I would grudgingly admit there was a bit of sunshine earlier, but I'm sure there wasn't 2 hours of it, and although it is bright outside, I don't think the sun is going to burst through the current cloudy sky. It seems like the cloud is already thickening up to be the very grey clouds shown in the forecast above. The latest revision to the forecast has added light rain for 4pm as well as the 7pm shown above. What seems rather more definite is that the warmest we can expect todat is just 18° C. That seems very poor with July, usually a hot month, starting tomorrow. The forecast for tomorrow shows lighter cloud, and the probability of sunny spells popping up a lot in the afternoon. Tomorrow should also be a bit warmer with 22° C probable.   Yesterday could be described as a day of rest, or a time to lick my wounds and recover. The biggest wound was not unexpected, and it was my very high blood glucose reading in the morning. It meant that I just had to fast until the middle of the afternoon, although later would have been better.

  At first it was easy to fast - probably because I knew it was essential to do it. If it had just been "a good thing to do" I would have been less keen. Admittedly I did feel very hungry later in the morning, and I have no way of knowing if that was real or imagined. By 10am I decided to start monitoring my blood glucose every couple of hours - with interesting results.
  By 10am my blood glucose had dropped to almost safe, although still dangerously close to the red line (10.0mmol/l). Things got interesting at midday. It seemed like my blood glucose level had gone up ! That didn't seem possible, so I pricked yet another hole in a finger, and took a second reading. That showed a reading of 9.2mmol/l, and that seemed like a reasonable fall. At 2pm I took another reading. The first was 8.7mmol/l, and superficially that was really good because it took me back into my more typical range. To confirm it I once again took a second reading. This time it was 9.2mmol/l - the same as the second reading at midday.

  I have long known that these blood glucose readings are not terribly accurate, and only to be taken as a guide, but yesterday I thought that the differences were sometime a bit extreme between two readings less than a minute apart. Maybe that supports my idea that the test strips I bought from Amazon had been stored incorrectly - maybe for months in a steaming warehouse in the tropics or something. On the other hand, I did open up the brand new test strips I got from the pharmacy, and tried just one test strip. it too gave a very different (and higher) reading.

 I can't rule out a problem with the meter the test strips are plugged into. To that end I have splashed out £27 and ordered a new one from Amazon. It is branded "Sinocare", and is obviously a Chinese made machine. It will probably send all my readings straight back to Beijing, but I don't I really care who knows my blood glucose readings (except the very high ones. I am embarrassed about them because they are usually my own fault). A second meter, using it's own design of test strips, at least gives me some sort of check by comparing the readings on the two devices. In an ideal world I would start getting readings like I was getting back in April or May before all the high readings I started getting - often for no apparent reason, unless it is the case that my pancreas is now failing.

  There was an original, loose, plan that I would join Michael for a couple of pints in the roof beer garden of The Catford Constitutional Club yesterday. The morning weather seemed like it would not be a pleasant experience, but the weather was actually fairly nice when we might have done it. I warned Michael in the morning that I didn't really fancy it. I had a brief chat about it later when he dropped off some bottles of Diet Coke he had kindly bought for me when he went to Tesco to get some shopping.

  That was around 3pm, and at that time I hadn't washed or even combed my hair (I felt a bit of a mess). I showed him my scars, and told the story of my mega high blood glucose, and said that I fancied staying "dry" yesterday. He said that it sounded like a good idea because he considered he was drinking too much lately. I think it was around 7 or 8pm that he messaged me to say he had given in, and opened a bottle or can of beer.

  I resisted all booze yesterday, but soon after Michael had left I thought my blood glucose had come down enough for a bite to eat. It was not a great choice of food. It was a Tesco "Finest" caramelised onion and cheese quiche. I wanted to get rid of it because I suspected it would have some sugar in it. Before eating it I actually checked the sugar level, and it was surprisingly high. I hoped that by having it some hours before the evening I might just get away with it if I was extra careful about what I might eat for dinner.

  My dinner was actually two cans of Tesco cream of chicken soup. Somehow that stuff has a very small amount of sugar in it (0.6gm per half tin), and not only that but a can only has something like 196 calories in it. It is the sort of stuff that diets are made of. I slightly increased the sugar and calorie content with a teaspoon of chipotle chilli past in one can, and some weird (Middle Eastern ?) sauce with coriander, green chilli and garlic in it. The actual increase in calories and sugar was very minor from such small amounts.

