Like yesterday, the day is starting off rather grey, but if the weather forecast holds it should end up better than yesterday with full sunshine predicted. That should raise the temperature to 16° C. There has already been a revision to the weather forecast, and that has only brought the first sunny spells forward to 10am. Meanwhile, the BBC forecast says only sunny spells today, but insists they should be starting at 8am - there is still 45 minutes left of the hour, and the chance of the sun breaking though in that time seems to be close to zero, but fingers crossed for 10am. The BBC and Met Office agree that tomorrow will be sunny from soon after sunrise until sunset. The BBC says only sunny spells, but the Met Office says most hours will include full on sunshine. It should be between 15 and 17° C tomorrow.

  I think I would say that yesterday got off to a good start, and then all went wrong in the early evening. After having a morning shower I put some clothes in to soak in detergent, and would do the rinsing and fabric conditioner later. I allowed maybe half an hour to cool down after my shower before going out for shopping.

  My shopping destination was the little supermarket on the bridge that seems to specialise in a mythical place somewhere between Turkey and Poland. Originally it was the Turkish bakery, but later on it started stocking loads of Polish stuff. I believe the owners are still of Turkish, or probably Turkish Cypriot decent. The name on the till receipts has swapped a few times between TFC and PFC - Turkish or Poland Food Centre.

  Anyhow, they carry a good range of Polish and other eastern European instant noodles, and they were my prime target for my shopping trip. I also bought a few other things like green bell peppers, green finger chillies, 3 large oranges, and finally two packs of Turkish Delight. The latter seems to be safe if I wash all the icing sugar off the outside of the otherwise safe flavoured gelatine cubes. They do many interesting flavours, but some of the more interesting have things like nut shavings on the outside, and so can't be washed clean of sugar.

  It wasn't exactly warm, but not exactly cold when I walked to the shop. The sunny spells were just starting, and I thought it worth taking a chance on no coat. It was so pleasant walking like that. I don't know why wearing a coat, no matter how light, seems to make walking harder and/or just less pleasant, but it does. I also seem to walk faster without a coat. I didn't really rush, but I didn't waste time walking home because I had a treat in my bag.

  I don't know if it is a seasonal thing, or more likely stuff getting delayed during importation as one of the so called dividends of Brexit (there are none), but I have seen beetroot flavour instant noodles for some time now, but they were back in stock, and I bought three packs. I was looking forward to having one for lunch. I also bought a few of those little salad pots which include four bean salad. I was about to have one also for my lunch, then then I remembered there was a pot of five bean salad I had bought from Tesco several days earlier.

  After my lunch I relaxed for half an hour or so before doing the three rinses and fabric conditioning of the laundry I had started earlier in the morning. I hung it to dry on the clothes horse in the front room. The sunny spells had warmed up the front room, but not as much as hoped. The sun is so low in the sky that it doesn't fully illuminate the downstairs front room. My bedroom, being higher up, fares better. I was able to turn the heater off up here quite early, and the sun kept the room just warm enough to be very lazy for a couple of hours.

  At some point in the first half of the afternoon I did a bit more housework, but I can't remember when. I know I had taken of my Marigolds after hanging up my laundry, but at some point I put them back on to do an overdue bit of housework - cleaning the bath. I suspect it is more a problem caused by doing my laundry in big builders buckets in the bath, but whatever the cause I gradually get a building up of what seems to be soft limescale at the plughole end of the bath. After putting the Marigolds on again I used some toilet cleaner and a slightly abrasive sponge to give it all a good scrub. It is now gleaming again. With luck it will last another 12 months !

  Last night Chain were playing in The Swan at West Wickham. It is an easy place to get to, apart from the hill climb from the station to the pub (I usually get off at Eden Park, the station before West Wickham, and get on a 194 bus to take me up the hill so I can arrive with sweating and puffing !). I thought it would be OK to go there, and so I planned what camera and lenses, and other accessories I would take.

  I thought it could be the first real test of my new, and so far very little used, Nikon D300S camera. While I checked the camera, and batteries for it (all needed a top up) I thought about something I had seen earlier. John Bull, the cameraman who has inspired my own gig photography, had announced he had put one of his lenses up for sale on Ebay. It was a Sigma 24 to 70mm lens.

  John said it was a veteran of a lot of gig photography. That made me think about a lens I own, but have hardly even used. When I compared my lens with the photograph of his lens, it was obvious they were identical. When I bought mine it was listed as £300 from Cash Converters. It seemed a very nice lens for my first, and fairly recently bought at the time, Nikon camera. It wasn't for reasons it would take several years to realise. The problem was the autofocus didn't work.

  I took it back to the shop, with my camera, and demonstrated the problem. I could have got my money back, but I tried something I am now very glad I did - I said that apart from the auto focus not working, it was still a good lens, and while it was a pain in the arse to manually focus it, particularly when a lot of movement is taking place, like at gigs, I would be prepared to pay half price for it.

