So this is the first weekend of My Diabetes Diary.
On Friday my mum was coming to visit, which might have prevented me from writing for my usual 2 hours, but didn’t as I took my lap top with me to Bath and wrote for two hours. I sat in my usual coffee shop, cafe Nero, drank my usual coffee, and wrote.
Currently, I am working on a very long novel which stands at 200 000 words, and a shorter children’s novel, which stands at 36 000 words. I am also in the process of editing a sci fi children’s novel which needs tidying up. Then there is a picture book which I have spent some time looking at. I wrote it 25 years ago….I enjoy looking at the illustrations for this, so I still wonder whether one day it will become a classic children’s picture book. Sometimes I line all the illustrations up on the floor and look at them lovingly, wondering. I registered for a course too. I do this from time to time, just in case I learn something earth shattering that gets me onto the next rung of the publishing ladder. The course looks good. 6 weeks to a published picture book. I may withdraw from this course, because I cannot really afford it.
I wasn’t working on Friday so I went into town, which means I get to walk around 5 k, and wrote in the coffee shop. I drank my usual coffee but didn’t add sugar to it. For breakfast I ate some cereal, which, I found out today by checking the ingredients, has sugar in it and syrup. When was it that I stopped checking the ingredients on food? Probably when I became a teaching assistant and also became considerably poorer than my former manager self. Still, I suppose since I turned down the recent offer of more work at a college 30 miles away, I am no longer a teaching assistant. I have been working in a local shop for several months now. I have convinced myself that this is an holistic choice; holistic because it means I can walk further than I can during a half hour lunch break at a college, or further than I would with an hour’s commute to work times by two. It’s a 10 minute cycle to work, and then back; I can extend this if I take my bike, which I do in reasonable weather, and cycle up a quiet lane adding to my exercise. I don’t always record these on my app because my phone is very cheap and ropey and I have to have whattsap for work working everyday, which means that is a priority, not for friends and family but for work issues and updates. I don’t get paid for these updates, but I have to check on them before I delete them from my phone, so I don’t have a choice really. Yes, I know that I can get some sort of memory chip, but really, I don’t have time. I’m a writer. Yes I’m a writer. I write every day for at least 2 hours. This is how I know I am a writer. I have been doing this for decades.
Paragraphs have never come naturally to me. I have no idea why. Were I to leave this blog for several days, I could read back the previous paragraph and then it would sound different, because I would have distanced myself from it enough so that I could hear all the errors in it and where there ought to be a new paragraph. I don’t really have time to do this so I will leave it and publish. It is a trade off. This is merely a diary, so it cannot be perfect. It will not be like my children’s books or my novels which I spend years perfecting.
I merely skim read it for errors and sense.
I didn’t eat anything sweet on Friday. I collected mum and resisted the urge to eat an apricot croissant. Instead we both ate a piece of toast and I drank another latte. Is that too much milk for one day do you suppose?
We arrived home and I cooked the pork chops I had defrosted, along with some mash and carrots.
I drank lots of water today. I usually do. This is nothing new. The only new thing I have done is to not eat anything sweet, knowingly….
Saturday
My partner made me the usual chilli toast and a cup of tea; we buy this in Tesco.
I walked down for my usual coffee before work with my partner and popped into the Coop to get some tomatoes. Tomatoes are a little bit sweet. Maybe they would stave off my sweet tooth. No Snickers bars today. I ate a whole packet of baby tomatoes at 11 o’clock.
After work, at around 1.30 I bought a tin of tuna. This was advertised in Coop at 95p but was actually £1.25 which annoyed me. But I didn’t ask for a refund.
I cooked lunch two jacket potatoes each and covered it in tuna, cheese, and lettuce.
My son rang me to get addresses for his imminent wedding and mum read the letter from my GP. On the back it tells me what my blood test result was. I hadn’t turned the page over. I forgot to eat the lettuce and an hour later when l returned to it, l found my partner has cleared it away. I have this habit of saving the best to last; l was looking forward to that lettuce.
