Once again the BBC version of the forecast is far more optimistic about the amount of sunshine today. The Met Office currently shows 2pm as being dull, and only sunny spells for most of the rest of the day.  The Met Office says a maximum of 18° C, and the BBC say 19° C. With only a light breeze predicted it should feel warm again today. Both forecasters say non stop sunshine tomorrow, and both say that despite the sunshine, it may only reach 18° C.

  I had a very good day yesterday, although the best bit only lasted about an hour. During the morning I had the full shave, shampoo, and shower routine, as is appropriate for such days when I was hoping to see Angela for a lunchtime drink. It was about midday, and I was almost ready to leave when I got a message from Angela.

  She asked if it would be OK to meet in the pub near her home so she didn't have to get the two buses (or one bus and a walk) that she would have to do to get to The Jolly Farmers. Later on I realised that it wasn't wholly OK, but the pluses outweighed the negatives. I didn't fancy walking up the hill to get to the pub, mainly because I knew that under the warm sun I would end up very sweaty, and opted to get a bus.

  I arrived at the pub just one minute behind Angela. She had already ordered a pint of Guinness for me, and a pint of a hazy lager for ourselves. We opted to sit out in the garden. I can't say it is a pretty garden. In fact it rather lacks any plants, but it is nice and airy, and the sunshine was nice and warm. Once we say down I gave Angela the two bottles of Vitamin D plus Calcium tablets I had bought for her a month ago.  She thanked me for them. Maybe just that little gift spurred a surprising thing.
  In the past Angela has not like selfies or other photos because most of our lunchtime meeting were a badly kept secret (on more than one occasion I spoke to her daughter, Miranda, for a minute or two when I was handed the phone). Maybe it is because the previous time we met in The Jolly Farmers it was with the approval, and even suggestion of lover boy, and yesterday there was no secret about it at all. Angela had several goes at taking a picture of me, but was not happy with the results. She came and sat next to me, and we used my phone to take the picture above (that I cropped off some of the top and more of the bottom).

  Not only was it warm in the sun, but that old warmth between us was back. I have a feeling that we may end up spending more time together after Angela gets married in September, but time will tell. In the more immediate future it is possible that Angela may come down to The Honor Oak pub today where I (and Michael) hope to see an hour or two of Carrie and Steve doing their acoustic act as Caz & Steve Duo.

  We had one more drink, another pint of Guinness for me, and just a half of lager for Angela, before we left the pub. I had decided I was going to walk home through the Linear Park. The road leading down to it is almost opposite Angela's house, and was blatantly had a small hug outside before she went in, and I crossed the road to walk down to the park. I have to say it is a lot easier walking down the hill to the park than walking up from it.
  One of the places we talked about for a future lunchtime drink was the Blythe Hill Tavern. They do (or did) have a lovely garden there, and it is walkable for both of us (although I might opt for a bus on the way there to avoid overheating myself). Once I entered the park another option came to mind, and although we would have to bring out own drinks, we could sit at this picnic table (or another one deeper in the park). I took this picture and sent it to Angela straight away. She said she liked the idea.
  It was lucky I had taken my little pocket Nikon camera with me, originally for a bit of train photography if I had gone to The Jolly Farmers via train, because it's zoom lens enabled me to get this fair picture of an egret fishing in the river not far from a bridge over the river. If I had been using one of my DSLR cameras I would have tried for a lesser exposure so those bright white feathers on it's body didn't end up over exposed.

  I couldn't enjoy my walk back through the park for several reasons. First among them is that I didn't stop for a pee before leaving the pub, and although not desperate, I did want to pee at the first opportunity. Another thing that spoiled the walk was that the path alongside the river was rather overgrown (as usual at this time of the year) and I had shorts on. I didn't fancy pushing through the nettles with bare legs. For the same reason I couldn't see an easy way to push myself into a discrete area behind a tree to have a pee there.

