This morning has started off feeling very cold, and my heater on full blast is only just keeping the room warm. This afternoon the temperature should rise 8° C, or still rather cold. A brief sunny spell might happen at 2pm, but the day will be nearly all dull, but maybe not extremely dull. The day will end very slightly less bloody cold than it started. Tomorrow will probably be generally dull, but there may be 4 hours of sunny spells in the afternoon. The maxim temperature is currently predicted to be 9° C.

   There is a reason for my extra early start this morning. The explanation is fairly simple, but I'll leave that until near the end of today's writing. I don't think I can describe yesterday as a particularly good day, but a bit of it was very good...but also bad.

  As part of my prediction about how I would spend yesterday, I said that I would probably go shopping in Poundstretcher. I didn't, and in fact I really didn't do anything of note, except eat, before about 5pm. I guess there is one thing I did do which seems a bit mundane, but later it might have been important. It was to select a camera and lenses for a gig in the evening.

  I decided that my big Nikon D300 might be a bit lighter than my big Nikon D610, and so I would use the Nikon D300 in the evening. I later weighed both and found the D300 was actually the heavier of the two. I still chose the Nikon D300 because I can my fisheye lens on that, and the fisheye lens might be needed to get wide angle shots of the band I was hoping to see, MT Pockets.

  The problem is that the Nikon D610 camera is a "full frame" camera. The important thing here is that it has a wider field of view, and for some lenses, particularly my fish eye lens, half the picture is of inside the lens instead of what the lens can see. With hindsight it was a bad choice to use the Nikon D300 camera because I have got used to the Nikon D610, and one thing that would have been very useful last night was it's ability to focus in poor light conditions. The Nikon D300 seemed to make a right hash of it !

  To keep the weight I would have to lug around I only took 2 lenses. One was the fisheye lens, and I only took a few pictures using it, and I don't think they were worth it. The main lens was my rather precious (to me) Sigma 24 to 70mm lens. It's zoom range, and fairly large aperture (f2.8) makes it perfect for small gigs. I am now getting ahead of myself here.

  During most of the day I read and relaxed, and about the only break was stopping to eat a few times.  I had an elevenses of just a kiwi fruit and and an apple, plus the usual small chunk of cheese. The next significant bit of food was a late afternoon lunch. It was a wholemeal bap with a ready to eat piri piri chicken burger (at least I think I recall it being described as a burger) along with some mayonnaise and some iceberg lettuce. The chicken was not as exciting as hoped, but it made for a good lunch. After that I ate nothing until breakfast this morning.

  It was about 5pm when I had a shower followed by a still long wait to go out. I was almost ready to give in and go to bed, but I felt I had to go because there was a very small chance that Angela might go because I had recommended it to her, and she loves MT Pockets. The significant part of the recommendation was that I didn't expect the pub to be rammed full like it can be at other gigs. The reason being that many people might be having a rest between Xmas and New Year festivities. I was right and wrong as I shall explain.

  I planned to go out to the bus stop at about 8pm (instead of going to bed), and that was with the idea that I stupidly thought the gig would start at 8.30pm, but that was another gig on a different day !! I left it just a minute or two late to get the bus I hoped to get, and so I waited for another 10 to 12 minutes, and then took a slow walk to the bus stop to await the next 320 bus.

  it was not long before the very cold air was giving me chest pains. It wasn't exactly angina, but more like the old scar tissue being inflamed by the cold from the inside. I was wearing my newest leather jacket, and while not as warm as one of my thick padded coats, it seemed to keep the outside of my chest warm-ish. I couldn't see the bus I was expecting waiting at the bus stand down the road, but then when it was supposed to be due a bus came around the corner that was the right size and shape for a 320, but had a "Not in service" sign up.

  I thought I had another 20 minute for the next bus, but maybe a replacement bus had been sent out. After a wait of about 5 minutes a bus came around the corner, and stopped at the bus stand for a few minutes. Then, with the bus Countdown display saying there was still 15 minutes to go, the bus restarted, and a minute later I was boarding it. It was quite chilly on the top deck, but not too bad, and it probably warmed up a bit by the time we got to Bromley. It was a fairly fast run with very few passengers on board.

  Although it was to be a good night, it got off to a bad start, and then got worse. The bad start is that the world shortage of Guinness meant the pub had run out, and I was reduced to drinking a pint of Fullers ESB (extra special bitter), a very strong beer, and usually very nice, but I wasn't sure about last nights pint - it was good, but not as good as expected. It was also £5.80 a pint, but I guess that was to be expected in a pub like The Partridge.

