This morning has certainly started with a lot of sunshine, and yet there are quite a few, mostly thin, clouds to be seen in the sky. The only change in the latest revision to the forecast is that now 2pm, which was shown as sunny spells in the screenshot shown above, is now shown as cloudy. Today may be cooler than yesterday with a predicted high of just 24° C this afternoon. It is interesting to note that the BBC weather forecast says sunny spells, and only sunny spells for nearly the whole day. Their temperature forecast is also for 24° C. Tomorrow may feature a bit more sunshine or sunny spells, but it could be a degree cooler than today. Like today, and maybe for the next fortnight, it will be dry.

   I guess yesterday could be said to have been a good day. Certainly seeing Angela at lunchtime was good, but the rest of the day was a bit more neutral. I carried on resting like I was doing the day before. I find there is not a lot to say about yesterday, but maybe there are a few things worth recording.

 It was yesterday that I first found out the official line up for Petts Wood Calling on Saturday. I really don't care for the first band, Keval, and I will be aiming to arrive at Petts Wood at about 1pm, just as they are finishing. I want to get more good (hopefully) photos of Hell On Tap. Chain on the big stage should be good. Cockney Nights are a sort of Eastenders Chas and Dave sort of outfit, and so are best avoided. I'll probably visit The Daylight Inn while they are on. Slider, a sort of punk band, should be good, and I am really looking forward to MT Pockets on the big stage. It can really transform a band having a big stage to perform on, instead a corner of a pub, and some bands can really fill a big stage. MT Pockets is such a band.


  It's going to be a long day for me, but I think I'll give up after MT Pockets....or will I ? John Bull, the photographer who inspires me, will be snapping away at his son Jamie (the Jamie in Jamie And The Jets), and I think John will expect me to do the same, Hmmm that could get tricky, but I'll play it by ear.

  If I haven't mentioned it before (I'm sure I did), it is my intention to take both my Nikon cameras out to play on Saturday. The idea being is that one will have a telephoto lens, and the other a wide angle lens to avoid having to keep changing lenses. The second Nikon was the very cheap D80 I bought a year or so ago. It is not a high resolution camera, and nor is it very sensitive to light, and I'll have to be careful how I use it. In the hierarchy between "Entry Level" and "Flagship" it is classified as "Enthusiast, and that is only one under "Professional" - so it must be good ! Another way of looking at it is that it is not suitable for those who don't know how to use a camera on anything but fully automatic. I hope I have practiced on it enough to get a few good shots out of it.

  It was actually the day before yesterday that I pulled my so far unused back pack style camera bag out, and started stuffing it with cameras and lenses. I got everything I needed photography wise in it, but it was a close run thing. Yesterday I looked for a bigger back pack where there might be room for a bottle of water, and a small pack of biscuits as well as camera stuff. I saw several that would do the job admirably. There was also a wheeled version with a pull handle on it (like a granny shopping trolley), but the price for that, and others that might be just what I wanted, were horrendous.

  They would be fine for a professional photographer, but I really only want it for just one day a year, and I did not want to spend a lot. I eventually went for a back pack that was only a inch or two in all directions bigger than the one I already have. With priority delivery payment, to make sure it gets here tomorrow, it cost £60 (all bar a few pennies). I hope the reality of it turns out to be how I think it will be like. It is still going to be a tight squeeze to get everything in it, but I think I can see a better way of arranging everything that might also give a few more places to squeeze something in.

  I think I'll make a note of what I ate yesterday because it will be relevant later on. My breakfast was a 100gm pack of instant chicken noodles - that is a little bigger than my usual fare, although many of the Asian branded packs I have been buying in Tesco lately are bigger than the typical Polish instant noodles I like. After coming home from seeing Angela (with two pints of Guinness inside of me) I had 5 rice cakes with lettuce and cheese slices on them. Once again I moderated myself, and only used a single thin slice of cheese on each one (from a pack of ready sliced cheese). My dinner was 3 grilled burger patties on a bed of lettuce. It wasn't nice lettuce, and so I might have been over generous with the dressing !

  I didn't fancy watching QI last night. I have to say that some of Sandi Toksvig's guests can be a much poorer selection than Stephen Fry used to have. I was going to go to bed when it was due to start, and I did feel sort of tired, but that was when I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet, and searched for, and ordered the new camera back pack. With that done I got into bed and started reading. I didn't read for long, and I think I might have been fast asleep well before 10pm.

