This morning seems sunnier than the forecast seemed to make me expect, but it is still quite cool, and once again the afternoon may only peak at 21° C. The sunny spells should continue all day until 6pm when the sky may clear, and we'll get full sunshine until sunset, but it will happen too late to increase the temperature. Tomorrow's weather returns to something more appropriate to April. Not long after a dry start it will start to rain, and with no sunshine from then onwards, it may only reach 17° C by late afternoon. Even worse than that is the temperature may dip around midday to a very chilly 14° C after reaching 15° C by mid morning. It seems like it will be a really horrid day.

  Yesterday started out really good, and the afternoon beer tasting session was very enjoyable even if the consequences of it were a total disaster - the amount of disaster was easily measurable this morning, but it had been feeling a disaster by late last night.


  After I had finished writing, had my usual rest, and then had a shower, I had to decide on two possibilities. One was to go shopping. That didn't seem to be essential, or maybe even slightly needed at the time, and so I chose the second option - an early afternoon walk in the last of the sunshine. I wore just t-shirt and shorts, plus my newest pair of Adidas trainers. This time they seemed very comfortable (the day before they seemed like they were no better than some of my more recent pairs of trainers).

  I opted for just a straight walk to Ladywell and back. This time I walked anti-clockwise, and go to and stop on Ladywell station for any train spotting. I did have to make other stops to stop developing any chest pains, but most of them were stops to take pictures using my Canon EOS 600D camera. That camera has come to be my favourite camera for walks and train spotting.

  While I didn't get any chest pains in a conventional way, I did get a stitch on my right hand side when I was approaching Ladywell. It was roughly to the right of under my right man boob. I guess that was some sort of oxygen starvation to some muscle or something. I gave it a little time to fade away again, and it never came back.

  I was finding it hard to find new things to take photos of, but early in the walk I decided this was a nice view. One tree in the foreground seemed to have very pale leaves. While the other had red leaves. As I discovered only earlier this year, some trees can have red leaves as a sign of stress much earlier in the year than autumn. The stress in this case would be because it was such a dry spring. The trees in the background have varying shades of a more brilliant green.
  This is far from an award winning photo, but I was happy to get it. This duck, just about to land on the river, was the last of three I saw launch themselves off a rock in the river, and fly a couple of feet. I was happy that I had managed to catch it in motion, with feathers spread for landing. The sad thing is that it was very under exposed, and brightening it up made it seem very grainy.
  There are a few small areas in the park that are left to grow wild to attract bees and butterflies. One of these areas towards the Ladywell end of the park, was dotted with bright red poppies.The petals of these ones seemed paper thin. I don't think I have seen poppies anywhere else in the park.
  There is going to be a big crop of blackberries alongside several paths, mostly between the fence and the river. It seems hard to imagine that the bees can find much pollen on what seems to be very delicate flowers, but all along the paths there were bees a buzzing away, and visiting all the blackberry flowers.

  I seemed to get very little discomfort from my newest Adidas trainers, and none of the discomfort I had when walking from the bus to home on Saturday. That does not mean my walk was totally comfortable. On the last half mile my legs and ankles were starting to complain, although it was mostly my legs. The new trainers seem flexible enough that there is less strain on my ankles when walking.

  It is possible I suffered less because I didn't really fight the fatigue pains. These things are a bit subjective, but I did think I stopped less, and maybe for shorter times, than last time I was doing that last stretch towards home. More telling was that I didn't have the sensation of being on my last legs when I got home, and acted no differently to when I had done far shorter walks, or when I was a lot fitter.

  The first thing I did was to have some lunch. I might have skipped it, or had something lighter, but it seemed a good idea to get a good lining for my stomach before a later onslaught of beers. I had two Pannini rolls filled with sliced beef, horseradish sauce and baby salad leaves. They were delicious !

  I then set about checking all the photos I took to see what might be usable. There was one photo in particular I hoped might be usable. It was a blackbird with a bright yellow beak high in a tree. I felt sort of elated that I managed to spot it, but I knew it was going to be a very high contrast picture - just a completely black shadow against a very bright sky. I took 4 pictures trying to get a better angle, but none of them could be brightened up to show anything but a black shadow or a heap of grain.

  I completed the job well before Jodie turned up a lot later than usual. She said she had missed the train, and didn't want to wait for the next one half an hour later, and so checked the buses. She had just missed one of those too, and said it was a half hour before the next bus (although the TFL app on my phone said they should be every ten minutes). It was gone 4pm when Jodie arrived. Alan turned up about 10 minutes later.

  It is Jodie's birthday today, and yesterday was one of the days of celebration of her 60th birthday. Yesterday she didn't claim any hangovers, and was quite happy to have some quite strong beers. As usual, she was not very talkative, and even Alan found it hard to get some comments out of her when she was deeply distracted by stuff on her phone. Fortunately I had Alan to talk to and we chatted about PCs, hard disks, and other technical stuff.

