The road looked damp at about 7am this morning, but it has dried out since then. The BBC and Met Office have different forecasts for today, and both seem to have changed a bit in the latest revision. The BBC predicted light rain of drizzle for most of the morning, and a few hours into the afternoon. They have now added sunny spells for 2pm, plus 5 and 6pm. The early Met Office forecast is as shown in the screenshot above. It has now changed to show heavy rain for just 11am, and midday. 1pm is shown as light rain. From then on it is shown as dry , but no sunshine is predicted. Both forecasters agree that it will be no more than 11° C today. Tomorrow is going to be a cold day with no more than 9° C forecast. The day may feature both some sunny spells, and some light rain.

   Yesterday started off good, and with high hopes for a good afternoon, but the afternoon, and into the early evening was actually a disaster, but more about that later. The morning also featured a minor disaster/annoyance, but by midday I had showered, and I was ready to go out shopping.

  The minor annoyance was a bit of a rambling phone call from my old friend Lee. He went on and on, and I had to stop writing for at least half an hour. On the plus side it seems he may have got his alcoholism under control, and he says he is now signing on properly in the Woolwich Job Centre. Sadly he still has fantasies about doing pirate radio again.

  When I eventually had finished writing, and showered, I still had a few hours spare to go shopping. As I think I suggested yesterday, I had decided it was a long time since I last went to Aldi, and so that is where I went yesterday. It was a bit of mad shop. I spent rather a lot in there, and ended up buying some things that conflict with each other. I bought three lots of fruit, apples, pears and oranges. The intention was to probably have fruit for lunches, but then I bought stuff to go into sandwiches and stuff like that - which would also be for lunches.

  I did buy some long life stuff that I can use as and when. One lot of extremely long life stuff was 5 little boxes of sugar free sweets. For ages I never saw them in Aldi, and then last time they had a couple of flavours, but yesterday they had 5 flavours, and I bought one of each. They definitely have to be very long life because the artificial sweetener they use has laxative qualities - which could be useful at certain times, but not most of the time.

  After writing about those sweets I have just crossed my room to open the rhubarb and custard flavour sweets, and popped one in my mouth to savour. One other novelty (for me) that I bought was a couple of bottles of Aldi's own brand diet cola. They do two different versions, and so I got one of each to try. Once upon a time they did a really nice own brand diet cola, but then they must have changed the recipe, and it because revolting.

  Yesterday I did try one glass of their ZX Cola, and I can say it was very nice, but it was drinkable, and maybe almost nice enough to make it worthwhile buying because it is a lot cheaper than Diet Coca Cola. The other own brand diet coke has a very similar label to real Diet Coke. I didn't really notice it until I got home and checked the till receipt. I backed up a slight suspicion I had. It looked as the girl on the checkout only scanned one bottle of three I was buying. I worried I had been charged the full price of real Diet Coke for the one bottle of Aldi own brand. In fact it was the other way around. I think that even if that own brand version is so disgusting I have to pour it down the sink, I will still have saved money !

  With 4 two litre bottles of coke, plus a 70cl bottle of whisky in my rucksack, I had quite a load to carry home. On top of that I had two bags of shopping, one in each hand, and although they were almost light enough to carry both in one hand, I did feel rather tired as I got home. having put my shopping away I looked forward to trying some "cheese melts" on some toast. I should have been eating fruit, but curiosity is a powerful force. The sad thing is that I found they were rather disappointing. They didn't seem to have a strong flavour, as hoped, and it was almost as if they were made from something that didn't bubble and brown like real cheese.

  I didn't have a long time to rest after eating my cheese on toast. With Jodie expected in about an hour I wanted to get the kitchen clean and tidy(-ish) before she arrived. I did that, and then waited and waited, and still she did not appear. I finally got a message from Alan, her boyfriend, to say her phone had finally died, and that they were having a very traumatic time in a phone shop in Bromley sorting out a new phone.

  Once again Jodie has gone for a 2 year contract with "free" phone. The phone she got was a Samsung A15, and they can be bought, unlocked for any network from Amazon for as little as £100, although a few others are £15 or £20 more expensive. The more expensive ones have more ram, and more storage memory. Jodie's one, being supplied as a so called free phone from her network provider, EE, will be the lowest spec version. Nevertheless it does seem to be a prtty good phone with a 50mp camera.

