The forecast for this morning's temperature is spot on - it was a very chilly feeling 13° C, and hasn't risen much so far, but it should reach 24° C by late afternoon. The latest revision to the forecast shows the full sunshine giving way to sunny spells at 6pm, but they should continue until sunset. The lack of rain may continue to the end of the month ! We seem to be building up to another heatwave at the moment. Tomorrow may feature continuous sunshine, and that may push the temperature up to 26° C. Following days should see small increments until we hit 31° C for maybe 4 days in a row.

   Yesterday could be described as the calm before the storm. I mostly, but not completely, relaxed in an attempt to gather my strength for today - a particularly hectic day that I shall explain further down the page. The one less than relaxing thing I did was to go shopping in Tesco.  I won't get a chance to do any shopping today, and there was stuff I particularly wanted for this evening, and tomorrow.

  One thing, or actually several things because they were 3 for £7, I bought were some ready meals. Six minutes in the microwave and ready to eat - just what you need when exhausted. I generally steer clear of ready meals because they are not very healthy, and their sugar contents can often seem very high, but for two days exceptions can be made.

  Yesterday I seemed to eat a fair bit, but also not that much. That sounds like a paradox, and it really is ! I started the day with a pack of instant noodles. My lunch was supposed to be a tub of Greek yoghurt coleslaw fortified with grated cheese which I bought in Tesco yesterday (I bought the coleslaw the previous time I went to Tesco). All the raw vegetables in the coleslaw, and maybe the fact that it contained very little sugar, left it being very unsatisfying. It might have been two hours later that I had another bowl of instant noodles.

  Having bought three ready meals I thought I had better use one up, and had one for my dinner last night. It was mashed potato with braised beef. The best thing about was the carrots. They did seem to taste very nice. Maybe the great thing was that they were not cooked to nothing but pulp, and still had a very slight crunch to them. The mashed potato was almost nasty, and the "braised beef" was a few chunk of probably very low grade meat, beaten to a pulp to make it seem less stringy, floating in a nondescript gravy. It also seemed to be a very small portion - probably a post Brexit cost saving exercise.
 One not-really-a-leisure-activity thing I did yesterday was to play around with different packing styles for my new camera back pack. I initially tried it with the lens taken off the second camera, but that didn't seem to improve matters at all. The "approved" way of using these cases is to have one camera with the biggest lens down the centre of the case with nice neat pockets for stuff all around it. That wouldn't work for two reasons.

  The first and most important reason is that it would not take advantage of of special, although maybe not terribly useful, feature of this case. that being the zipped opening on the side. My new picture tries to show how a camera, with large lens on it, can be taken out of that opening without having to open the full case. The second reason why it can't be like in the advertising pictures is that several lenses are two long to stand upright, and have to be laid down - thus disturbing the neat symmetry shown in the pictures.

  Well, sod the so called experts, my back pack is packed as per the picture above, and ready for action today. One ironic thing is that by taking two cameras, each with a specific lens, I may never need the other lenses. Today I will find out if that is true. The most important thing is that no matter how I stuffed everything in, there would still be no room for the stuff that I will be taking in a separate shoulder bag.

  After my lousy sleep the night before I tried not to let anything distract me from an early night last night. I think I was asleep not that long after 9pm, and I did seem to sleep rather well last night. I kept the window closed to keep out the chilly air, and kept the empty duvet cover close for a bit of extra warmth in the last hours of the night. I'm fairly sure I did have dreams last night, but I can't seem to recall a single thing about them. I don't even remember waking up too many times in the night. I think it was just gone 4am, when 5 or 6 weeks ago it would have been broad daylight, that I had a slight difficulty getting back to sleep.

  One of the things last night was that it was not warm enough to sweat during the night (maybe I didn't put much chilli sauce on on my dinner either). I thought it would be worth taking a chance by checking my blood glucose without all the rigmarole of drinking lots of water to re-hydrate myself. I was right, and rather surprised to get an almost average reading of 8.6mmol/l. After that ready meal with it's semi high sugar content, plus all the other stuff I ate, I expected a higher reading than that. It just shows that I know nothing about controlling my sugar intake....Either that or there was some other reason for the high readings recently. Maybe some sort infection that I was not really aware of. Curiously enough, I don't feel any better this morning than most mornings.

  The whole of today revolves around Petts Wood Calling - the one day music festival held in the Petts Wood Memorial Gardens. I had been offered, and have accepted a back stage pass, and so my photography today is more like work than pleasure. It is certainly going to feel like work, or would do if I bothered to photograph every band, but I will definitely be getting there too late to see the first band on because I really don't like them. There is also another band on in between tow bands I would like to see, who I will only take a few snaps of before going to the pub ! I think I am aiming for the 12:35 train to get there (with one change of train, probably at Shortlands station).