About an hour ago it seemed like the sun might break through the clouds, but alas no, and maybe we will not see the sun at all today. On the other hand, that was how yesterday was forecast, but included quite a few sunny spells. Once again the temperature is not expected to go any higher than 8° C, and depending on the wind it could feel a lot colder.  It is worth noting that the BBC weather forecast predicts light rain for this afternoon. Tomorrow could be a replay of today, but the weather could change a lot in 24 hours - maybe !
 
   Yesterday got off to a good start, and that set the tone for the rest of the day. Admittedly the good "start" actually happened just after midday, but that was when I finally went out to the pharmacy. It seemed to take a long time before I felt ready to wash my hair, and have a shower, and maybe it took longer than expected to complete both.

  At the end of my shower I put a few items of laundry in to soak in detergent while I went to the pharmacy. I don't know if the doctors are on strike, or have just reverted to not wanting to see any patients, but it seemed comparatively quiet in the pharmacy - so quiet that the assistant said if I didn't mind waiting 10 minutes she would make my prescription up while I waited. She did just that, and saved me another trip to do the usual "collect 48 hours later".

  It was around 1pm when I got my drugs home, and after a cold walk I concluded what would be nice was some hot lunch in the form of soup. I first heated up a can of Tesco Irish stew. I personally classify it as a soup because it comes out of a can, and is just like a "chunky" soup. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted more. I should have resisted it, but I gave in and had a can of Aldi own label "chunky beef and vegetable soup".

  I let that settle down for maybe an hour while I laid on my bed reading and resting. It seemed like I wasted a lot of the afternoon before I returned to my laundry. Although I thought it was getting late, it was probably not much later than 2pm, and the core of the stuff in soak was still warm (although the outside was nasty and cold). The job was only two t-shirts and three pairs of underpants, and I finished the whole job in one session.

  I hung it up to dry in the dining room with a fan heater on low blowing at the clothes horse. While I was in the dining room I had a rummage in a box of tools, that should be hidden away, and found my adjustable spanner, plus a possibly useful sized ring spanner. They were to fix my dripping hot tap in the kitchen. I had too much washing up in the sink to start the job then, and put it off to today...hopefully.

 I think I only did one more useful job after that, and it was to going to be to change the batteries in one of my outdoor, radio linked, temperature sensors. I had only put new batteries in in a few weeks ago, and I didn't think it could be the batteries. When I got to it I found the little LCD on the front was still bright, but the display seemed frozen. Taking one battery out, and then putting it back in seemed to restore it to working.
  I amused myself for some of the remainder of the afternoon by cleaning up a few old pictures that I had originally taken on 35mm film. A lot of my old pictures are not very good, but can be improved by computer photo editing - something not available almost 40 years ago. I think I knew the basic rules of photography in those days, but like today I don't always follow it. For instance, the above picture of Ladywell station, taken in March 1995, was taken from the wrong angle for the position of the sun. Like many pictures I take today, there is often a very good reason why I can't stand "with the sun over my shoulder". At Ladywell there was no place I could stand for a better picture.
  I am still standing at the wrong angle to take this picture of the old waiting room on the down platform at Ladywell station. I think I did it deliberately so that I could slightly over expose the picture so that detail can be seen in the deep shadow of the canopy. I further enhanced that detail using my photo editor. The picture still retains a sort of soft, but still detailed view that was typical of chemical film photography. Some of the softness is my negative scanner being far lower resolution than the negatives it is scanning.
  Apart from being taken in an era when Network South East branding was very prominent, there is not a lot of historical significance to the pictures of Ladywell station. The view is not a lot different today, but the view in the picture above has changed beyond all recognition - plus the way it was taken has now disappeared. I took this view of what is known as the Silwood Triangle through the open door window of a slam door train.

  It was a roughly triangular piece of ground bounded by the main railway line (from where I took the picture), the East London Line on the right, and the boundary to the flats on the left. I had read, probably in a railway magazine, that there were future plans to convert the land into a railway depot for the East London Line. The existing East London Line depot was tiny, and all maintenance on the trains had to be done at the Neasden in north London.

  It looks like work has started to remove a redundant railway bridge. It is the grey structure under the crane. It once carried a single, non electrified line to the docks around Deptford, and the line actually ran down the middle of a road or two ! Sadly I only know about this from books, I never saw that bit of railway with my own eyes.

  The view in my picture has changed beyond recognition. Much of the grass has been replaced with sidings for the London Overground Trains that took over the East London Line (and more).  I think all the buildings on the left were demolished, and replaced with higher density blocks of flats.

  I only edited these three pictures yesterday, but I have plans to go through more of my old film pictures to see what might be of general interest, and can be improved with some modern photo editing. My next job was to do the washing up, and prepare my dinner. It was to be, and indeed was, stewed chicken with baby potatoes and runner beans, plus some medium heat red chillies. It turned out to be very nice, and seemed to be enough for the evening.

  I ate my dinner watching TV, and continued watching all the usual TV programmes I describe until it was time for bed. As also usual was the break in watching TV while nothing interested me.  It was 11pm when the last programme finished, and I went straight to bed. I think I was fast asleep very soon after that. My night was yet another where I seemed to sleep very well. As usual I had to go for a pee about every two hours, although after the first the ones that followed didn't seem to be needed in reality.

  My first pee, at about 1am if I recall correctly, was interesting - in a philosophical sort of way. It seemed to last a long time, and I made the weird estimation that I peed enough to fill a grapefruit sized container. That lead on to the thought that somewhere inside my body, among the intestines and assorted organs, there is somehow space for something the size of a grapefruit.  That lead back to a scatological thought from some time in the past, when I marvelled at how much my intestines could hold when I was unfortunate enough to have possibly eaten something with a powerful laxative effect.

  In my last hour or two of sleep I have what seemed like a very long, and very detailed dream. Unfortunately the memory of it is so moth eaten that there is little to tell - apart from a small part of the dream. Even that small bit is too patchy to describe in any great detail, but the essence of it is easy to describe. It started with an emergency broadcast over the top of a TV programme. It said missiles had been detected, and a raid was imminent. The missile were probably nuclear weapons, and in theory panic should have ensued, but in the dream I thought it was very exciting as we waited for potential Armageddon.

  Including potatoes in my dinner has always seemed like a gamble, but last night it seemed I got away with it - in spades ! My blood glucose reading was a very nice low figure of 7.7mmol/l. It took my end of month average down to 8.48mmol/l. That is very slightly less than January, which was 8.51mmol/ and lower than the average of 2022, and 2021, 8.53 and 8.67 respectively. It is a shame I had the week long blip of higher readings while I had a cold, or my average could have been even lower.

 Once again it seems too cold and gloomy to consider going out (unless I really wanted to upset my chest again). However I think I need to go to Tesco to get some shopping. One other important thing for today is to try and fix that dripping hot tap in the kitchen. I feel rather pessimistic about it. It is a funny sort of tap, that operates over just a quarter turn from off to fully open. I wonder what the mechanism inside is like, and what sort of tap washer it might use. I also worry that after dripping for so many months it could have internal damage. Until I finally manage to undo the mechanism I will never know. On my last attempt, without using a correctly sized spanner, it seemed like the mechanism was welded into place. If I could even get to the back of the sink, which would need some major work, I would be happy to try and replace the whole crappy mixer tap with something more standard, but getting to the back of the sin would be a nightmare job.