  Last night was good in that I assumed I would not get disturbed by a mouse, and just relaxed. It seemed to work even when at around 1am I was feeling rather hot, and couldn't sleep until I turned the fan on. Apparently night sweats are the new symptom of Covid. Maybe I had Covid last night, or maybe my bedroom was about 28° C last night, and maybe I had been a bit generous with the hotter pepper sauce on my dinner last night.

  It may  have only taken 5 or 10 minutes to get back to sleep with the fan on, but it felt like a very long 5 minutes. One notable thing is how I only woke up for a pee in the night once or twice. It was almost as if my blood glucose was nice and low, but maybe I was sweating it all out. It was still 25° C in my bedroom when I got up, and it was very nice when I opened the curtains wide to get a bit of breeze in the room, but there seems very little wind to stir things up this morning.

  I know I dreamed quite a bit last night, but only one bit of dream remains in my memory, and that is evaporating fast. In this dream I was walking in the countryside to get to somewhere specific, but unknown now. I passed a footpath, and decided I preferred to explore it rather than do what I had intended (although I think it was only a short detour). The footpath was clearly seen, but bits of it were a bit overgrown. It started with a bit of a slope down, and in my haste I managed to snag a bramble with my bare leg. (I was wearing shorts).

  I found my way through some overhanging trees and stuff, and came out on the footpath proper - my route to it may not have been the official way. I seemed to know that the first 100 yards, or something like that, passed by the back of some houses. They were on the left, and there was some sort of natural barrier, maybe a river on my right. After some minutes of walking I found my way blocked by what looked like loads of old rotting floorboards. What perplexed me was that I couldn't see any way they could have been dumped there. The footpath was too narrow for a the traditional fly tipper in a white van to get there, and there was the barrier, that might have been a river, on one side, and the back garden of a house on the other side. I couldn't imagine that someone would dump such a big pile of crap over their back garden fence because it could be so easily traced to them, and besides, there was no hint that all that crap could have been dragged through a nicely tended garden. I think I woke up when I had run out of ideas for the dream.

  This morning I made sure I guzzled a pint of chilled water, and gave it a bit of time to percolate through my body before checking my blood glucose this morning. Maybe I was a bit hasty because I had a bowl of instant noodles ready to eat. Based on what I ate yesterday I expected my blood glucose to be similar or less than yesterday morning. In fact it was very high at 9.9mmol/l - a hairline under the red line. That was very unexpected, and rather unwelcome. Had I known earlier I would not have prepared the instant noodles. Unless it was a faulty reading it really does suggest I will soon by classified as type 1 diabetic, and on self injected insulin. My last hope lies with the idea that all the very high readings I have had in the last month and a bit, and many of them unexpectedly high, could be down to a faulty batch of test strips.

  I have always had the occasional high reading, and usually I have a good idea what caused them. There are 50 test strips in a each container, and I am now getting to the end of that container (there are just 3 left in it). Apart from on a few very rare occasions when I might use 2 or 3, I only use one test strip a day. Looking back at the last month and a half (and a few days) I can see a higher density of high readings. Each high reading is not unusual in itself, but so many close together is. If I get one high reading I usually If circumstances allow it) take extreme steps to get the reading down for the next morning, but recently that hasn't always seemed to work.

  One trouble with statistics is that they can mean anything you want them to mean. I look back at my past few months of blood glucose reading, and think I see a pattern that might define a rule, and then I continue to look back at the readings, and find my rule is completely wrong. Maybe my last hope is that I will get more consistent readings when the weather gets cooler again.

  The highlight today will be a beer tasting session with Jodie in the later afternoon. Before that there is only one thing I think I am liable to do, and that is to go to the Poundshop in the hope they still have, or have in stock, ear plugs in their DIY section. I use them at gigs now, and specially so at Petts Wood Calling where, with my back stage pass, I often take photos standing very close to the powerful P.A. speakers. It is not essential to get more ear plugs because I have sufficient for now, but spares are always useful. I can also get a packet of biscuits from the Poundshop. I'll take half a dozen biscuits with me to Petts Wood Calling because it is going to be a long and arduous day to fast for so long. At the current time it seems unlikely my blood glucose would sink too low, but regardless of that, a couple of biscuits may perk me up if I am flagging.