  The last reason for not fully enjoying the walk was my choice of shoes. I was wearing white trainers, and they were not really broken in. I wasn't thinking I would be doing more than a very short walk when I put them on. My walk home from Angela was almost 1.5 miles. In fact if I had started measuring from when we left the pub it may have been a bit over 1.5 miles. As walks go it should not have been arduous, but the soles of me feet felt quite sore by the time I got home.

  I could have gone up to the toilet to have a pee as soon as I got home, but I still was in the position where it was strongly desired, but quite some way away from losing control. I stopped to examine my post that was sitting on the door mat when I got home. One letter was just spam, but the other was my new "Smarty" SIM card I had ordered. Sometime today I may put it in an old phone, and activate it.

  The fresh air, and the Guinness conspired to make me feel peckish when I got home, and I decided I could have 4 rice cakes with cheese on them. I munched them before transferring the pictures I used (plus a few I didn't) to my PC and did the usual editing (mostly just a bit of cropping and scaling), and saved them ready to use this morning.

  Finally I could lie down and do a bit of quiet reading. I may have had a snooze too, but it all seems to be a bit vague. What I do know is that Star Trek time seemed to arrive very quickly. I think I waited for the last commercial break of the first Star Trek (The New Generation) before rushing downstairs to the kitchen, and preparing a salad for my dinner. It was a tuna salad, and in the end a double tuna salad. Each can was only enough for a single cat treat, and so I didn't feel bad about scoffing two small cans, but the reality was that I had noticed the Best Before date on the first can, and it was two months ago !

  I did think I noticed a slight brownish bit of tune from the first can, and started worrying about salmonella or something. It turned out I needn't have worried about that, but I did have a plan in reserve in case the tuna tasted bad. I had what I thought was a Polish smoked sausage n the fridge, but it seems it was Romanian salami. It was unclear if it needed cooking or not, but it did say it was smoked and that usually cooks stuff. I cooked it anyway, and I ate it as a sort of weird dessert after the tuna salad (maybe the tuna salad, depsite being quite big, was a starter). I can't say I enjoyed that salami. It tasted quite bland once I had peeled off a tough leathery skin.

  I took my usual breather from TV between 8 and 9pm. I turned on the TV again to watch Have I Got News For You. It was probably before that when I seemed to feel some discomfort from my guts. I wondered if that only slightly old, and still tasting tuna had given my food poisoning, but the discomfort never got that bad, but then again it persisted like an annoying mild itch into the night.

  It took some time to get relaxed enough for sleep. It seemed almost warm enough to mostly push the duvet aside when I went to sleep. As usual I woke up feeling cold, and turned the heater on low at 3am. I can't decide if I slept well or not last night. I know I woke up a few times, and not always for a pee, and it seemed to take some time before I could fall asleep again. I think in reality I was barely awake for 10 minutes on these occasions - it just seemed to feel a long time.

  It all feel very vague now, but I think I remember dreaming a lot more than usual last night. I can't remember anything coherent about any particular dreams, but I think each one had an element of feeling isolated - not being part of a crowd. I guess that is just normal life brought to a head or something.

  Once again it was a night where I did seemed to pee a lot either in frequency of quantity. It was like being pre-diabetic again. As such I was hoping that maybe I would actually get a nice low blood glucose reading this morning. It was higher than yesterday, but only a bit. 8.4mmol/l against 8.3mmol/l yesterday. If, as I was once hoping, my latest test strips are over reading, it is possible my blood glucose could have been 7.??mmol/l in the real world, but that is clutching at straws, and I will be guided by the actual reading, and not what I want it to be.

  There are a probable two events today. It would be a nice day for a walk, but the only walk will be to Tesco (or possibly Aldi) this morning. I will follow that with a lot of resting, and maybe a dinner sized lunch, prior to going out tonight. For once it should be easy to go out tonight. The warm weather, plus sunset now being 8.59pm, will make it a lot easier, than there is the possibility that Angela might make it, and Michael has expressed an interest too. There will be no afternoon drinking because Jodie is at a gig or something this Thursday.