08:27 BST

  Later versions of the weather forecast came near to getting it right. Yesterday morning was bright and sunny, but the afternoon was generally dull. At around 6pm there was some light rain. The afternoon seemed warmer than the forecast 21° C, and my thermometers suggested 23° C.

  

  There have already been a few very light showers this morning. The latest revision to the forecast now says just one period of light rain at 10am. After midday the clouds should thin, and 1pm should see sunny spells. From 2pm there could be four hours of non stop sunshine followed by a couple of hours of sunny periods. It is possible there will be another shower at sunset. It is not going to be a warm day with the afternoon high being no more than 17° C. At this point ut seemed wise to consult the BBC version of the weather forecast. The fact that it says light drizzle at 9am seems to make it more believable. It say there will only be sunny spells this afternoon, but the temperature could be 19° C. They can't agree on when there will be rain, but both forecasters agree that tomorrow will be wet, although the BBC have also suggested thunderstorms in the morning. Both suggest a similar temperature in the afternoon of 16 to 17° C.

   I basically arranged my whole day around having a beer tasting/drinking session with Jodie, but there was a flaw in that plan...or maybe two flaws. The first was that there are no trains to Catford Bridge this whole 4 day bank holiday weekend, and then to compound that Jodie said she had a hangover, and didn't fancy messing around with buses. I didn't find that out until about midday. Maybe if I had known it at the start of the day I could have made better use of the day.

  One thing I did do in the morning, although it was barely morning when I finished, was to catch up with a small backlog of laundry. I washed, and hung on the line to dry, a couple of t-shirts and 4 or 5 pairs of underwear. It was my biggest achievement for the whole day. I did achieve something even better, but it was a negative thing. I shall explain that at the appropriate time.

  I did think about going for a walk in the park in the afternoon when it was a bit dull, but quite warm. I really should have forced myself to go, but I was in the wrong frame of mind. I was feeling a bit depressed, but the reason for that depression is because I didn't go out, and I didn't go out because I felt depressed. A fine bit of circular logic !! I did find a few things to do, and they kept me partly amused for some of the afternoon.

  One thing was to do a little more experimentation with the old Toshiba laptop. I installed an old favourite screensaver, and I did another battery endurance test. The latter didn't go that well because I missed (or it didn't play) the alarm signal for when the battery was down to 10%, and then, probably quite shortly after that, I missed the alarm signal to say it was shutting down. The most intelligent guess I can make is that once again the battery lasted for about 90 minutes. That is still pretty good, and probably more than half of the original capacity for such an old laptop*.

* I have managed to find that the laptop came on the market in the year 2000, and so mine is now almost 22 years old. I did find a Danish manual for it, and maybe somewhere there was a time for how long the battery would last, but I can't read Danish, and although I could take a guess at some of the writing, I couldn't see anything about battery life. More internet searches showed lots of new batteries should be available, new power supplies, and even a new motherboard, although the price for the latter was extortionate for a board probably taken from a scrapped machine.

  I also installed a few more programs on the laptop, but I didn't test whether they were working or not. I may do that before I put the laptop away, but essentially I have gone as far as I can with that laptop. I do have the option of putting back the hard disk with Linux, with web server, on it, and if I need an emergency web server I will probably do that, but for now it is working, but useless for most tasks, and anything thing it can do I can do more then ten times faster on my desktop PC.

  The other thing I did yesterday was to watch some TV, and it was, gulp, daytime TV (just). Fortunately it wasn't the usual daytime TV fayre, but a rather good film that I came across when looking to see if I had once again missed Sherlock Holmes (I had). It was the film "The Battle Of Britain". As far as I am aware it is a fairly accurate depiction of moments in the Battle Of Britain. Fortunately it was a British made film, and didn't have a bunch of excitable Americans in it, and it didn't show Tom Cruise single-handedly shooting down the whole of the Luftwaffe. Instead of being exciting, it was quite emotional.

  I watched a bit more TV while eating my dinner. My lunch had been fairly sensible, albeit intended to precede a drinking session. It was very well cooked (to release most of the fat) bacon with lettuce leaves. It was quite tasty, and I may well use the recipe again. On the other hand, dinners was not good. I really wish I hadn't bought the rather large macaroni cheese ready meal. It was intended for two, and it had quite a lot of calories, and rather a lot of sugar in it. I didn't want to waste it, and so I ate it all. It was fortunate that it was quite enjoyable as a face filler, although it did seem a bit blander than expected.

  By 10pm I was in bed, and 30 minutes later I was asleep. I think I remember one short period of insomnia during the night, but it was more to do with trying to memorise some of a dream. I shouldn't have bothered because I can't even remember what the dream was about now. I do remember one fragment of dream. It was set in somewhere like Catford telephone exchange. It was like I had returned there after many years, and found it very familiar. The one strange change was that there was a Japanese engineer working there. It transpired that he had a still at home, and had brought in two demijohns of basically pure alcohol. The dream ended with me hoping I would get to try some later.

  After what seemed a good sleep I woke up just after 5am, and as I have done several times lately, I turned the heater on low, and got back to sleep. At about 6.45am I woke up again, and I felt sort of good. In a way that is surprising because when I checked my blood glucose it had gone through the roof. I knew it was going to be high after eating that macaroni cheese, and possible 5 bottles of Asahi lager didn't help, but I never expected it to be well over the red line with a reading of 11.1mmol/l.

  Whatever else I do today I have to fast until this evening, and then maybe only have a couple of cans of Tesco chicken soup (very low sugar content) for dinner. This is going to make for a difficult day, and made even more difficult because one thing I want to do today is some shopping. I don't even know if Tesco is open today, but that is probably the best place to go, although just buying Diet Coke, which is what I need most, is going to be very weird. Assuming it does brighten up this afternoon, I really should force myself to do a 3 or more miles walk in the park today, but I am definitely not looking forward to doing that. At least it might be better than weeding the garden - something I have been neglecting for so long now that the flower beds are overgrown with weeds.