The latest revision to the forecast shows only 5pm as being without sunshine, and from 6pm it could be back to full sunshine. Of course this is mostly nonsense. The forecasters know there will be one big cloud passing through, but can't say it's arrival time, or if it will pass overhead, or towards the north or south of Catford. The temperatures continue to rise as we head into another heatwave. 28° C is expected today. Tomorrow may feature non stop sunshine all day, but surprisingly the temperature may be a degree less than today.

   I don't know if it was a self fulfilling prophecy, but yesterday I was as knackered as I expected to be after my long stint at Petts Wood Calling on Saturday. That's not to say I didn't manage to do anything. I did do a few things, and it seemed like hard work !

  It seemed to take ages to finish writing here. I started very late, and wrote quite a big diary* entry with lots of pictures included. It was midday, or close to it when I finished, and only then did I take a nice (briefly) refreshing shower. Once I had finished using the bath I started some laundry, but I left it soaking in detergent for some time before I finished the job, and got the clothing hanging on the line to dry in the nice warm sunshine.

* Where "diary" could = a "blog", or maybe it is just a pile of scribble. I have never known what to describe my morning writings as, but maybe "diary" is pretty much what it is.

  I had wanted to go for a walk in the park yesterday to see if the "Food 'n' Fun" day lived up to it's promise. All I know is that the only definite thing I missed was the birds of prey display. I had selected a camera and lens to take some snaps of them, plus anything else of interest, but I had a snooze instead. The earliest I could have gone would have been about 3pm, but by then I had given up on the idea because I had other stuff to do.

  I heard from Jodie around midday, after I had sent her a text message to say the trains weren't running because of engineering work. She replied that she was a bit "beered out" after a heavy session, or more at The Great British Beer Festival. I suspect that is where she was last Thursday when she didn't arrive here. That left me free to start the work I wanted to do - photo editing.

  I finished yesterday saying that my main camera, the Nikon D3200, probably had several hundred pictures on it. I was amazed to find that there were over a thousand pictures on it. A lot of them can be accounted for by the fact that I had the camera set for burst mode - if I held the shutter button down it was taken 4 or 5 shots a second. It is a very handy thing when you hope to capture a special moment in time - a smile, or a certain look, and similar things. On one occasion I held the shutter button down when I knew that Jamie Bull was about to jump off the stage, and although I haven't checked to make sure the shots were nice and sharp, I know that I caught him halfway between stage and the ground. It is a good way to take hundreds of pictures that just fill up the memory card  with unwanted pictures. Than goodness memory cards are still fairly cheap.

  By the end of the day I had done full photo albums for just three of the seven bands I saw. One of those, The Cockney Knights, was a fairly quick job because I just didn't like all that ancient east end knees up stuff, and I just took some token photos of them before going to the pub for a pint of Guinness.

  I was rather disappointed with the pictures I had taken of Hell On Tap. It seemed the best picture were taken on my Nikon D80 camera (2006 vintage), but most of them were taken on my Nikon D3200 (2012 vintage, and double the pixel count). I thought they were very lacklustre, and they needed quite a bit of work to make them sparkle a bit. It seemed the camera was being confused by the strong backlighting from the open backed stage (with the sun right behind the trees behind it).

  I am sure I had the camera set to centre spot metering so the exposure would be right for the face of the subject. At least that is how I believe centre spot metering works, but the camera seemed to be reacting to all the light in the scene. Some faces came out a tiny bit over exposed, and looked sort of plasticy with no detail. Out of something like 140 pictures I managed to find 8 that I thought were good enough to use. With a couple of pictures taken with the D80, which generally provided good pictures, I managed a 11 shot photo album.

  One thing I nearly forgot to mention was the time it took to split up the one huge directory on the camera memory card to individual directories for each band. To add to the difficulty of the task there were a scattering of pictures taken that were not band pictures, but just friend and people not on stage.

  It was late enough when I did the third photo album that I did some of the editing during commercial breaks while watching TV. That was actually good because I would agonising over how I could improve a photo, go away to watch the next bit of TV, and come back to the photo editing with "new eyes" (or rested eyes and brain). What I found is that with fresh eyes many pictures looked perfectly good with an extra tweaking.

  It was about 11pm when I had completed the photo album of Chain, and I was happier with it than the photo album of Hell On Tap. It was another late night, and I needed to relax a bit with some quiet reading before I felt ready for sleep. It's all very hazy now, but I think I turned out the light at 11.55pm. By midnight I had fallen into a deep sleep. As far as I am aware, it was 4.18am when I woke up next. That is a very long block of sleep for me ! It was still dark then, but the sun had been up for some time when I next woke up.

  Like the day before, I wanted a bit of a lie in, and I probably spent as much as 90 minutes in that strange state of being almost awake and sleeping at the same time. Of course that is impossible, at least I think it is. What was probably happening is that I would sleep for 10 minutes, wake up just enough to open one eye to check the time, and then fall asleep for another 10 minutes. I would guess it was rather poor sleep, but it still felt good to be able to do it - up to a point. I knew there was work to be done, and had to get up sooner or later.

  Apart from one thing, I thought I ate quite carefully yesterday. That one thing was "bacon mayo". It contains stupid amounts of sugar, but it's biggest crime is that it tastes more like smoky margarine - rather unpleasant. I don't know why I put some on my dinner last night. What I do know is that it actually put me off eating what could have been dinner part two. Both dinners would have been the same ready roasted, cold chicken breast on mixed salad leaves, but each would have been dressed differently.

  I had a pint of chilled water, and allowed maybe 45 minutes for it to percolate through my bloodstream before checking my blood glucose reading. Maybe a bit more water, and a bit longer would have given a lower reading than 9.0mmol/l - exactly the same as yesterday.  That was slightly annoying after I thought I had eaten much more carefully than I might have. Incidently I have started a brand new pack of glucose test strips, and can't blame them for erratic high readings. It seems it is really me after all.

  Today I have more photo editing, and more laundry to do. Later on, assuming Jodie has recovered from her alcoholic poisoning, I'll be tasting more exotic beers this afternoon. I doubt I will be doing anything at all after that. An earlier night might be nice.