Comic Cuts — 4 November 2022

Everything feels like its back to normal following our ten days of isolating. I have stopped coughing, which was the last symptom of the Covid infection, and I'm not feeling nearly as exhausted as I was. Mel, who suffered what they call a bigger "viral load", has also recovered nicely. Thanks to all who have been asking after us — I'm pleased to report we're feeling O.K.

And to prove I'm O.K., I had my diabetic check up, so I can confirm my HbA1c level is normal, my haemoglobin A1c level is normal and my GFR calculated abbreviated MDRD is normal and none of this requires any action. (No, I'm not making this up... I got a print out of the results of my check up.)

I have put on a couple of pounds but, as I explained to Dr Claire, the blood test measures a period of activity of some weeks, and an uptick in sugar levels, and also my weight, is because of the six birthday cakes we had to eat following Mel's birthday. I'm sure that moving the check up to, say, early September would give even better results. And then I could pig out without worrying about what might show up in my blood test. (Yes, six cakes: I had made a banana bread, but thought that wasn't "birthday" enough, so I bought a lemon sponge; Mel's Mum made two cakes, a friend made one and there was one from Mel's workplace. We were eating cake well into October.)

While I was there I also had a flu jab, which is a quadrivalent jab this year, designed to protect against four strains of flu. We watch quite a lot of Australian panel shows, and they had a bad flu season some months ago, its worst in five years, which is thought to be a sign that it could get bad over here in the winter. So make sure you get a flu jab if you're eligible. The last few years have been a shit show as far as health is concerned and Covid is still out there (as we can attest), so don't add the risk of flu to an already piss poor situation. You're not only protecting yourself, you're also protecting your family and friends.

I'll hop off my high horse now, although there isn't much else to report. I'm cleaning up artwork for another Spanish collection of The Spider, and will hopefully be working on the introduction next week.

I've also spent some time sorting through DVDs. I bought two huge cases for carrying CDs, each with enough sleeves to fit 400 CDs (or DVDs in my case). Because everything I do is on an industrial scale, I bought a box of 16 cases many years ago, each one containing 120 pockets, which I promptly filled. I had a few empty sleeves and 3 empty cases.

Fast forward (mumble mumble) years (I can't remember how many) and I had ended up with nine piles of unsorted movies all about three feet high. So in an effort to rationalise my collection, I sorted out four large boxes of films to get rid of, a few of which I sold, but they'll mostly go to charity shops. That left the piles that were pictured in last week's Comic Cuts column. Well, I have been sorting them out alphabetically and filled the two new cases (800 sleeves) with A-J. I'm now rearranging the smaller (120 sleeve) cases and have so far filled two (J-L, M, N-O) and I'm going to spend the next hour or two filling up more. I want to get this all finished by the weekend, because I still need to shift a load of books out of the house. Didn't manage any this week, but we have now dumped some 240 magazines through the paper collection. It's a shame, but needs must...

Illustrations this week are a few random scans of books I've recently picked up.