The wind kept the temperature up to 10° C overnight, and so this morning has started milder than recent mornings. The huge improvement today is sunshine - full sunshine from a blue sky ! With luck it will continue until sunset at 4.47pm today. All the sunshine will only raise the afternoon temperature to 13° C. That is not very high, but it should feel OK in the sunshine. Once again we may get a couple of hours of 40mph winds, and today they are prediected for 11am and midday. Tonight may be a bit cooler than last night, but 9° C is not that terrible. It is tomorrow that will be terrible - the rain returns ! All the daylight hours will see rain, although no heavy rain is forecast. From 3pm tomorrow the temperature may reach 16° C - that is some very small compensation for the rain.

  Yesterday was another day where the rain and dull sky killed any get up and go in me. I did not go out, and I did very little. I read quite a lot, and I managed to convince myself to eat a slightly less voracious diet for my dinner.

  The worst of the weather did not start until late in the morning, although before the worst it was pretty dull and damp looking. Maybe calling it the worst is slightly over doing it. It was definitely raining, but there was no heavy rain...at least none that caught my attention.

  I was contemplating doing some household chores yesterday, and I wish I had made a bit more effort because nothing got done. One bit of brief activity was preparing my lunch. It was a couple of bread rolls with two sausages in each. It was just as I got to my second to last mouthful that my phone rang. It was my sister with bad news.

  The new was that my older brother has recently died. (My oldest brother dies some years ago). It was possibly a blessing that the older brother died. He was reported as suffering from dementia. I hadn't been in touch with him for maybe 20 years or more, and so the news was not what I would call awful. Obviously it is sad he is dead, but it doesn't have any real impact on me.

  What does, or will cause and impact on me is that my sister says one of my brothers sons (I have no idea how many children he had), possibly the one I was forced to hold when he was still a baby, and that put me even further right off babies, and concluding cats are much nicer) wants to write to me in the hope of finding out more about his father. That is going to be tricky because our paths rarely crossed because my older brother was a lot older than me.

  I am unsure how much older, but I know he got married while I was still in primary school, and was on his second or third job before I left secondary school. I spent a lot of time last night when I should have been sleeping, trying to scrape any memories from the back of my brain about my brother. Maybe the main thing would be his love of amateur dramatics. I say him, not always that willingly, perform in maybe half a dozen plays. He played the lead in a couple of them, and I have to admit he played them so well that I had to do a sort of double take to remember it was my brother on stage, and not the character he was playing.

  I had another phone call yesterday that disrupted my day. It was from my ex-friend Sue. This time she thought she was having a stroke. She sent me a couple of pictures of her face, and I didn't see any sign of the lopsidedness you get when you've had a stroke. I think she just wanted attention. She said he blood pressure was very high (187/102 if I recall correctly). I strongly suggested she call an ambulance. They are better trained to recognise a stroke, and her high blood pressure was worth calling an ambulance anyway. As far as I am aware, she didn't call an ambulance because she had no one to look after her dog if she ended up in hospital. I feel sure there are plans for that sort of thing.

  As evening approached I did not make any preparations to go out to see Chain playing in Blackheath. Apart from the walk to the end of the road, I would have stayed mostly dry - the bus stop is right outside the pub Chain would be playing in. It being cold, dark, and wet was a good enough reason, but on top of that I don't like the pub. It is probably fine for drinking in, but the bands play in a sort of alcove, that only gives a view to a small amount of people, and makes photography very annoying. My regret at not going is so small it barely registers on the scale of annoyances.

  While I made no gig preparations, I did make preparations to eat a bit more carefully when I had dinner. The main part of my dinner was two cans of soup. One was Tesco's "cream of chicken", and that is, or was when I bought the cans quite a few years ago, known to have a very low, close to zero, sugar content, and it is also low calorie too. Less good, but still very good, was a can of Oxtail soup.

