It is supposed to be raining right now, but it is still dry, and we keep getting short, and sometimes a bit hazy, bursts of sunshine. Both forecasters are adamant that it will rain this morning, and The Met Office forecast shows more rain than the BBC forecast. The BBC say 11° C, and The Met Office say a max of just 10° C. Both warn of strong winds, but it should calm down a bit in the afternoon. The details seem to be changing, but one constant is that it is not going to be a nice day. Tomorrow, which is of particular significance to me, is likely to be dull, cold, but probably dry in the morning. Both forecasters predict 12° C, but maybe only late in the afternoon.

   The whole of yesterday all hinged on one thing - Jo's solo gig in Ye Olde Whyte Lyon pub in Locksbottom. It was an enjoyable couple of hours bracketed by two very long and tedious bus rides, but more on that very soon. It was fortunate that I started, and finished writing moderately early yesterday.

  I had time for a short rest after I had finished writing, and then I had a long and luxurious (not really, but it sounds good) ablutions session. I shaved, shampooed, and showered. Then I blow dried my hair. The only problem with all that is that I need to turn the water temperature down. Now the ground has warmed up a bit, and the days (and nights) are a bit milder, my multipoint water heater is producing water that is getting close to being uncomfortable when washing my hair.

  At the end of my hot shampoo and shower I further cooked my head with the hair dry. It wasn't long before I was sweating like I had just had a sauna. I had to waste some time just cooling down. On top of that, despite "opening my bowels" quite productively earlier in the morning, I found I had to go another time before I could go and get my bus. As well as being delayed by the cooling off time, and missing one bus, I then missed another bus while sitting on the toilet !

  There is one thing worse that the length of the bus ride to Ye Olde Whyte Lyon, and that is that there is only one bus that goes direct, except it is not direct - it slowly trundles around every small estate it can find, and over 20,000 speed bumps on the way. The alternative* is to change buses somewhere the other side of Bromley. Fortunately the wait for the second bus is not usually very long. I arrived at the pub only about 40 minutes after I had hoped to be there.

* Another alternative that might be a bit faster is to get a train from Catford station to Bromley South station, and get the bus from there. On my way home I discovered another possible alternative. There is a bus that may not take that long to go between Hayes (Kent) station to the pub, although it does take 20 minutes between Catford Bridge and Hayes. It might still be the fastest route. I'll try it one day.

  My hope that on a bright and dry Sunday afternoon, the pub may not be too crowded, turned out to be right. It was still a well attended gig, bit there was a bit more elbow room. I think nearly everyone at the pub was a fan of Jo. It is possible it might have been very sparse in there without Jo, and the pub seems to be making the right decision to get some paid entertainment in.
  I can't recall taking any picture of Jo sitting down to play and sing before, but I am sure I must have seen it at least once before, even if not occasion comes to mind. I think she only did this for one particular song. I can't remember what song it was (possibly something I didn't recognise), but it did sort of sound like a sitting down sort of song.
  This long shot of Jo only shows some of the audience immediately in front of her. There were still more behind me, and other tucked into little corners, and some seemed to stay near the bar, and just listened.
  I have to admit this was an experimental shot taken from within a few inches of the floor looking up. It captured her guitar, reflecting the violet stage light, really well, but it doesn't show any more than a very poor image of her face.

  I didn't stay long after Jo finished her second set, but I think she ended 10 or 15 minutes after the official 4pm finish, and so I guess I was there for nearly 2 hours. In that time I also had best wishes for my health form many people, and friendly hellos form several others. I managed to do a few portrait pictures, that might be OK with a bit of touching up. After a quick, and quite small pee, I left to get the first of my two buses home.

  I just missed one possible bus, but that did leave me a bit of time to look at the bus map on the bus stop, and noted the bus, a 353 I think, that goes between Hayes (Kent) station, and the pub. One day I might try the route to see how it feels. I guess I had a wait of less than 10 minutes before a 61 bus arrived. Almost outside Bromley Bus garage we had the annoyance of a wait to change drivers.

  Once we were moving again I stayed on the bus as far as Bromley Common/The Crown. This is the bus stop I usually use if I have been to The Chatterton Arms pub. From there I can get either the 320 or 208. The 320 is usually faster, despite using the same bus stops and route for 97% of the journey. The first bus was a 208, and the 320 bus passed us as we were leaving the Bromley area. That was possibly because we also had to endure a 5 minute wait in Bromley "to regulate the service" - aka to get it closer to the timetable.

