Once again the forecast has been hastily revised. The dark cloud, originally forecast for right now, 8am, has been replaced by full sunshine, although the reality is more like sunny spells. The sunny spells, or full sunshine, should continue until about 2pm. After that there will be light cloud for another 3 or so hours. At 6pm there could be light rain that will continue until 8pm. It is going to be a cooler day than yesterday, and just 20° C is expected. All I can say about tomorrow will probably turn out very wrong, but the forecast says it will be a bright morning with some sunny spells, followed by light rain in the afternoon. The temperature may only reach 19° C.

   For reasons I'll explain later, I was going to describe yesterday as a disaster, but in fact it seems it was rather a good day - on the whole, although maybe there are still elements of a disaster. In one respect the morning was bad because I kept being interrupted, and distracted from what I was supposed to be doing.

  It was while I was finishing writing yesterday that the first interruption happened. It was both good and sort of bad news. I had a series of messages from my friend Patricia in Argentina. She wanted to tell me she would be stopping in London for a day or two on her way to Italy next week. It will be lovely to see her for the first time in a few years or more, but the catch is that she will possibly stay here one night.

  I am very happy for her to do so, but it means I'll need to try and do a years worth of hoovering before she gets here.  I also will have to get all my cameras and photographic gear gear out of the spare bedroom. That will be followed by more hoovering, and airing the room and bedding. On top of that the bathroom will need a good polish. I should really have started all this the day before yesterday, but I may well start it, when feeling completely shattered, on Monday.

  After I finished writing yesterday's blog/diary I had my usual half hour rest before I washed my hair and had a shower. Once clean, dry and fragrant I was ready to go shopping in Aldi. Despite the gloomy weather forecast it was bright with a couple of short sunny spells as I walked to Aldi. I seem to think that I thought it was good to stretch my legs. Actually shopping in Aldi was almost a disaster.

  The most disastrous thing was that I seemed to be bombarded by messages on my phone. My phone can stay undisturbed all day on some occasions, but just while I was shopping in Aldi I got 3 or 4 messages from jodie, and each message directed me to a short video on Instagram. When I later checked I found those videos were generally pointless, and worse was that I hate tiny little videos that look like a big postage stamp size in a small mobile phone screen.

  I also got a couple of text messages from Michael about drinking in the afternoon. All the messages were irritating, but not really a disaster, and what I thought was a disaster turned out to be not a disaster at all. The potential disaster was that I saw, and bought, quite a lot of potential snacks, and later I ended up eating more than I thought good for me. I did buy more sensible stuff like salad leaves and some meat I could cook in the mini oven/grill.

  After getting home I had a small lunch of some ready cooked, ready to eat, BBQ flavoured chicken pieces, plus a couple of cheese and jalapeño empenadas.  I had also bough a pack of chicken and chorizo empenadas. They were quite small, and there were only 4 in a pack. They seemed to be a quite tempting snack, but after trying them I don't think they are more than very, very slightly tempting - nice, but not wonderful.

  From 3.30pm I hosted, as always, the beer tastings session. Several nice beers were tasted, including one from the Varvar brewery in Ukraine. With a top up of Guinness when Jodie was drinking too slowly, I managed to get to a state of mild drunkenness......or maybe it was not so mild ! I think I was a bit more animated than usual. Nevertheless, Jodie and Michael didn't leave until about 6.30pm - which I suppose is about the normal time.

  I had precooked my dinner before we started drinking, and I was able to get it warmed up again before Jodie and Michael left. Once they had gone I wasted no time in serving up some BBQ flavoured pork shoulder slices (or some part of the animal that wasn't the belly). I ate them with a pile of fresh rocket. it made for a nice dinner, and it seems a healthy one too (even if a bit meat heavy). While "nice" it didn't seem to satisfy my drunken stomach.

  It wasn't long before I was raiding the fridge for some post dinner snacks. Maybe I could blame boring Star Trek: Voyager for feeling peckish instead of the booze. The first thing I ate was the 4 little chicken and chorizo empenadas, but with each one only being two small mouthfuls (or one big mouthful) they just made me want more. Next on the list was a couple off Aldi Scotch Eggs. It wasn't the best time to compare them with the two types that Tesco sell, but I guess they were very similar to Tesco's ordinary Scotch Eggs.

  I stopped eating after that because I was thinking I had gone well over the top. After watching UFO, which finishes at 9pm, I headed for bed. It was feeling rather sticky, but not as bad as the previous couple of nights. It still made getting comfortable and relaxed hard, and maybe I was feeling a bit bloated. It didn't help that yesterday I was very close to being constipated - I did go, but only produced a quite small movement. Maybe it was around 10.30pm when I managed to get to sleep, but it could have been as much as an hour later.

  I do know I woke up at just gone 1am this morning needing a pee, and I did definitely need it (felt like half a gallon !). I needed another fairly big pee at around 3am, and yet another near 5am. All that peeing, plus the gloomy knowledge that I had eaten more than was good for me, gave me a sinking feeling that my blood glucose might have gone up into the danger zone. If I had any memories of dreams in the night, they were blown away when I checked my blood glucose level.

  I couldn't believe my eyes when the first (and new) meter read 7.8mmol/l, and then the old meter read 7.7mmol/l. I regard anything under eight as being excellent. My ideal. fantasy, reading is 7.5mmol/l, and I was not far off that. I am at a loss to explain how it could be that low after thinking I had eaten excessively, but maybe there is a part explanation, although I don't understand the mechanics of it. This morning I was most definitely no constipated. I am not convinced there is not more to come, but earlier this morning I made a very large deposit in the toilet, and 10 minutes later I had to go back and make an even bigger deposit. It was sort of curious how it was not an uncomfortable process at all. It may have been 20 minutes later that I was back on the toilet to produce a little more  - little relevant to the first couple of times, but otherwise maybe not so little.

  And so begins a very long weekend. Today I will at least make a start of getting all my photographic equipment out of the spare bedroom. I may even have time to do some cleaning in there. I am not going to do too much because I want to try and go out tonight. I want to see Ransom playing in the Purley Jolly Farmers pub. It is a fairly long (just under an hour), but simple journey (Catford Bridge to London Bridge, and then change for a direct train to Purley).

  My further plans/ideas/fantasies are to get up, and get ready in time to go to the opening of Chattfest in the garden of The Chatterton Arms at 2pm. I may stay there a few hours before returning home to freshen up a bit before going out again to see an hour or less (depending on how full it is) of Hell On Tap in The Partridge in Bromley. On Sunday there is another day of Chattfest, and ideally I will be there at 1pm. I'm not sure how long I will stay there - assuming I get there in the first place. I will be pushing myself to my limits this weekend, and I still have all the housework to do for Patricia's visit.