  Jodie was over an hour late when she got here, and she didn't have Alan in tow. I suspect the trauma of getting the new phone was too much for him, and there was still plenty more trauma to come ! Jodie's old phone seemed to be working well enough for the lady in the shop to set both phones up so the new one could copy all the day from the old one. She was advised to keep both phone together, and that the process might take 4 hours.

  As far as I am aware, the transfer of data from one phone to the other is done over WiFi. It can't be over the 4G network because only one phone had a SIM card, and Bluetooth is too slow. I am not sure what caused it, possibly it was Jodie, but the old phone saw my Wifi signal and went and connected to it. That stopped the transfer process, and caused great upset until Jodie could restart it. At that moment it estimated the job would take 7 hours, but that very quickly dropped, and in the end, after lots of tears, it was done in about 90 minutes.

   The next great trauma was that the data transfer had not copied the scores from all the children's games that Jodie plays on her phone. I suggested that it probably be updated when the new phone had the SIM card from the old phone transferred to it.  That caused great panic and more tears. She tried to convince Alan to join her at my place, but he declined, although he did agree to meet her in The Three Hounds where they very often meet.

  I think it was 7.30pm when Jodie left, and that is a good 90 minutes later than usual. During all that time she only ate half her lunch/dinner, and only had a couple of beers. Meanwhile I had several of my cans of strong lager, and ended up rather tipsy. I was also feeling very hungry by 7pm, and ate my dinner in front of Jodie. It was a chicken, potato and cauliflower stew. It was also very hot, having only been out of the microwave a few minutes. I managed to burn part of the roof of my mouth, and also the adjacent gum. Later last night it felt like I had toothache ! Fortunately it is only slightly sore to touch now, and most of the time I forget it is there.

  After Jodie left to get her train I did only the most basic tidying up before heading up to my bedroom. I had a quick look around the Electronic programme Guide to see if there was anything to amuse me on TV. There was an episode of The Avengers on at 9pm, but that was too long to wait, and so I checked some stuff on the internet, and maybe half an hour later I was trying to read in bed. The trouble was the booze was making me feel very sleepy. I can't be sure, but I think I was asleep by 9pm.

  I can't be sure, but there is a tiny possibility I slept right through to 3am. I woke up from what must have been the strangest dream ever. The only bit I remember was the last few seconds, and that Victorian throwback Jacob Reese Mogg MP saying "once the municipal union of lamp lighters hears about this they will be straight out on strike". Your guess is as good as mine about what the rest of the dream was about.

  What I do know is that I got very little sleep after 3am. With a possible 6 hours already under my belt, I guess I didn't really need much more, but I tried for it for the next three hours. I think I did get a few brief sleeps, but I had to go for a pee nearly every hour. It was almost like my blood glucose was far too high. With hindsight it was probably all the beer draining off that had to wait while I was in my possible 6 hours of deep sleep.

  Unsurprisingly I had a hangover in those early hours of the morning, and I can't say I felt too good when I finally got up at about 6.30am. Once I was upright, and moving around, the worst of the hangover faded away. What was particularly cheering was the news that my blood glucose was not alarmingly high. In fact it was quite low. Both the Contour and Sinocare meters read a very good 7.6mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter read an extremely good 6.8mmol/l. Yesterday was just a minor blip, and it seems I am now on track again.

  One thing that may, or may not have helped, is the fruit added to my diet. As hoped, it seems to have made me very "regular". Just half an hour after getting out of bed I was on the toilet, and did a poo worthy of the food I had eaten. Half an hour later I almost did the same again. Since then I have been twice more, but the last one was more fart than poo, but it definitely included poo !

  It is at this time I should be saying I intend to do this or that, or the other. This morning is another one where I have no idea what I will be doing. It is cold and dull outside, and going anywhere does not appeal to me. Some reading, and a snooze does appeal to me. I think I'll need to put the heater before I try and relax too much. Yesterday, and the day before I kept the heater off until the evening, but not today. I feel cold already. Later today I might think of something interesting to do, but probably the best use of my time will be to try and catch up a bit with my growing backlog of TV recordings to edit and store.
      







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