09:13 BST

  As I write this (9:40pm) it is bright outside, and there have been a few thin rays of sunshine, but earlier on when sunny spells were forecast it seemed very dull. The next thing in the forecast is light rain from 3pm to 7pm. It is anyone's guess if we see this or not. The temperature should reach a peak of 20° C by 1pm, and it may stay there until 4pm when it will start to fall again. It will be another quite cool night, but some (possible) sunshine in the morning may help the day warm up a bit. The afternoon may be dull, but sunny spells may resume again at 5pm. At 6pm the temperature may peak at a none too impressive 22° C for one single hour. It is possible some weather more suited to summer may return in the middle of next week.

  Yesterday was one of those days when it felt like I was very busy doing very little. It did end with a good, if slightly miserable, booze up, but I can't really say there was any highlight yesterday. Maybe managing to get one more photo album of The Badger Band was the highlight of the day.

  When I think back to yesterday I can't really say why I could not get a lot more done. I suppose I ought to blame it on my extended Wednesday boozing session, but although I drunk just over double what I would usually drink, I didn't feel drunk enough to believe I could have a hangover yesterday, but I guess that is what happened. It must be another aspect of old age. Once upon a time you get up the next morning, and say, yes, that is definitely a terrible hangover. These days it is more like someone has painlessly stuffed my brain with cotton wool.

  The odd thing is that I thought I finished writing earlier than usual yesterday - even though I said I had written 2,664 words. That is a bit longer than most days. When I finished writing I face the dilemma that I had so much to do, and yet I felt really tired. I gave in to that idea, and I laid on my bed reading, and I am pretty sure I had a snooze, although I have no idea how long I might have slept - somewhere between 2 minutes and an hour !

  What I do remember is feeling mildly hungry, and although not quite time for lunch, it was well past elevenses time. I gave in and had something to eat, although I am not sure what. I am sure I had coleslaw and flatbread crackers at some point, and it might have been for a late elevenses/early starter for lunch. After eating I felt the desire to lie down again. I don't specifically remember it, but it is possible I had another snooze.

  I do seem to like snoozing a lot these days, and I have been treating it as if it was traditional in old age, but now I wonder if it is more to do with my dodgy heart valve. With sufficient distraction I don't need, or have any rests, and I don't think I feel any the worse for it - unless that is the reason why I felt bad yesterday, and this morning as well !

  Having let my almost-lunch settle down I made the effort to start the finish of the towel and shorts I had left soaking in detergent for 24 hours or more......err, no, I did manage one rinse the day before yesterday after I had needed to use the bath t wash me, and then put both items back in clean rinse water. Whether it was all the time it was in the first rinse water, but I only seemed to need another 3 or 4 rinses before I decided I might as well hang both items on the big clothes horse to dry.

  By that time I had missed "official" lunch time, but it seemed a fine time for a snack. I treated myself to two small scoops (approximately) of raspberry ice cream. I nearly had some lemon ice cream, but I was not sure I could trust myself to not eat too much of that. The raspberry ice cream is very nice, but only about 73% as good as the lemon ice cream. I am sure I ate something else because what was looming on the horizon was a Thursday afternoon boozing session.

  Jodie opted to get the bus here because it was raining her end (it was almost sunny here), and it was more like 3:45pm when she arrived. Once we started drinking I sent a text message to Michael (he needs reminding every week because he seems not to understand, or believe what an open invitation is), As usual he replied an hour or more later to say he doubted he would join us, but he seems to say the same every week since his wife had to be moved to a care home.

  During the last week or so his wife has been taken into hospital 3 or 4 times, and so Michael has been spending hours there. I am unsure if he came direct from the hospital, but in doing so he would pass his own house anyway. He had called at home to grab a few beers from his fridge, and his special beer mug. As usual he was not happy, and was grateful to be able to tell us all about it (although I don't think Jodie paid much attention to it all. He did go on for hours !

  He was only interrupted when Mark joined us prior to he and Jodie going off to some bar and/or restaurant. I must admit it was a big relief to have a slight change of topic. I feel we have a duty to entertain Michael in his weeks of need, but sometimes, perhaps most times, I do end up drinking more to soften the impact. Jodie, Mark, and Michael left only just in time for me to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation (I had missed the news).

  I watched enough TV to get me through my dinner. Dinner was a tub of cold Chicken and Chorizo pasta for part 1. Part 2 was almost a full tub of coleslaw with cheese and crisps. It was very unhealthy, or I thought it was, but maybe it was not that bad. One thing I am fairly certain about is that all that raw cabbage and carrot will soon open my bowel to full flow. It will be useful to completely empty my system before spending much of tomorrow at Petts Wood Calling.

