67 days ago
With fresh raspberries and blackberries and strawberries frozen earlier in the summer, I was able to serve up a birthday treat summer pudding for Joshua. I have enough of all three in the freezer to do the same for Jaya on her birthday in November. The blackberry season is almost over but i hope to take the kids for one last big forage to add to our stores. I pick and free more raspberries almost every other day, the harvest has been enormous.
70 days ago
A very kind attendee at Sharestock sent me a thank you present of a hamper packed with wonderful Scottish food and a bottle of French wine for the Mrs. As Joshua helped unpack it yesterday his face lit up, “you can’t have that, diabetes,you can’t have that, more for me”..So the whole family is delighted. But the most delighted is pictured below.
217 days ago
I was first up and my encounter was scheduled, it was my diabetes check up. When the Shipmans test your blood they obtain a three month average trailing score of blood sugars. So this chat was about bloods taken on March 4: two months of sobriety, healthy eating and exercise and one month of drinking and over indulgence during the olive harvest and then Christmas. Yet my results were stunning, a 25% reduction in blood sugars, albeit from a terrible start. The nurse was full of praise and said how much thinner I was looking. I think she meant I looked less fat but the trend is my friend.
250 days ago
I am sure that there are many of you thin folks who will be screaming “fat bastard” as you read this. You would be right. But I am on a journey as I try, again, to tackle type two diabetes and that journey started, just after Christmas, seeing me tip the scales at closer to 17 stone than 16. Now, today’s weigh in shows that I am closer to 15 stone than to 16 stone. I am, by nature, one of life’s fatties and weight has been a lifelong battle.
270 days ago
What a pathetic country we have become. Someone living entirely on welfare in the UK is in the top 2.5% of global earners but today we read that 15% of UK households were so poor that last month they had to skip at least one meal a day. Really? 4.5 million households? 11 million people?
271 days ago
I start on my diabetes. I should have acted earlier. But as i prepare for a Christmas of lettuce with all the trimmings washed down with mineral water, I am fighting back. Then it is onto UK small caps? When will they fight back? I name five that probably can’t and for which it is a matter of when not if the Fat Lady arrives.
278 days ago
For St. David’s Day, the Pest, aka my son Joshua, has a choice of three Welsh tasks for a school contest. No sheep jokes, he is only seven. And fear not, any English person owning a second home in the village won’t be “coming home to a real fire” though Joshua is a fierce nationalist. That reminds me, it is Ireland vs Wales on Saturday which we will be watching with an Irish family though the Mrs says she will join the kids in rooting for Wales. Traitor. Back to the contest: the task we have chosen is making Bara Brith, a Welsh sort of fruit cake.
295 days ago
The twice monthly Tesco shop took place yesterday with myself and young Jaya once again whizzing around the Wrexham store. Lots of cat food for the cats, grapes and strawberries for Joshua, biscuits for Jaya, pasta sauces and pork joints for the Mrs. and stacks of kale, chickpeas, blueberries, kippers, tuna and houmus for me as I continue my alcohol, sugars and carb free diet to tackle the diabetes. The fridge is bursting with curly kale which is meant to be a superfood.
314 days ago
I now feel a bit of a wuss writing this as my pal Darren sends photos of the snow in Canada outside his rural retreat where it is minus 17 degrees. I am not sure if it will snow here in North Wales next week. My kids hope it does and so do I as if there is even a light dusting of global warming, the Marxist Madrassa where the Mrs works will shut down and we will enjoy her company all week. But I do know that it will be cold by Welsh standards and that an alternative to switching on all our hugely expensive gas radiators is to run a fire in the main living room where folks can snuggle up and watch mid rot on the telly.. And that brings me to my birthday present to myself, in the first photo below, a heavy splitting axe.
1017 days ago
In one sense Tory MP Maria Caulfield is right. Anyone can get HIV but in encouraging us all to head off to the NHS, the envy of the world, with its record waiting lists to get a test is Ms Caulfield really being totally fair and balanced? Or just adding to the NHS waiting lists in order to appease certain vociferous minorities?
1610 days ago
Those poor nurses. Hospitals with not enough PPE and underpaid doctors on 100 grand a year. The poor NHS and those wicked fucking Tories starving it of cash… Meet Olivia Butterworth.