  What I found out much later was it was designed for Nikon cameras that had the focus motor inside the camera body. Only older, and some professional cameras have that focus motor. It was the reason why I bought a very cheap Nikon D80 camera body last year. I had learned that it had the focus motor in it, and it enabled me to try the lens for the very first time. One nice feature about the lens is that it is a constant aperture lens. In other words the aperture does not change when you zoom in. It is a feature more often seen on the huge lenses you see on huge looking professional movie cameras.

  Out of curiosity I checked the price on https://fivercam.com/, my favourite second hand camera and lens supplier. I found 4 lenses that matched the search for "Sigma 24 to 70mm", and my guess is they all use the same glass lenses, but are externally different. My one, and I am very sure John's one too, was priced at £269. So paying just £150 for mine was a good bargain. There was a slightly different one listed for £360, and then two others for over £1000 !! Curiously enough it was only the £1300 one that was described as constant aperture, but it did look physically different. I think mine was very cheap because it was old enough to need the focus motor in the camera, and so it's appeal is a lot less.

  I considered taking the lens to Chain's gig, but it is a very heavy lens, and that put me off a bit. I was put off the whole thing when darkness fell only a bit after 4pm. It just seemed to flick a switch inside my head, and I no longer had any desire to go out. I just looked forward to dinner, and bed soon after 8.30pm - the same time the gig would be starting ! I did start going to be then, but it was possibly more than 90 minutes later before I fell asleep.

  Before thoughts of sleep came thoughts of dinner. Maybe it was because I had had a mid afternoon snack of rice cakes, and maybe it was because I had not pre-prepared and dinner that I half didn't want any dinner. I didn't fancy going hungry either, and I probably ended up eating more than if I had had a proper dinner. I ended up eating half a pack of German pork meatballs, a pot of couscous with red kidney beans, and finally two large juicy oranges.

  I kept meaning to pre-cook some dinner, but it was probably the idea that I was going out in the evening that held me back. That was a bit silly because it wouldn't go to waste if I didn't eat it last night, and in a sealed container it would be fine for reheating for tonight. That extra day of marination would probably make it even nicer. Anyway, I had eaten more than enough, and felt satisfied when I ignored the 9pm showing of QI on Dave, and went to read in bed.

  As I said above, it did take quite a while before I fell asleep. It felt like ages, but I suspect that it was really little more than half an hour. From then on I seemed to sleep quite well. I remember little about most of the night except that I slept mostly covered up, but didn't have any episodes of feeling too hot and sweating. It is curious about thise sweaty nights I have had recently. The previous two or three seemed to coincide with a very nice low blood glucose, but last night definitely wasn't - which is odd because high blood glucose is often a cause of sweating.

  It was only in the last couple of hours that I had some dream sequences that I can just about recall. The dream was about being at a gig. It was one of Jamie Bull's Elton John tribute/cover shows. It was in a big pub that had a very good, well lit stage. It was free entry, and the place soon got crowded. I managed to loose two good seating positions because I was on my own, and there was no one to guard my seat. As the gig started I noted how nice the lighting was, but for some reason I didn't get my camera out.

  The next thing I remember was every one getting up to go home. It was like I had slept through the whole performance - well, I don't find Elton John cover versions to be terribly exciting, and so maybe I did - somehow. When I went p pick up my camera bag it wasn't there. I thought someone had picked mine up by accident - there did seem to be some photographs using identical bags - and cameras. I saw someone pick up a bag like my own, and asked to check it. The man picking it up admitted it wasn't his, and said he was going to hand it to the bar staff. I looked inside, and it seemed to have my stuff in it, but it was a different camera. It was another Nikon with a similar number, but the controls on it looked very weird.

  The dream seemed to start fading away at that point. I think it wasn't until I woke up I realised one possible upside to the situation. I still had a camera that I could use once I had learned how to use it, and it was possible it was full of pictures of the gig. The person who took mine would be very disappointed because I had taken no pictures at all. It could be possible that if that, presumably, accidental swap had taken place the man who took it could easily discover my name because Nikon's allow you to embed a copyright name in the image data, and so it could be seen in the camera settings.

 I guess the dream didn't quite fall into the nightmare category, but it was still unsettling. Not as unsettling as my blood glucose reading this morning. It was 9.8mmol/l, and while still under the red line, that is terribly bad, or at least it would be if there was not a scapegoat to blame it on. I blame the two sweet and juicy oranges I ate last night. It seems I can get away with it if I eat them at lunchtime, but at nearly 8pm too much of that sugar carries over to the next morning. It is going to ruin my end of month average, but probably would only make a slight dent in a full hospital blood test - they give a sort of average over a couple of months.

  Assuming the sun finally breaks through the clouds, which doesn't seem likely for some time yet, it would be a day where I would be saying I would probably go out for some exercise - which would be very good, particularly when my blood glucose has started so high this morning, but I have been saved from that. Last night I got a voice call from Jodie asking what I was doing today. She told me that something has come up for her on Sunday, and it would suit her more if we could move Sunday's beer tasting session to today. I said yes, that would be fine.

  So most of my day is now planned thanks to that phone call. Also, thanks to that phone call, I now know that my new phone works as a phone. Until that call I had not really tested the microphone and earphone. I now know both work perfectly.