  Once I finished eating I switched the TV off, and got back to my photo editing. I did not have too many picture to go through, and I may have only found 3 picture worth using out of maybe 30 snaps (some were unusable by any metric). I got those done, and breathed a great sigh of relief.
  I only propose showing a couple of the pictures. This one shows five sixths of the band. I shot it using my wide angle, fisheye lens between two of the annoying pillars at the front of the stage (with the camera held beyond the pillars). Those on the outside of the picture show some fisheye distortion, but I was aware of that, and made the original picture small enough that I could trim off the outsides to leave what I show here.
  On the Sunday, when these pictures were taken, I tried harder to get a group picture of the bands. This one came out fairly OK. One thing the sharp eye may notice is the socks and shoes of the lady in pink are well over exposed. As I keep complaining - the light on the stage, although it coming in from outside, is highly variable. It made my life a misery/ruined several potentially good pictures when someone's face was over exposed while their body was dark and underexposed. In desperation that can be partly corrected, but it saves a lot of time to just ignore that picture and hope the next is better.

  I was feeling very tired when I had finished the last picture of The Badger Band (I still have three other bands, and it doesn't look I will get even one of them done by the end of today). I'm not sure what time it was, but I think it was probably before 10pm because I did check to see if QI might have been worth watching - it wasn't. I read for a while, but I may still have been asleep by 10pm. The only trouble was that I did not sleep well last night.

  The reasons for poor sleep probably start with the start of my hangover after the afternoon's boozing session. All the coleslaw I ate was giving hints of heartburn when I woke up maybe an hour after getting to sleep. I took some antacid tablets, and tried for sleep again. I was soon asleep, but I may have only slept for an hour before I needed to get up for a pee.

  I am not certain of the order of things, but one thing was probably the first, and it was waking up feeling cool, and putting the heater on. Another reason to wake, which was in addition to getting up to pee, was waking up to the feeling of cramp starting in both legs. Fortunately I leapt out of bed, and had weight on my legs before the cramp could do it's most agonising pain. One time I woke up feeling a bit short of breath. I can't be sure but I think it was probably a dream causing it instead of anything like sleep apnoea.

  I did have one dream near the morning that I can describe mostly in terms of the theme rather than the action, although odd bits of action still seem to have left some memory. In the dream I still worked for a famous telecommunications company. I had been sent to the technical train college near Old Street in east London, and I was on a course of advanced communication (how modern telephone exchanges, and other stuff is connected together).

  I was not enjoying myself and not bothering to learn anything - although having said that, I don't recall there were any actual lessons.  Some of the time I was just bored stiff, but at other times I was chatting to some of the others. One person in particular was a pretty young lady, and she seemed worried that I didn't seem to be learning anything. I confided in her that I was actually 70 years old, and well past retirement age, and that I was only resisting retiring to see how much I could get away with !

  I think it was just before 5am when I woke up from that dream. I couldn't help thinking about it, although I am not sure if I thought it was good or bad. I may have been trying to recover the memory of what the young woman looked like. I described her as pretty in the previous paragraph, but I seem to have no memory of what she actually looked like. That, and trying to find a comfortable position, caused at least 45 or more minutes of insomnia.

  I did get back to sleep, and it was almost 7am before I woke up needing a pee. I had my pee, and a small poo before weighing myself. It did not look good. Fortunately after counting out my pills and vitamin tablets for the day, and before I ate any breakfast, I had another pee, and another poo. After weighing myself a second time I found I had only put on 200gm since yesterday. It may not be much, but it is yet another small gain, and losts of small gains can add up to big gains unless I am careful.

  Two thirds of my blood glucose readings were perfectly OK, even if higher than hoped for. One reading was awful. it was no surprise that all the beer and food I ate yesterday would have a negative affect, but why it was so bad on just the one meter is a mystery. The Contour meter read 8.3mmol/l, and that is good enough for semi occasional times. The GlucoRX meter read not that much different at 8.4mmol/l. It was the Contour Plus meter that after some days partly agreeing with the others, it has gone off at the deep end with a reading of 9.3mmol/l. If the others had been higher I might have been concerned, but now I am just mystified as to what the difference is that triggers these unusually high readings.

  This morning my weight may be a little bit higher, but it is still a lot lower than it has been for the last couple months. My blood glucose is nothing exceptional. My blood pressure may even be very slightly low at 101/48, but it has been much lower at times. My body temperature is perfect, and my blood oxygen saturation is a very good 98%. For all these good things, I still feel lousy this morning, although I admit that I have improved a lot since I got up.

  The most obvious negative feeling is aching joints. Most are only a bit above being noticeable, but my right wrist seems to be suffering from repetitive strain injury from using my computer mouse too much. I've got a wrist support thing on at the moment, and that is working well. It is just coming up to 11:30am as I write this, and while some aches have diminished a lot, I still feel very tired, and maybe even more tired than earlier.

  This is unfortunate on a day when I have so much to do. I am going to ignore the things I should be doing (most importantly photo selecting and editing), and once I have finished this electronic diary (and I still have to make up a page for August), I am going to have a lie down, and if I snooze then so much the better. later on I will have a quick shower, and then go shopping in Tesco.

  Tomorrow I will mostly be occupied with Petts Wood Caling, and that could keep me out from before midday to semi late in the evening. I will need supplies from Tesco for a light dinner tonight, and an easy late evening dinner tomorrow (probably ready made sandwiches). I will also have to try and make tomorrow's electronic diary (this) fairly brief, but that might be easy because compare to recent days, I will have little to say.