2490 days ago
My glasses are falling apart so I finally accepted that I need a new pair and walked into the opticians a couple of weeks ago. When did you last have an eye test? Said the Lady. er...um, I really cannot remember. But now that I am forced to consider the issue I think that it must be almost ten years ago. Has your eyesight changed at all? Said the lady. Well now that you mention it....
2667 days ago
I tried to look on the bright side all week. Most folks with an enlarged testicle do not have cancer. After his fondling session, my Doctor had said it was almost certainly a result of a dibetes induced condition. And anyhow the five year survival rate for testicular cancer is now 90%. And my advanced age puts me at low risk anyway. None the less, Friday's appointment at the Bristol Royal Infirmary was something I dreaded. My father and my wife shared that dread and so on Friday the Mrs and Joshua came along too for moral support.
2840 days ago
Whenever I head to Greece I take delight in calling the larger than life bear raider Evil Knievil to tell him what I am eating and how good it is. You can hear the old bear salivating down the line and he says he is jealous. But then he adds that although his father, George Cawkwell, is the greatest living scholar on the subject of Ancient Greece, Cawky jnr will not come here because the wine is just not up to scratch. Arguing with him on this matter is pointless.
3075 days ago
After a long hard day at my desk and labouring in the olive groves I left the Greek Hovel as it was already getting dark and headed through the olive groves, down snake hill to the valley floor and then up past the deserted monastery and into the bright lights of Kambos. I could not wait for another excellent healthy Greek salad from Miranda, whose offerings I had sampled for the first time just eight hours previously.
3351 days ago
I cannot remember exactly when I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I think it was around six or seven years ago. It was not a surprise. I had eaten and drink too much and the great West Ham supporting Tory blogger Iain Dale had described his symptoms and diagnosis a few months earlier. I knew what was coming.
There have been times since when I have managed it with medication and sometimes just by clean living and taking stacks of exercise. There have been times when I just let myself go. Four years ago I was a 19 stone 6 pounds blob and really all over the shop. But relationship breakdowns, work crises, near bankruptcy and a nervous breakdown did wonders for my (physical) health sending me off to walk around the mountains of Greece and Albania. I may have been a bit of a fruitcake but I sure knocked my body into shape.
Of course marriage and owning a restaurant are not good for the figure but I think I sort of have things in some sort pf check but perhaps I was a tad complacent. I know that Iain has also gone through such phases. However, the Mrs forced me to register with a doctor and last week an eye test showed the first – albeit minimal at this stage – signs of an issue in my right eye. I knew what was coming next.
This afternoon I strolled down to the doctors,
3716 days ago
I am feeling rather virtuous today. Just a Greek salad and a coke to eat and I have already done one hour’s manual labour in the fields. I am just off for another stint now. I am pretty sure that my Body Mass Index is back in the “normal” range and as someone with diabetes – thanks to eating and drinking too much – that is good news. I’m heading the right way. But the rest of the world is not.
One in five Americans is obese. And America – like the rest of the West – is getting fatter. This spawns numerous health issues of which type 2 diabetes is just one.
Now I reckon that weight loss is simple: “stop being such a greedy bastard and take some bloody exercise.” It is something that any individual can achieve by himself, or herself. But the zeitgeist is different.
4338 days ago
Britain is getting fatter. The strain of treating a stack of lardbuckets like myself for diabetes (my issue), heart attacks, etc is a very real financial burden. All of that is a given. But calls to ban Frosties ( Labour health spokesman Andy Burnham) and Fried Chicken shops ( general lefty fruitcake and a bit of a lardbucket herself, Dianne Abbot) do not address the problem. Prohibition never works. It fails with drugs, it failed with alcohol in 1920s Chicago and it will fail with Frosties.
4349 days ago
I have always been a fan of Greggs (GRG) the UK’s largest retailer of sausage rolls, puff pastries and all the other sort of comfort food that helped to give me diabetes. The company has always had net cash, benefitted from operational gearing and delivered solid year on year earnings increases. But in 2012 things appeared to start to go slightly awry and the share price has fallen from 550p at the start of the year to 458p. As recently as 7th November I foreasaw a bounce ( at 470p) but I have been reviewing my assumptions about UK consumer behaviour. As such I apologise for that bad share tip, a volte face is on the way.I would like to buy this stock as fundamentally it is a good business serving six million Britons each week. But ….
