There is full sunshine at the moment, and that gives me hope that there will be at least sunny spells through the day. The Met Office correctly predicted the sunshine, as can be seen in the screenshot above, but the BBC predicted a day almost like yesterday's dull dreariness. However....the BBC weather forecast has changed now to show lots of sunny spells. Obviously someone has just arrived at work there, and hastily given their giant computer a kick up the arse and asked it to recompute the weather ! Both forecasters reckon today should see 25° C this afternoon. Tomorrow could reach 26° C, and there could be a fair amount of sunny spells, or a lot of hours of full sunshine depending on which forecaster comes closer to predicting reality.

   Yesterday was a terrible day. I was suffering from poor sleep, and the dull dreary weather was very depressing. I felt very listless, and it was hard to enthuse myself to do anything at all except eat. The eating was the worst part of yesterday. Everything I ate would have been fine for me by itself, but a whole lot of little things adds up to one big thing. As I write this I haven't checked my blood glucose reading yet. I am preparing myself for a nasty shock !

  In between a lot of laying on my bed reading, and dozing, I did manage to do two jobs that needed to be done. One was to clear a backlog of washing up that was making the sink smelly. With all the washing up done I could swill some bleach around the sink, and down the plughole. It smelled a lot nice after that.

  The second job was to finally finish entering the details and pictures into my ever growing spreadsheet listing/cataloguing all the pictures of train I have taken. Yesterday it was the last of the pictures I had taken last Saturday. I also spent a fair bit of time looking back through my photo archives for other train pictures I had missed. I think I only found one good picture of an old slam door train taken in 2004. I am sure there are others, and when I feel in the right mood I will have another trawl through all my old film camera pictures again.

  It must have been midday when I had one of my bigger meals. I really wanted to eat something nice, although I probably wasn't really hungry. I had had a large pot of instant noodles for breakfast, and hat should have kept me going for most of the day. I was also not feeling cold as such, but cool enough that a desire for something hot drove me to have two cans of soup.  Later in the afternoon I would have a couple of handfuls of peanuts, and an "Italian style" salad that I had bought from Sainsbury's on (I think) Tuesday.

  I had a desire for something substantial for my dinner. I ended up having both fish fingers, and a couple of "southern fried" flavour fish burger patties. I just had salt and vinegar on the fish fingers, and after trying them many times in the past, I have concluded that Aldi's own brand fish fingers are not very good. The fish burger patties I anointed with tomato ketchup.

  While I ate my dinner I watched an episode of The Simpsons on Channel 4+1. After that I couldn't see a thing on TV that interested me until 9pm. Having spent a lot of my day reading I fancied a different way to waste time. I turned to my archive of Granada TV made Sherlock Holmes stories. I had previously watched three complete series, and last night I watched the first episode of series 4.

   What I didn't realise was that it was a "feature length" episode based on the book The Sign Of Four. It was very enjoyable, and one of the key characters - a 20 to 30 year old woman was quite attractive dressed in her Victorian costume. I think I have discovered a new fetish for Victorian style dressed women - but only women for the upper classes ! That episode of Sherlock Holmes ended just 5 minutes after the start of QI, on Dave, and I watched it until it ended at 10pm.

  Last night it was cool enough to close my bedroom window, and close the curtains too. I didn't need any fans on.  After my poor nights sleep the night before, I expected to drop off like a log (or some such simile), but initially I didn't. I kept hearing noises from what I thought was inside my bedroom - as if there was some wildlife in there. Maybe there was some animal life in my bedroom, but after the half empty 2 litre bottle of Diet Coke had fizzed enough for the pressure to push out the crinkles in the plastic bottle, and after my bed stopped creaking when I stopped thrashing around on it, it gradually got quite quiet, and I fell asleep.

  I am unsure when I fell asleep, but I would say it most have been around 11pm. From then on I slept really well, and only got up for a pee once or twice. I slept right through to almost 7.30am - which surprised me. I do remember a sort of serial dream about bands performing in odd places. It all started when I found/was given/acquired a very old German microphone. It was (hopefully) joked that it might have been used by Hitler himself.

  The microphone itself was about the size of a bottle or beer. It was directly attached to an impedance matching/balancing transformer carefully shielded in a case about the size of a small can of beer. The two together were quite substantial. I started repairing the microphone. The main thing was to fit a new XLR style connector to replace a similar sized, but unusual German connector. It did seem a shame to add a modern modification, but it was the only practical way of using it.

  Such an imposing microphone needed an imposing singer, and that turned out to be Fiouse from The Flame Pilots. They were doing a gig in a church. Many people thought they would play at the end of the church where the vicar normally does his stuff, but fortunately for me they were playing in what I guess were the choir stalls (I had to admit it is maybe 55 to 60 years since I was last in a church, and my memories are a bit vague). I found myself in a good position to video the band using my old camera/recorder duo. Somehow the German microphone didn't seem to be in this dream.

  The next dream, or I presume it was the next dream, was about after the gig, and I was reviewing the video I had shot. It was truly terrible, but the sound was fantastic thanks to the German microphone that had popped into this dream. The next dream feature Chain playing on seemed to be a traffic island in Forest Hill. Every time the traffic lights changed the audience needed to run out of the way of the oncoming cars.

  Once again I was trying to video some of the gig using my ancient camera/recorder rig. I realised the reason that the video looked so appalling was because a spider had constructed a web over the lens. I didn't realise this at first because the viewfinder was behind a tiny hole you had to squint through. Things got a little weird after that. On the front of the camera there was what looked like a 4 inch CRT. It had a clip on transparent cover, and inside was running with condensation. After drying that out the recordings looked so much better, but it is a mystery buried in the dream how that could be possible.

  I was immediately cheered when I drew the curtains and was greeted with sunshine. I was further cheered by a good looking weather forecast from the Met Office, but only the Met Office until the BBC did a hasty revision to their web site. Today could have been a potentially a good day to go out somewhere, but as I write this there is a problem. I ate so much yesterday, and yet so far this morning I have pooed so little. There must be a lot more on it's way, and I think I will decline frollicking in the sunshine today unless things change.

  There is good and bad news about my blood glucose. I was expecting a reading well into the red, but it was only into the orange. 9.5mmol/l is under that red line, but it too high, and I hope I can find enough amusements today to help avoid too much eating. I have started the day with a small instant noodles, and that may stave off some hunger, although only 15 minutes after eating it I have all these visions of potential foot to eat running through my brain. Sometime my brain is my worst enemy. Maybe I should punish it again with an overdose of whisky !

  I have one, possibly two plans for today. If it is going to be dry and sunny I intend to do at least one load of laundry, and if there is time and inclination, two lots of laundry. If my guts feel stable I may go out shopping in Aldi. There are a few things I prefer to buy from Aldi, and although some of their stuff does not match Tesco's quality, it is often a lot cheaper. Other than that, there is one other thing I might do today. It is to carry on building my fourth "psuedo radio" playlist. I have made three so far, each containing about 1500 songs, but after playing them for several years, they are lacking surprise or novelty. The trouble is that unlike dreams, it take a few sentences to describe the process, while it took several paragraphs to describe my dream that may not have lasted more than a minute or two of dream time. Building those playlists is a long an tedious process. Fortunately it s rewarding when done.