  I think it was gone 7pm when Jodie and Alan left to get a bus to Bromley for more drinking. I had my dinner. It was a chilli con carne ready meal from Tesco, and to my surprise it wasn't all that bad. I followed it with some ice cream, although I did try and limit myself to approximately "two scoops" because that is usually just about, albeit with a tiny margin, safe (for some amounts of safe).

  I had missed the news and missed nearly all of Star Trek:Voyager. I did end up watching a full edition of Have I Got News For You. That ended at 9pm, and I was going to watch another edition (Dave was showing two, one after the other for some reason). That would mean going past the 9pm watershed, and Dave showed one of those terribly nauseous Bet Fred Casino adverts. I turned off the TV with great prejudice, and went to bed. I fell asleep very quickly because I was drunk.

  Unfortunately I woke again maybe two hours later, and my hangover was happening, plus I had all sorts of digestive system problems. Fortunately this didn't include throwing up, although most unpleasant at the time, might have been the quick cure. I definitely needed to take some antacid tablets, and I also some pain killers because my right shoulder, and a few other joints seemed to be giving me some discomfort. It was two hours later before I got my next bit of poor quality sleep.

  A bit later on I started sleeping better, and I had some dreams. One dream was obviously inspired by the need of a toilet in real life. In the dream I was in a very big posh building with marble floors. I have no idea what or where it was, but maybe it had a sort of hotel feel to it. I went through a big door to a room with two toilet stalls in it. Both were filthy with soiled toilet paper everywhere.

  I came out of there without doing anything. I spied what seemed like a cleaner, and asked if there were other, and cleaner toilets to be found. He said I should use the VIP toilets which was through a more discrete door. I like what I found in there even less. In one trap there was a young boy, apparently passed out, laying down with his face half in a filthy drainage channel. The other trap had an even bigger surprise. It seemed that someone had crawled into the sewer pipe, and had his erect penis poking out into the dry toilet bowl.

  I had a far less unsettling dream a bit later. I dreamed I had gone back to work after a long period of sickness. The boss asked me what was wrong, and why I hadn't called a doctor. I explained that I had some sort of sleeping sickness, and had spent 23 out of every 24 hours fast asleep. It had gone on for several weeks, and that I was not awake for long enough to try and see a doctor. I said that if the boss was not happy about it I would be happy to resign, but he said there was no need to go that far, and that the company needed me !

  I can't remember when it was, but on reflection I think it was a bit before 2am when I finally got to sleep, I had managed to push out a rather hard poo. That made me feel more comfortable, and so I was able to get to sleep. I still didn't feel fully comfortable whenever I woke up in the night for a pee. It was odd that after drinking so much beer earlier, I didn't seem to need to pee all that much. I think some of the times I woke in the night were not really needed.

  I felt I had lost so much sleep in the night that I was determined to sleep late this morning. It turned out to be a little later than was ideal. It was well gone 8am when I got up. After getting up I went for a small pee, and did another rather hard poo. When I got on the scales I was saddened to see that I had put on a whole kilogram since yesterday morning. Since then I have made more visits to the toilet, peed more, and passed quite a lot more poo - to the extent that my bottom is quite sore - and I am not sure I am completely empty yet !

  As well as my weight being up, my blood glucose is up too, but not to the same extreme. The Contour meter read 9.2mmol/l. That is in the undesirable pre-dangerous area, and even that can be a bit dangerous in more minor ways (like boils growing on the inner thigh). The GlucoRX meter read 8.6mmol/l, and that is not so bad, but lower would be better. The Sinocare meter read 9.8mmol/l, and that is rather too close to the red line at 10.0mmol/l.

  Under the circumstances I did try and skip breakfast. Doing so would also save a bit of time after a very late start. I had my usual morning pills, but omitted the cod liver oil capsule so I wouldn't get any fishy burps. In the end I could have had it because I got as far as describing the four photos I used today when I could no longer ignore my stomach growling. I gave in and had two small packets of Kimchi flavour instant noodles - the make that says they contain zero sugar, and only 57 calories per packet. I may try and skip dinner now, but I may still have something fairly light.

  My imagined plans for today were very similar to yesterday. I could go shopping, or I could go for a walk. Possibly attempting to tackle something closer to a 3 mile walk. I have not ruled that out yet. I may do that in preference tto shopping, but before all that I have one essential task. I left my favourite small bath towel soaking in bio detergent after my shower yesterday, and it is still soaking this morning. I will probably have to do do at least 8 rinses and wringings out before I can probably hang it on the washing line to dry. Once that is done I am free to do anything else.