It is certainly bright and sunny as I write this, but the forecast says the sunshine will soon give way to just sunny spells. The afternoon may be mostly dull. The Met Office generally agrees with the BBC forecast in the screenshot above. Both agree that 22° C is all we can hope for today. Tomorrow could start bright and sunny, but like today it will soon cloud over. The afternoon could be very dull with rather dense clouds. It will also be a bit colder with no more than 20° C° C expected.
 
  Yesterday brought some rewards. Some of those rewards would not be realised until this morning, but maybe the best reward was finally finishing all my photo editing. For me, photo editing is a mix of tedium, excitement, and sometimes great satisfaction upon discovering I have somehow taken a great photo.

  I enjoyed my breakfast, a special cocktail of two varieties of instant noodles, and then got down to writing this electronic diary. I had a fair amount to say, and quite a few pictures to comment on. It can sometimes drag when I would like to be doing something else, but it is also a way to liberate my thoughts.....or something like that. Once I finished writing I did my usual, and had a lie down and read for a while, but not for long because I still had a load of pictures to select and edit.
  I showed several pictures of The Nameless yesterday, and I did mention I had taken rather a lot of photos of the band. In this photo Jamie sits at his keyboard and sings loudly, while the audience watches him.
  This is the bass player of The Nameless, and I am unsure about the correct spelling of his name. It is something like Mourinho Daniel. Towards the end of the bands set he leapt off the stage, clambered across the barrier, and went walkabout in the audience. He was using a transmitter plugged into his bass, and was able to keep playing with no long trailing leads.
  I must give credit to John Bull for lining the band up. As soon as he had finished, I leapt in and took this shot of the band soon after they came off stage.
  I am not a fan of reggae music, and apart from the occasional well known song, maybe from Bob Marley, I actively avoid it. However I felt I owed it to them to get some good pictures of the band after sharing tales of things like hospital stays with them. This is Julian "Dread" Bennett, and the first song he sang was a Bob Marley song whose exact title escapes me, but it's lyrics seemed perfect for a band playing together for the first time in 9 months after recovering from their ills.
  To me it seems odd that a man with a really broad Irish accent should be playing reggae, but I guess there is no rules to stop it. When I can understand that quite thick at times accent, he tells some very funny tales.
  This is Romeo giving my camera a nice friendly smile. He went one better than me, and had a quintuple heart bypass operation. He has the same scars on his leg as me, except he has them on both legs. His stay in hospital was very much longer than mine because he caught Covid 19, and also pneumonia. Both caused much severe coughing, and I know from personal experience that is very painful on freshly stitched incisions.
  I must confess I an not well practised enough to be sure of the spelling of his christian name. It could be Julian or it could be Julien, and it might even have two "ells" in it. I seem to have caught him with a pensive look on his face. I'm guessing it was probably an emotional experience to be back on stage with his band mates playing and singing the music they love after a long absence.

  It was a great relief to finally finish the last of the band photos, but I wasn't totally through picture editing for the day. One, by comparison, smaller task was to review all the pictures of trains I took on my mobile phone while travelling to and from Petts Wood. I can't recall just how many pictures I took, but just one was of a train that I had not got in my collection.
  The light was getting a bit low, and the train was travelling fairly fast because it didn't stop at Petts Wood station, and somehow my mobile phone managed to get a clear, if somewhat dull, picture of the train. It make me wonder why I carried two big and rather heavy Nikon cameras, plus lenses. The best thing was that train 375824 was a new one for my collection recorded on a huge spreadsheet.

  I was very surprised I didn't get "the munchies" yesterday. I was often working fairly hard photo editing, but I had to take short breaks to let my eyes recover/normalise, and there could have been a lot of temptation to snack on stuff. oddly enough, that didn't happen. I did stop for lunch, but it was just 12 rice crackers with a squirt of cream cheese on each. This time I did check, and it seemed that the sugar content of both the crackers and cheese, while not zero, was pretty low.

  At some time I did have a small handful of peanuts when I fancied something to chew, but mostly I seemed content to wait for dinner time to arrive. Dinner was very simple. I had mini baked potatoes (small new potatoes oven cooked after just scrubbing them clean), and half a re-heated ready cooked, roast chicken. It seemed smaller than I imagined, and that made it very easy to add a dessert.
  My dessert was some ice cream, and it was "some" - or quite a small portion by my normal reckoning. I had already started when I decided to take before and after pictures. The main thing about this one litre tub of ice cream is that the way the tub was originally filled leaves nice divisions to help divide it up. I ate and enjoyed just one of those divisions, leaving 4 for another day. Never before has appetite control been so easy !

  I was quite looking forward to putting my feet up and reading after dinner, but there were the usual Star Treks to watch, and they were followed by "Secrets Of The London Underground". It was not a great episode (maybe they did all the best stuff in the first of the two series, and series 3, and now 4, are scraping the barrel a bit...but there were still some good bits last night.

  It finished at 9pm, and I went straight to bed where I read the last dozen or so pages of the book I have been reading. I guess it was probably around 9.30pm when I finished the book, turned the light out, and turned over to sleep. Last night I was not disturbed by coughing or heartburn, and I seemed tired enough to get to sleep very quickly. I only slept for an hour before I woke up for a pee (which wasn't actually that desperate), and to make some heavy adjustments to my pillow. I think it was a stiff neck that woke me up more than the need to pee. With the pillows adjusted I was able to sleep more comfortable.

  I remember very little about my sleep except for one extra vivid, completely realistic dream. It was only after waking up, and found no evidence of what I dreamed I was doing in bed, that I realised it was all a dream. Shame though, it did seem rather enjoyable, and, err, productive !

  This morning I had reasons to to be happy on two three accounts. My weight, after a pee, and rather small poo, was the same as yesterday. I admit that is not as good as a loss, but being the same is good enough. My blood pressure, which I've only just checked, is exceptionally low...possibly a little lower than might be good. It was 92/41. Updated to add that if I had done the poo I have just done, it would be quite possible to say that I am at least 100gm lighter than yesterday !

  My blood glucose readings are a strange mix of normal, better and even better this morning. The Contour meter read a fantastic 6.6mmol/l. It would be most excellent if all three readings were similar, but the GlucoRX meter read 8.1mmol/l. That is still good, but the Sinocare meter went for even better, although still not matching the Contour meter. It gave a reading of 7.2mmol/l, and while even lower is more desirable, it is still a very good reading.

  Today I am relieved I have no more photo editing to do.....or do I ? It is a Wednesday, and this week I can foresee no reason why I won't be going to The Jolly Farmers for my usual couple of pints of Guinness, some banter, and doing, or trying to do the Crosswords in The Metro. One small difference today is that I think I'll be taking my lightweight (by comparison) Nikon DSLR camera , the D3200, with me to take some test shots, most of trains, to see how well it might work if I take it to an outdoor gig where there should be plenty of light. It will be a lot lighter to carry than my two main Nikon cameras. Of course this will mean I will have have photos to edit later !