  As predicted, the pub was far from full. What I should have foreseen was that everybody was standing around at the bar opposite the band, and there is only about 5ft clearance. Once people started dancing, and quite a few did. it was just like the pub was rammed full, and it was difficult to do my photography. on top of everything the lights were turned off once the band started. The band did have some stage lights, but their faces were very often in shadow, and my Nikon had a lot of trouble focussing... a lot of trouble !
  This was one of the early pictures I took and you can see it is rather dim in the pub. I was using flash, and that is usually fine, but it does depend on having enough light for the camera to see the scene so it can autofocus on it. I wanted to show Dan's great smile, but had to use oodles of sharpening on this picture, and it just does not look right.
  I did manage to take this picture in focus, but there is another problem - Dan's silly baseball cap. It is obscuring his eyes, and so another picture spoiled. I only had a very quick flick the pictures last night, and pulled out the first few I could use to show here. I have a dark suspicion that out of 135 snaps, less than 10 will be usable.
  In this view the guitar is fairly well lit, but still the picture is imperfect. The error was not to force the aperture to be smaller for a bigger depth of field so everything you can see is in focus. I could have done that by turning the flash gun power higher, but that would bleach out the green from the stage lights. It was just one of those nights where I spent too long avoiding bodies and not enough time concentrating on driving my camera correctly.
  I had to take 5 attempts to get this picture right, and then I chose the wrong, and slightly inferior picture to show here. Once I had realised what was going wrong I corrected it - mostly by turning the flash gun power up, and then slightly turning the camera to focus on Michael (on the left), and with the focus locked, swing the camera around to get both of them. The picture I should have used shows both of them in sharp focus. In this one, Tom, on the right is very slightly out of focus.

  Incidently, Tom Monks, seen on the right, is someone I have sort of known for many years, but very rarely seen. He organise an open mic night at The Iron Horse in Sidcup. I thought it clashed with my Wednesday drink, but that is the MT Pockets full electric open mic. Tom's one, every second Monday evening, concentrates more on the acoustic side (although I am sure there are exceptions on both nights). I must admit I didn't recognise Tom at first, but he recognised me. The last time I saw him he was clean shaven (he claims the moustache came out of Xmas cracker !!).

  I guess I had taken picture for the first half hour of the gig, and knowing I was having camera difficulties (and crowd difficulties) I was about to pack up and go home when Michael walked in. I thought it would be rude to walk out on him, and so I stayed to the end of the firsts set. I took a few more pictures in the second half of the first set, but not many, and just gave in and listened to the band.

  I wasn't sure if Michael had seen enough, but my right knee was starting to complain about standing up all the time, and I was also starting to get some sciatica in my right leg. I decided I would definitely go once the first set had finished. Michael also said he had seen enough, although I suspect he was probably a lot more tempted than me to see some or all the second set.

  By pure chance it was only a 5 minute wait for a 320 bus back to Catford (a 208 bus would also be good in that direction). In deference to Michaels lower agility, I chose a double seat on the lower deck of the bus (I automatically go upstairs on buses). It was a fairly good run back to Catford. Michael wondered if he dared ask the driver to let him stay on the bus after the last official stop by Catford Bridge station. When we got there i dared him, and he did ask, but by then I had got off the bus. Michael stayed on the bus, and it probably cut his walk down to half the distance to his home.

  I did quite a fast walk home, and it didn't seem to be that bad. It was certainly a way of keeping myself warm, but when I got home I found my chest was hurting a lot, and this time it was more like angina. It was probably a mix of angina and cold and complaining scar tissue. I could have been tempted to have a bowl of hot soup to help warm me through, but I seemed to be in quite a stubborn mood that I was not going to eat any more (an idea made feasible after only drinking one single pint of beer).

  Instead of eating I transferred the pictures from my camera to my PC. When I had a flick through the pictures I was very ashamed of how terrible most of them seemed to be. I quickly found four that were just about passable with a bit of work in my photo editor, and I have used them this morning. If I have time today I will try and work my way through all the pictures I took, and salvage what I can.

  It was getting on for midnight when I had finished with the photos. I went to bed, and then read for maybe as long as half an hour. I think I went to sleep quite quickly after that, and on the whole I slept well until 6am approached. I was nice and warm in bed, and there seemed no reason why I shouldn't sleep for a few more hours to make up my full eight hours of "beauty sleep" ! Unfortunately, in my view, I just couldn't fall properly asleep, and not long after 6am, and at beast just five and a half hours sleep, I got up.

  I think I hoped for more than the 400gm weight loss after I had my first pee of the morning. (Of course I had got up to pee at least twice during the night.) On reflection, I guess 400gm is quite a good loss, but I have apparently had more after not eating so little, but I guess that also included a big poo or two - none this morning, and probably none expected until later after such a large gap between meals.

  Even if my weight loss was not so great, my lower blood glucose was very good.  The Contour meter was the highest with a good reading of 7.9mmol/l. Bother the GlucoRX and Sinocare meter read an identical excellent 7.7mmol/l. That's all three readings in the seemingly rare attained light green colour coding in my Blood Glucose spreadsheet. Even my blood pressure is looking excellent this morning, 105/47. It's just a shame I feel a bit crappy, but that may just be sleep loss - and that it seems blood cold, and grey outside.

  I have two plans for today. The first is to do what I was going to do yesterday - a shopping trip to Poundstretcher, and maybe Savers too. It seems I used my last Ceterazine hay fever tablet this morning, and so a couple of new packets would not come amiss. If I can I will get them from Poundstretcher where there are one or two things it would be useful to buy.

  Later this afternoon I expect I will see Jodie for some beer tasting. That could lead to some excessive eating, but provided I try and take up the slack tomorrow, I guess I might deserve a light, and short holiday from trying to tightly control my eating. Having an "accident" today might possibly spur me on to better things tomorrow !