There are two versions of the weather forecast this morning. There is the gloomy BBC forecast and the benign Met Office forecast. The Met Office forecast has only changed a little bit since I took the screenshot above at about 6.30am. The main change in the last 2 hours is that 9am is now shown with grey clouds, but the grey clouds shown from 11am to 1pm have changed to white clouds. The sunny spells shown for 7am has now been replaced with more white cloud. The temperature stays the same with an afternoon high of 21° C. The BBC forecast throws in light rain from midday to 4pm, and of course, being the BBC, they have thrown in a thunderstorm at midday. They also think that the temperature may only reach 20° C. Tomorrow is the day of greater interest. Petts Wood Calling is going ahead regardless of the weather tomorrow. That weather is going to range between wet, and very wet ! The BBC forecast shows thunderstorms all afternoon. The met Office shows heavy rain all day. Of course these forecasts are actually for Catford rather than Petts Wood so the fine details could be different, but I still think a wet suit might be appropriate garb.

  Yesterday was one of those days where the more I tried to do things, the less I actually got done. I intended to be washed and dressed, and shopping in Tesco before midday, but it was closer to 1pm when I finally got to Tesco. One reason was that after spending about 3 hours on my PC, just catching up with stuff, I had a lie down to do a bit of reading. I read less than a page before I ended up snoozing !

  As usual I intended to only buy healthy (by my own standards - generally low sugar) stuff, but there was a few things I got suckered into buying. One thing I now regret was some cheese and ham pasty type things. Only after eating them did I notice their high sugar content. I must admit that I was suckered into buying them by a "buy 2 for a discount" type of offer. To make matters worse I ate both of them because the first one seemed to be quite insubstantial.

  One thing I should have written first was about the laundry I had left soaking for 24 hours. I had to finish off the wash before I could have my morning shower. It wasn't a lot of stuff to do - just a pair of shorts, and two pairs of underpants. Having hung those three items up to dry on the small clothes horse I could have had my shower, but there were more distractions. My new battery for my Wileyfox mobile phone arrived.

  Of course I had to check that it was the right battery, and then put the phone on charge. Once again I was just about to head to the bathroom for a shower when another letter popped through the letter box. I don't know if the postman had forgotten it, and had to come back when he should have been a couple of street away, or if it was delivered by a different postman. Having checked what it was, and realised it didn't need my attention, I finally had my shower.

  After getting back from Tesco, and had some lunch, I could start playing with my old Wileyfox Spark mobile phone. I put my "Smarty" SIM card in it, and put some credit on the SIM card.  For some reason it was hard to convince the phone it had a data connection. It was definitely using the SIM card for telephony, but data didn't seem to work. The cure was a bit strange. It was a case of turning off the data connection, and turning it on again several times. It then suddenly it worked.

  One thing that hasn't worked yet is that I can't seem to install a few favourite apps. It could be that the version of Andoid on the phone is Android 7. All the existing apps seem to work, and many seemed to update with no problem......maybe 20 minutes passes....Clearing the cache and a few other random things and those app installed. I do have one further problem with the phone, and that is the data rate is awfully slow. I suspect it is the service provider, Smarty, a company owned by "3", that is probably the problem. If it wasn't too much mucking about I would swap the SIM card from my main phone and see if the data rate goes up.

  All my experimenting on the phone had to be deferred at 3:30pm when Michael popped in for our usual Thursday afternoon drink. I can't really call it a beer tasting session because we were both drinking beers we knew well. I am saving all the weird stuff for Jodie when I probably see her on Sunday afternoon. I had a pleasant few hours with Michael taliking about the usual stuff - music, beer, and food.

  Michael left about 5:40pm, and I started cooking the sausages I was going to have for dinner. I ate them later, with a small pile of salad leaves, and some alleged low salt/sugar tomato ketchup* while watching Star Trek:Deep Space Nine. After Deep Space Nine I watched Star Trek:Voyager. I turned the TV off for the night after that because  QI had Johnny vegas as a guest, and he makes me feel ill, and I couldn't see anything else on that seemed worth watching.

