 15° C. Tomorrow should feature sunny spells, and even sunshine, and all that may help to raise the temperature to a warm 20° C.....maybe.

  The weather yesterday should have left me feeling depressed and listless again, but somehow it didn't. I can't say I had a busy day, but I did achieve a few things. Maybe it was all down to the building excitement of a delivery from Amazon. There was a catch in all the excitement, and what I had delivered was exactly as expected, but it turned out to be not what I wanted.

  The item delivered was a so called "high gain" television aerial. I am currently using one plugged into the USB dongle that allows me to watch TV on my PC. I query the description of "high gain" but it does provide a marginal improvement over the little aerials that come with the USB dongles. The problem is that many dongles use a miniature aerial connector instead of the standard "Belling-Lee" socket used universally on TV's in this country, and probably most other countries except possibly America.

  I seem to have several of these DVB-T (digital broadcasting - television) USB dongles, and apart from the one I currently use on my PC, the best ones use a miniature aerial connector. I have two others, and although I am sure one of them has worked on a Linux PC before, it would not work on the Linux PC in the dining room. The other with a standard aerial socket works, but seems very insensitive, and can't pick up some channels. That leaves two other which work fine, and are sensitive, but use a miniature socket. I shall have to make an adaptor if I am going to use that aerial with a good dongle in the dining room.

  I didn't feel like cutting cables and suchlike yesterday, and got on with other stuff. A lot of that "other stuff" was actually messing about with those dongles. I spent a fair amount of time testing them on my bedroom PC. Doing so meant having to delete all the stored channels, and then scanning for them all over again.  One problem is that some of those dongles need an initial "seed value" to do the scanning, but that "seed value" is several years out of date, and so it just scans past BBC3 and BBC4 (and probably other channels). The better dongles can do an auto tune with no seed needed, but for some unknown reason it doesn't always work every time. It seemed to take an age to get every channel back on my bedroom PC after mucking about with it. It also took a long time doing the same sort of thing earlier on the dining room PC.

  The new aerial was delivered at about 2.40pm, and before that I probably spent all my spare time catching up on tech news and other stuff on the internet. Through the whole day it could have been easy to have had many nibbles and such, but I must have somehow flipped an internal switch in my brain that pressurised the worst of my hunger. I didn't actually fast, but all I had before dinner time was salad and cheese on rice cakes. Somehow that felt very satisfying.

  As dinner time (about 7pm) approached I did start to feel hungry, and didn't think my intended dinner would be enough to satisfy me. That intended dinner was the Tesco shepherds pie ready meal that I found on the reduced price counter several days ago. It had to be eaten soon because it was on it's best before date the day I bought it. I supplemented it by having a starter of a can of soup. Maybe the two together was not a good idea because that shepherds pie seemed very rich, and I was getting a bit of acid reflux after eating it.

  I did what seems to be my normal now of watching an episode of QI on TV before going to bed to read. I didn't read for all that long, and I was probably asleep soon after 10pm, and maybe before then. The real question now is, did I dream ? I am sure I did, but I am not sure what I remember was a dream, but maybe something triggered by a dream, and something thought about during short periods of being awake (probably for a pee).

  What I either dreamed, or just thought about, were class 319 "Thameslink Trains". It was a few days ago that I came across a video I had downloaded about the introduction of the new class 700 trains for Thameslink services. I think it was all narrated by a TV reporter, but someone in the rail industry had really geed him up (possibly with something in a plain brown envelope) or he was just gullible enough to believe everything he was told.

  The basic report was that the new trains were wonderful, and that the old trains were ancient and life expired. The original class 319 trains were first introduced in 1987, and were last used in 2015 - a life time of 28 years. For a train that is not long, and after a refurbishment they were transferred to be used on less demanding services in the north. As far as I am aware they are still going strong to this day.

  It got me thinking about what trains, in intensive service, have lasted a lot longer. The A60 Metropolitan line trains on the London Underground were definitely tired, and their suspension was getting very soft, but they made it to over 50 years old before being replaced with their dull and soulless replacements. A more modern, and rather prestigious train is the class 373 Eurostar train. They were introduced in 1993, and so are currently 29 years old. They have had refurbishments, and are now apparently being supplemented by a younger cousin, the class 373, but are still in daily use running through the channel tunnel and clocking up the miles on the continent. I have seen no sign yet that anyone has accused them of being life expired like the class 319 trains were in that news report.

  My choices for eating worked out OK yesterday. This morning my blood glucose reading had dropped from an almost dangerous 9.6mmol/l yesterday to a very acceptable 8.1mmol/l this morning. Of course I don't think I feel any better for it, and I certainly didn't need less sleep last night. I woke up as if to get up at just after 6am this morning. After a pee I though I would see if I could get 5 minutes more sleep - a whole hour later I woke up again. I definitely had my 8 hours sleep, and maybe a bit spare last night.

  Today is going to be complicated, and maybe very frustrating. The most important thing today is that I want to meet Angela for another Wednesday lunchtime drink. The complication is that I am expecting two deliveries today. One is for 12 big bottles of hot chilli sauce. That is being delivered by DPD, and generally that get here before midday, but I haven't heard from them yet with an estimated delivery time. I am also expecting my new bedroom curtains, and they are being delivered by Amazon. Usually that would get here late in the afternoon, and early evening is also very common, but yesterday's delivery of that TV aerial was at about 2.20pm, and I would have to run back from the pub (an impossibility) if I wanted to be here that early. I have never missed a delivery from Amazon, but I guess there has to be a first time.