It seems like today will be another hot, sunny and dry day. Once again the temperature should reach 26° C. Tomorrow could see a big change....or not. The BBC and Met Office have come up with quite different forecasts. The BBC say sunny all day with the temperature reaching 24° C. The Met Office predict a mostly dull day with a 30% chance of light rain between midday and 2pm, but they do agree on 24° C. The day after tomorrow looks more definite, or at least as definite as a forecast can be for more than an hour or two ahead. Both forecasters agree that day after tomorrow, Sunday 18th, will most definitely be wet.
  Yesterday was  one of those days that was fairly dull until a brief bit of enjoyment which was followed by depression. I filled in some slack time in the morning by attempting to copy a couple of music programmes recoded on an old VHS tape to my DVD recorder. This time it let me down badly !

  One particular problem was that I had a very enjoyable hour in the sun, outside my front door, chatting to the man who lives next door. He has had a series of medical problems which probably have their roots in when he tried to drive off on his motorbike with the security lock on. He managed about 1ft of travel before ending up on his back with the bike on top of him. That was maybe 10 or more years ago. Since then he has stuck to driving a car.

  His latest malady, and subsequent recovery, turned out to be something like arthritis of the shoulder. He had keyhole surgery to repair it, and is still on strong pain killers. While on those pain killers he has almost full freedom of movement, and was looking quite fit. He says that without the painkillers he still feels like a cripple. Meanwhile, in my front room.....

  The first programme on the VHS tape had finished. Originally I was going to stop there, but it continued to record the next programme, and the recordable DVD was running out of space. It says it should be able to record 2 hours, but I think that maybe only if you don't want to finalise the disk so it can play in other machines. It managed about 90 minutes or recording before it crashed, and any attempt to finalise the disk so I could rip the first programme on it to my PC, failed. All in all it was a wasted morning.

  I ate the spare quiche in the fridge (bought the day before) for my breakfast yesterday. I knew it was bad for me, and thought if I ate it for breakfast I might get away with it when I checked my blood glucose this morning. I still had lunch, and it was 5 Tesco own brand, frozen, pork sausages. I had the "luxury" of having low sugar and salt tomato ketchup on them. I must admit it was a bit of an anti climax. The ketchup didn't really enhance the sausages as expected.

  Finally, after a bit of washing up, it was time for beer tasting - except everyone was late. Michael sent me a message saying he had to rid his living room from an invasion of ants. Jodie sent many messages to say she would be late, and had got on the wrong train. That all sounded very weird, but once she finally arrived, an hour and a bit late, it started to make more sense. She was aware of a cancelled train at the time she would normally get the train to Catford. She decided to set out early, and go to London Bridge to visit a shop or something. It was at London Bridge that she got on the wrong train - a fast train to Orpington !

  I think I was finishing my second can of Guinness when Jodie arrived, and Michael had guzzled a couple of cans of Carlsberg. With Jodie's arrival we could start on some of the new beers that had been delivered just after midday. Although put in the fridge nearly 4 hours before was started drinking them, the little beer fridge does not have enough chilling power to chill a whole fridge full of warm beers in that time. That was a bit of a shame, but at least they were cooler than room temperature.

  I'm not sure how many of the new beers we tried, but the fridge was half empty at the end, although it has to be said it doesn't hold that many 440ml sized cans. Most of the beers were quite nice, but I think one was less pleasant. It was still almost enjoyable though. We finished off, as usual, with a whisky or two. Jodie had brought some sort of magazine with her, and drew my attention to a Swedish whisky she said she would like to try because the write up made it seem really nice. I thought I recognised the name, and sure enough I already had a bottle of it. The label seemed to be a different colour, but maybe that was because mine was originally for the Swedish market - only Jodie could read a few words on the label - but we agreed it was the whisky in the magazine.

  I felt sure I had another Swedish whisky. To get to it meant moving all the bottles from in front of the doors of the bottom part of the drinks/glasses cabinet. Sure enough, there was another whisky from the same Swedish brewer, and of course we had to have a small sample of that too. Also in the cupboard was a long forgotten bottle of 57% Absinthe. Only Michael tried it, and declared it to be quite nice. I, or course, had a shot of it just to confirm my memories of it being very drinkable.

  It was obvious, from the amount drunk, that I must have been drunk, but I didn't seem to feel it. It became more obvious after Michael and Jodie had left, and I started to get my dinner together. It was intended to be a simple salad, but it got more complicated. I can't fully blame the booze, but it incorporated a fair sized serving of sliced and boiled new potatoes. I had bought a small bag of them over a week ago, and they were starting to deteriorate. Before they got too bad I cleaned them all up, and cooked them in two batches early in the afternoon.

  The salad ended up a little bit bigger than it might have, but the effect of the booze was that it didn't seem to satisfy me. It was not long before I was scoffing the last bag of micro chips sticks. In the past they have proved to be relatively safe if eaten in the middle of the day, but I doubted they would be so safe eaten in the evening. I washed them down with more booze - half a small tumbler of whisky.

  The net result of the excess food and the large whisky, was to make me feel very depressed. I was thinking along the lines of how a few hours of excitement is surrounded by hours and often days, of the dull and dreary. It feels like it is a relatively new thing, but I seem to recall having thoughts like this 20 or 30 years ago, but maybe less off them. There was one further annoyance. After all the booze and food I was starting to feel a bit stuff, and it sometimes seemed to would take little more to send me over the top, and puke it all up.

  That made it impossible to start drinking the 2 litres of chilled tap water I intended to drink so I could take a more accurate blood glucose reading this morning. I did my best to take sips of water at every opportunity, but it was not until 5am that I made a big effort to try and finish the 2 litre bottle. I did eventually finish the bottle, but the last of it was to wash down my morning pills after I had taken my blood glucose reading.

  Last night was one of those nights where I didn't feel hot enough to keep a fan on for more than the first hour or so of the night. Later in the night I did sweat enough to need to rotate my pillow around at least twice. This is why I needed to drink loads to stop dehydration. I had one of those nights where it seemed I was awake a lot, but also it was obvious that I was getting a fair amount of sleep between those periods awake - which probably seemed to be longer than they really were.

  It was about 6.30am when I reluctantly got up. I had more water, and waited for about half an hour before I checked my blood glucose. It was 9.1mmol/l again. That was probably a pretty fair reading considering all I had eaten and drunk yesterday. On thing that was rather less good was that last nights feeling of bloat had turned into a mild stomach upset this morning. I was most definitely not constipated this morning. Having been twice I should theoretically not need to go again, but I feel very strongly that relying on theory would not be a sound idea.

  I had fantasies about going to the seaside today before the weather possibly deteriorates. As I write this I definitely don't fancy going on a long journey. If I feel more comfortable later on I might do something like a walk along the River Thames - but maybe along a quieter stretch than the South Bank. Maybe towards Greenwich or somewhere. In the mean time I have another depressing task to do - on an empty stomach. I have decided to fast for some of today, but I have just had an email reminding me it is time to renew my TV licence. How depressing !