  In an ideal (probably fantasy) world I would have had no more than just those two cans of soup, but I had some ice cream as well. It was Aldi's "High protein" ice cream that seems to have a low sugar content. Maybe I thought it so low that I allowed myself a Caramel bar as a sort of treat to round off dinner. At some point in the second half of the day I did have some "dry roasted" and some Salted peanuts - mostly because they are very nice, but are also a good source of fibre (I think).

  I watched some TV last night. Most of my favourite TV is not shown on a Saturday night, but last night Sky Arts (on Freeview) were showing Dave Gilmour (from Pink Floyd) playing a concert in the Circus Maximus in Italy. Some of it was very good, and a few bits were a bit dull. One specific bit was annoying. One other concerts the TV listings show the concert includes the song "Fat Old Sun", but it seems to have been clipped out of those other concerts. Last night it was played, and I was still disappointed. This live version was different in several ways to the recorded version on the album "Atom Heart Mother", and I did not enjoy it as much as I hoped to.

  I could have watch more concerts after the main David Gilmour one, but it was gone 11pm, and I headed to bed. I seemed to fall asleep fairly quickly, but by 2am, maybe earlier, I woke up, and could not stop trying to remember stuff about my older brother that may be of interest to his son.

  I can strongly sympathise with his son. There are many things I would have liked to have heard from my dad, but he died when I was just 13 years old. It would be several more years before I knew enough to appreciate what my dad could have told me about his wartime experiences. I know a few important things, but very little more. I know my dad was involved in the deployment of radar. He was a qualified radio technician (or maybe engineer) and knew all the technical details of the radar equipment. It was all top secret stuff at the time, and as such he was not allowed to fly over the North Sea in case he was shot down and captured by the Germans. He did fly out (or was flown out) over the Atlantic where the radar equipment was being assessed for it's capabilities of picking out a submarine periscope. I know he had a flight log book because I have seen it. What I was never sure was if he had been trained to fly a plane - you might think everyone in The RAF would be, but everyone had their own specialities, and my dad's was radio and radar equipment, and not flying.

  I don't know how much time I spent awake during last night, but I can sort of remember getting up to pee (and on one occasion to see if I could poo, and every time I went back to bed my brain would switch on again, and it would take some time to try and get it to turn off so I could get back to sleep.

  I am unsure what time it was when it seemed like it was time to get up (or more truthfully, I just could not get back to sleep). When I did get up I did the usual and dashed to the toilet for a pee. A bit later I went again, and this time I did have the poo I almost had in the night. I guess I could say I was a bit constipated, but once things moved they moved very easily - and barely touched the sides as they popped out. I think I only needed a couple f sheets of toilet paper.

  When I weighed myself I found that eating soup for dinner had the desired effect. I lost some weight, although I will admit I have lost more by almost eating normally. This morning I was on 200gm lighter - the same as the last 3 or 4 mornings. My blood glucose was quite reasonable, but it was exactly the same as it was three mornings ago - so nothing worth celebrating - except 8.23mmol/l this morning is a lot better than 9.07mmol/l yesterday.

  This morning (just now, in fact) my blood pressure is probably perfect (if anyone knows what perfect is). I got two readings, The first showed that the clocked changed to GMT during the night, and I ought to change the clock in the blood pressure machine. The other reading was 113/69, and in my limited imagination that seems very good to me. My heart rate  seems pretty good at 75 bpm.

  The main "entertainment" today should be a beer tasting session with Jodie. Prior to that, and also prior to one other thing I think I will do, I will wash and condition my hair, and also have a shower. That other things is possibly optional, and it is to go for another shopping trip to Tesco. I think I could usefully buy more soup, some more solid dinner, and some more bottles of Diet Coke. I may just buy 2 bottles of Diet Coke, and get 2 bottles of Vanilla flavour Coke Zero. Since mentioning it last time I have tasted the vanilla flavoured Coke, and while Coke Zero is not my favourite, the vanilla flavour Coke Zero is a pleasant enough novelty to get a few more bottles in.