  My evening was the usual - dinner with Star Trek - three different episodes, The new Generation, Enterprise, and Voyager. By 8.30pm I was in bed reading, and by 9pm I think I might have been asleep. It wasn't too long before I was dreaming, and most unusually I can remember the interesting parts of the dream, although some of it is possibly a synthesis of the dream and some dreamy thoughts about is as I lay awake for a short while after it (or maybe I dreamed that too).

  I think I really only remember some of the implications of the dream rather than any action from the dream. It had no beginning and no end. I seemed to be an inventor, or a salesman, or maybe a mix of both and a bit more in the realm of unmanned aircraft - or "drones" as they are popularly known. It may have been a conclusion made after the dream when I was half awake, but I seemed to be living the true American dream - worshipping profit above all.

  The drone I was showing to someone was very basic and I/we were selling it very cheaply. It had a simple built in camera, and that was about all. To do anything useful you had to buy accessories, and they were expensive. The basic thing may have been cheap, but when you started adding all the extras the price soon got very high. This didn't seem to matter to accountants because extras were "running costs" and not capital expenditure. In theory I/we were going to end up rich.

  To my conscious mind it all sounds very unethical. On the other hand it reminds me of a scheme with some similarities. Now at this point I was going to say that Gillette, the makers of razors and razor blades (and other stuff), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillette decided that they could sell the actual shaving tool very cheaply, and make their money by selling the blades for it at an inflated price. There maybe a hint of that in the wikipedia article, but it is not explicitly stated. Oh well, if my dream had been reality I may still have made millions and ideally billions, but the real world was calling.

  Once again, on the whole I seemed to sleep well last night. It is actually possible that there was one silly problem - I didn't seem to wake up enough to drink all the water I intended to drink. Like a lot of times recently I woke up at just after 5am, and it almost felt like it was time to get up, but after a pee I decided to just get back into bed for "another 5 minutes". I actually woke up again near 6.30am. One oddity was that it was almost feeling chilly in my bedroom this morning. The window was closed, and my thermometers said it was 25˚ C in the room. That extra sleep was done with one leg and one arm under the duvet. It just felt too warm with any more on me.

  I knew the quiche I eat yesterday was far too rich for me, but I still hoped my blood glucose would be a bit lower than my first measurement, and a lot lower than the second measurement mere seconds later. The first measurement was 9.3mmol/l, and maybe that was closer to what I expected. To double check I measure it again, and it was 10.1mmol/l. With this level of uncertainty it is very hard to know if I am winning or losing. I think I'll be having a diabetic check up in a couple of months (one now would be useful), and that will involve a proper blood test that should reveal just how badly I am losing the battle - if indeed it is as bad as it sometimes seems.

  I have a sort of plan for today....sort of.... A couple of things are fairly definite. Before the morning is over I want to trim my beard, shave the rest, wash my hair, and have a shower. Sometime after that I think I ought to change all my bedding. It has suffered a lot during these hot sweaty nights, and although I can't really smell my own stink, I expect anyone else would find it disgusting - not that I am expecting any of my rare visitors to be going in my bedroom.

  I expect I'll do a fair bit of reading today, and a little bit of eating. What I am going to try and do is have a very light combined lunch and dinner in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe it will just be ham, or corned beef on salad leaves. The point of it is that I am thinking of going to a gig tonight. Devanna Music (an acoustic duo) are playing in The Mitre Hotel in Greenwich. I sort of like the place, although it does get very dark in there. Ideally it would not be so heavily overcast this evening, and there would still be good natural light for a while. If I get there I am only going there to take pictures, and with no dynamic action taking place (no electric "guitar faces") to snap I may only take a dozen or so pictures. It is possible I may only stay for half an hour.

 On the other hand it is possible that Michael may come along. The loose arrangement is that either one or none of will go, and we will make our own way there (and possibly back again). It is possible I will only have a single pint of Guinness - unless it gets more interesting than I am expecting. Once I get home I want to try and go straight to bed without stopping for any supper. There is a small chance I might even get a good blood glucose tomorrow morning if I do this.