Once again the Met Office have been shuffling around the features of today's weather. The latest revision says the morning rain will finish at 9am, but start again at 11am. 11am and midday could feature heavy rain, but 1pm may be dry, but rather grey. From 2pm there could be a couple of hours of sunshine before sunset. The maximum temperature this afternoon is expected to be just 10° C. Tomorrow, which yesterday was forecast to be an awful day, may see 11° C, and mostly dry. There is a 25% chance of rain at 8am, midday, and 3pm. The rest of the day will be quite dull. Of course, this will have changed beyond recognition in tomorrow morning's forecast for the day.

   Yesterday was a rather good day with just a couple of mild disappointments. It initially seemed unlikely that the sky would clear, the rain would stop, and the sun would come out, but it did ! From about 11am it turned from a cold, wet and dreary day to a very nice sunny day. I might have had doubts about going out during the morning, but I went through the motions, and I was ready to go out when it was nice outside.

  It must have been just after 11:15am when I took a stroll to Catford station to catch the 11:35am train to Blackfriars. I took along my Canon EOS 600D camera - which is now probably my favoured camera for rail photography. I had barely been on platform 1 at Catford station when my first opportunity for a snap arose.
  I still think of this as the VSOE train, but these days I think it goes under the title of the British Pullman train. It was possibly doing a luncheon trip into Kent. It usually has a locomotive at each end, but yesterday it has just a single locomotive on the front. I was using a telephoto lens for this shot, and the foreshortens the image, and makes the coaches look all wobbly, but in fact each named coach is in pristine condition.
  I had to change at Blackfriars station to continue to Farringdon station. One of those odd quirks in railway history is that the station was originally built by the Metropolitan Railway company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widened_Lines), and that was later folded into London Transport who also ran the tube network. The result is that this national rail station is sort of owned by the Underground, and uses the tradition Underground Roundel.
  Two of the four platforms at Farringdon were actually for London Underground Met and Circle lines. These have now been joined by two more platforms of the Elizabeth line. That uses a purple version of the roundel. I must admit I find it strange that this line has it's own unique identity. It was originally called Crossrail during it's design, and early construction phase. Some of it is in deep tube tunnels, but more of it runs on the surface. It is built to standard surface stock size, and runs on 25kv overhead catenary. I guess it makes it hard to call it part of the tube, but it could be part of national rail - except it was funded just by London.
  I was surprised that it only took 4 minutes to walk from where I got off the train on the national rail platform to arrive on the Elizabeth line platform. Like all the new works of the Elizabeth line network, the platforms were designed to be light and airy. I found them to have a cold appearance, and with all the charm of a public lavatory.  The trains are all 9 car trains with carriages of "standard length" and so the stations are very long.
  One aspect of the Elizabeth line is that some journeys, such as Shenfield to Paddington (and potentially Reading) can be very long, and demand comfortable seating. Much of the seating is along the sides of the train, and is very uncomfortable unless you are only doing a short journey. I was very happy to see, and be able to find that some carriages had transverse seating. It made my 15 minute (I think) ride from Farringdon to Maryland much more pleasant.
  I first rode on one of these class 345 trains several years ago, and well before the Elizabeth line was officially opened. They were using them between Shenfield and Liverpool Street stations. I got on at Romford, and did not enjoy my ride to Stratford station. The train was busy, and at that point I was not sure if there were transverse seats anywhere in the train.
  Maryland is a very old station. The platforms are fairly narrow, and it is not long enough for a 9 car train. I had to walk through the carriage to the next one to find a door that opened. Nevertheless, like old stations taken over for London Overground services, all the signs have been replaced with purple Elizabeth Line roundels - all the signs except those on the other two National Rail platforms which I don't think have any public service now. They retain rather boring rectangular blue signs with no edging, or any other lettering except the name of the station.
  This was almost my final destination - Maryland station. It looks more like the entrance to a cinema than a railway station to my eyes. My actual final destination was a couple of hundred yards to the right of this picture. It was The Cart And Horses pub where on 3rd February I expect I will be the official photographer for the KT Bush Band gig being held there. At the moment the pub is covered in scaffolding, and that might explain why the original date of the 9th of December was cancelled.

  I took a few picture of the pub, and maybe I'll show them tomorrow. I didn't go in the pub, but I did note it had taken almost exactly one hour to get there from the time I got on the train at Catford - and I had left home about 15 minutes before that. It seemed a far longer journey than I expected. On another bright, and mild day I will try using the Docklands Light Railway from Lewisham to Stratford, and see if that is any quicker - I'm sure it must be.

  Having got my snaps of the pub I retraced my steps and went home again. It was a smooth journey in as much as there was very little waiting involved, but it still took an hour before I got off the train at Catford. I was feeling quite good until my house was in sight, and from then on I felt very tired. I guess I just can't seem to relax when travelling, and I keep a high state of awareness, drinking in all the details along the way. I consciously forget many of those details, but I retain enough to make a repeat of the journey quite familiar - then the trouble is looking for even more details to try and remember.

  I did two things when I got home. I had a pee, and I made myself some cheese on toast. For speed I did it in the microwave. That doesn't toast the bread, but it does melt the cheese. I haven't had cheese on toast for ages (if you ignore the cheese on naan bread I had a week or so ago), and it was sort of delicious. After that I was about to have a snooze when I got a message from Michael to say he had just been in Tesco, and had 4 bottles of Diet Coke in his car if I wanted them. I did, and had to dress again to go out. Maybe 15 minutes later I was back in my bedroom, and starting the snooze I was intending to have.

  After my snooze I spent a long time going through the 86 photos I had taken. Some were rubbish, but most were OK or good. I have only shown a small selection here today. Some were just train pictures, and I think from them I managed to add 5 or 6 pictures to me great big spreadsheet of every train I have seen. It included two types of new train, class 745 and class 320, that I had never seen before.

  All that "post production" photo work kept me so busy that I never did seem to find the time to finish preparing and cooking my dinner. With 7pm fast approaching I emptied a sachet of ready cooked rice to the casserole dish that had the start of a beef stew in it, and I had that for my dinner after zapping it for about a minute less than it needed in the microwave. The rice and stew were not steaming hot. The beef was cooked, but needed a lot more cooking to help tenderise it. It was very chewy, and I can't say I enjoyed my dinner. The best bit was the conference pear I had for dessert.

  After spending so much time in my "digital darkroom" I was feeling tired again, and I headed for bed early again. I read until 9pm was probably getting close, and then I went to sleep. The only thing that spoiled my sleep was a cough. I had started, or resumed, a dry cough as my train neared Catford yesterday, and it continued through the evening, and partly through the night. I don't seem to be coughing much now.

  I thought that if I was having a relapse into my earlier illness then my blood glucose might go up too. Fortunately it had come down after my little excursion into the nines yesterday morning. This morning it was down to a satisfactory 8.6mmol/l. That is slightly above my typical average, and I may try to get it a bit lower tomorrow morning, but it all depends on the weather, booze, and anything else that typically influences me.

  The highlight today will be a walk in the park to meet Angela in the pub. It is now looking like it could be a walk in heavy rain through the park, but the walk home should be dry, although still a bit grey. It is now possible there could be sunny spells in the last hour before sunset. Today, being the winter solstice, means that the sun is now starting to set later and later, although sunrise is still getting later. I think it will be somewhere around the 6th of January before sunrise will start getting earlier.