Mum read the letter from my Gp. I hadn’t turned it over. On the back is the information about my fasting glucose levels.
It reads:
19 Feb 2019 Numeric reading 5.5 mmoI/L Read code description Plasma fasting glucose level
29 Feb 2019 Numeric reading 5.8 mmoI/L Read code description Plasma fasting glucose level
Later…
We went for a 5 k circuit walk past Thornbury Castle and into town.
We drank a latte. Mum bought some croissants for her journey in the morning. She offered me a pastry. I declined.
For dinner we ate some delicious turkey which my partner found going cheap in Tesco. I had a handful of mash with this and copious carrots. I made mum some cherry pie and blueberries. I didn’t eat anything else.
Sunday
This morning I ate a bowl of that cereal I like from Aldi with the raisins in it. I was chatting to mum in the kitchen because, after two cancer opps, she has to take tablets and wait half an hour before she eats. I decided to look at the ingredients on the cereal packet, and was surprised to discover both sugar and syrup. Apparently the order that ingredients are listed in dictates the amount, so that the ones at the beginning are of the highest content. I learnt this years ago from a woman’s magazine. The sugar was the second ingredient.
We drove mum back to Bath to catch the bus back to Heathrow, and went for a two hour walk. This walk too is not unusual. When the weather isn’t good enough for cycling we often walk for several hours. I don’t always record this on the app as it is ropey, as I mentioned elsewhere. The walk around Bath is called the skyline walk, and is reasonably well marked out with yellow arrow markers. It starts on Bathwick hill, and there is a leaflet you can pick up if you walk past Tesco on the hill and turn right at the bus stop which shows the route.
Afterwards, we stopped in a graveyard and sat on a bench dedicated to a poet who died in 2018. There was a short poem by the poet etched into the white stone bench like an epitaph. The poem was about a thrush. I quite liked it. I spent some time working out that the poet had lived for over 80 years and had been born between the wars. He was about 11 or twelve when the II World War broke out and I thought he must have spent some years wondering whether it would be his fate to go to war, and also that he must have lost many male friends to it; perhaps brothers and perhaps a father. His name was not familiar to me. Perhaps I will return to the bench one day and record the poem here for you, or at least, since it will still be under copyright, perhaps I will tell you the name of the poem.
I ate a salad with olives and lettuce and tomatoes and feta cheese. I usually eat this for lunch. I also ate some cheddar cheese crisps and blueberries and grapes. These are the sort of things we eat at most weekends. My partner always has pie and today was no different. Cherry pie. Except that I didn’t eat it.
We walked into town and sat in the coffee shop to read the papers. I drank my usual cafe latte. I didn’t add sugar. I felt very tired and snoozed for a minute or so on the lovely comfy sofa, before my partner nudged me awake.
Today, all day, I have been feeling very constipated. I am describing this here because it was one of the symptoms of my illness in February which made me go and see my doctor.
I have two cravings today, which I ignore, one is for peas and one is for greens. I am ignoring them, because I left my purse at home and there isn’t a supermarket nearby.
I make a mental note to buy some tomorrow and eat them in the early evening. My shift is in the afternoon, so I will have time to buy them in the morning, walk back home and eat them for lunch before my shift begins at 1.15 pm.
We arrived home and I ate two slices of chilli bread with butter and drank a cup of tea.
We then went out for a 9 or 10 k ride. My phone is low on power so I cannot record the ride. It is quite hilly. This ad hoc ride is quite usual for us at weekends if we have not had a day’s ride which would be 20 or 30 k and end up somewhere near the Severn or in Berkeley.
We are having turkey for dinner and fried egg with vegetables, crispy potatoes and carrots.
I have eaten three apples today, but nothing sweeter.
While writing my next diabetes blog l have edited this On my Amazon tablet, even though it is slower than touch typing at my laptop. I keep using L instead of capital I because it is quicker.
hermionelaake 