* This particular brand of Ketchup has some previously unseen, and now unremembered, foreign name, although most of the label is in English. It is certainly lower in both salt and sugar than Heinz low salt/sugar ketchup - that actually probably has more sugar in it than a chocolate pudding ! For the moment it is Tesco who hold the record for the lowest sugar content in ketchup, but once again they are out of stock until August 8th.

  I spent a bit more time playing with my old-phone-with-new-battery, and apparently very slow Smarty sim in it. I installed another useful app - one that shows live departure boards from TFL controlled stations. In doing so I think I found out what was going wrong. I kept getting frustrated with the slow download speed, and turned on WiFi (which I generally have turned off). That causes a glitch, and that corrupts the download. Starting again with the WiFi on allowed a smooth download, and the app installed OK.

  I eventually put the phone down, and read some stuff on the internet before going to bed where I spent quite a long time reading from a book. I am unsure when I finally went to sleep, but I think it was quite soon after turning the light out, and at a guess I'll say it was close to 11pm. I then seemed to sleep quite soundly until 2am. I can't remember any dreams during that bit of sleep, but I am sure I had some, and I think they were the trigger for many negative thoughts.

  It took over three hours until I was able to get back to sleep. I was having all sorts of negative, and very depressing thoughts. Some of it was about Petts Wood Calling. I feel a sort of obligation to go and get my back stage pass for some interesting photography, but I can't really say that I am looking forward to it. There are several bands I don't think I'll like, although a couple I definitely would like to see (and photograph), but I don't fancy subjecting my best cameras to heavy rain, plus I don't fancy standing in pouring rain trying to get a picture through a sheet of rain.

  That was one example of negative thoughts, but only medium depressing ones. My biggest, most depressing thoughts were partly inspired by Michael saying how much he looks forward to Angela's wedding, with the highest interest being in the live music at the reception from late afternoon. I was inspired a lot more to sink to the depths of depression by Angela saying, on social media, that she was so looking forward to becoming Mrs Love Boy. That wedding, sometime in September, feels like a major turning point in my life. It effectively puts Angela out of reach, and generates a hard decision between just letting he go and burning all my bridges, or staying in touch just enough to find out when the curse of Angela descends, and she has another late husband (she has buried two real husbands, and a sort of common law husband. The latter was dying of cancer when they got hooked up.)

  I did manage to get about one hour more sleep after being awake for what felt like most of the night. In a way I only know I was asleep because I remember a strange dream. The dream was set around a background of pirate radio. one very odd thing is that John, the photographer who inspired me in my transition from an ordinary snapper to someone who aspires to take better photos, was in the dream as a radio operator rather than a photographer. I can't remember the dream clearly, and I think that is because there was actually very little action to remember despite it seeming to be quite a long dream.

  It wasn't long after 6am when I got up. Ideally I would have liked to get another couple of hours of sleep, but I thought it would be easier to get those hours in as snoozes. Soon after getting up the awful truth was revealed about my bad eating yesterday - why do I find it so hard to resist temptation while going round in Tesco, and why to I give into the desire to taste (and of course eat) the temptations bough while shopping. My new blood glucose meter gave a truly terrible reading of 10.4mmol/l. The old meter gave a less disastrous, but still highly undesirable 10.0mmol/l.

  With those readings the last thing I should have done is eat before dinner time, and then only eat something known to be very safe. Unfortunately, this seeming to be the season for disasters, I kept belching the horrible fishy taste of a the cod liver oil capsules I had this morning. The only cure I know is to hold them down with some food. I decided to have my usual breakfast of instant noodles. It gave me the excise to try some new instant noodles - pork flavour. Even that couldn't go right. I noted the packet size was just 60gm, and that is half the size of some instant noodle packets I eat, and quite a few others are around 100gm. I had bought two packets of pork flavour noodles, and threw both of them in the bowl. The final cherry (negative cherry !) on top was that they were not very nice. Not horrible, but sort of bland.

  Today I will try and restrict what I eat for the rest of the day. It could be tricky though because today could be very boring. Although it should stay dry (according to the Met Office, but maybe not by the BBC) it will probably still be very dull out. That depresses me, and I doubt I will find any inspiration to go out. I also feel a bit crappy (but not in the bowel movement sense) and tired...as well as depressed. The best I can see me doing is putting all my energy in trying to snooze my way through the day, although that would be an impossibility. With luck I might get an hour of snoozing in.