  I arrived at the bust stop almost at the end of my road feeling quite tired. It is odd, but true for me, that being on a bus is more tiring than walking (per length of time, and obviously not distance travelled). Not only that, but sitting down so long caused my legs to stiffen up. It was quite a miserable walk back home, and I was really glad to get in, and could, but didn't, put my feet up.

  Two of the first things I did were to have a pee, and to take the assorted flavours/makes of bottles of sugar fee colas down to the kitchen, and replaced them with a single 2l bottle of chilled water. From then, until after I am back home from my MRI scan tomorrow, I will only be drinking water. I will also be trying to eat as little as possible. Once I was comfortable I transferred all the pictures I had taken on my big Nikon D610 to my PC, and I had a quick glimpse through them.

  There were some pictures that needs some correcting and other tricks of the digital darkroom, but well worth doing - I hope. I picked out the three I have showed above as being go examples of the afternoon's photography, and needing very little editing beyond reducing in size to show here. I dealt with those pictures before going down to the kitchen to get my dinner ready. It was quite an odd sort of dinner.

  It was also quite a big dinner. The big ingredient was a pack of mini roast potatoes ready glazed with olive oil, garlic and herbs. The packet made them sound very nice, but the reality was not quite as great as expected,, but still very nice. I had half of them on the second half of a packet of ham that was just starting to taste a bit stale, but not quite off (I hoped). I had the second half by themselves, and maybe they were better like that compared to ham. I was sure potatoes went well with ham, and maybe they do if it is real, freshly cooked, warm ham, but not pre-sliced, per-packed, rather plastic ham !

  I did have the energy or patience to do more photo editing, and so I turned on the TV, and I think I then switched it off again 5 minutes later. I passed some more time reading some stuff off the internet, and going to the toilet for my third poo of the day. I would sort of reap the benefit of that this morning. By 8pm I was reading in bed, and I think I may have been asleep by 8.30pm. I left the heater on low last night, and it kept my bedroom just warm enough to sleep provided I kept at least an arm and leg under the duvet.

  I slept quite soundly for most of the night, and I can only remember a few dream - and can remember hardly any details of those dreams as I write this. I do remember a bit, probably the most important bit of one dream. It was odd in that it was a dream of a telephone call, and so there were almost no visuals to try and remember. It was a call to an old friend who I had hoped to meet. She was with some friends, and asked if I would mind them coming as well. I said I would prefer her on her own, but of course her friends could come. The I suddenly remembered that I had my MRI scan in the morning, and it would actually be better if no one came, and I got an early night.

  Despite seeming to have got lots of good sleep, I still seem to feel sort of sleepy, sort of weak, sort of edgy, and sort of something else when I got up. What was quite a surprise is that I was ready for yet another, moderate poo soon after getting out of bed. I thought after last night, and not eating anything between breakfast and dinner yesterday, I would be almost empty. Evidently not. To my great delight after weighing myself, I saw I had lost almost 3kg (over 6 lbs) since some of the high weights of last month.

  After seeing that weight loss I was disappointed that my blood glucose readings were very average. I had hoped for something really good, but maybe that was too much to hope for after that pile of mini potatoes - although once upon a time I would have believed that all those potatoes would be a complete and utter disaster ! The Contour meter read a slightly higher than average 8.7mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read a better 8.3mmol/l, and the Sinocare meter came down in the middle with 8.5mmol/l.

  I have a pretty good idea of what I should be doing today. I intend to finish selecting and editing the best, or most interesting of the pictures I took yesterday. I expect to be resting a lot. Maybe even snoozing, and the way I currently feel, that may not be a "maybe" but a "definitely". I shall be attempting to curb my appetite as much as possible (I had a single bowl of instant noodles for breakfast), and I shall be drinking nothing but water. One of the last things I will be doing is setting my alarm for 5am, and trying to get to sleep as early as I can.

  Tomorrow I have to be clean and dressed in time to get a train no later than 8am. I am due to check into the MRI suite at the hospital at 9am. Obviously I will not be writing anything tomorrow morning, but I might be home again by midday (unless I think I have the energy to do a bit of train photography while in central London), and will probably recount my experiences in a very later. early afternoon post.
        







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