After a Christmas and New Year break, I'm finally back at work on the ACTION book. I'm way behind where I wanted to be, but I've managed to complete the text with a couple of last minute tweaks and sorting out some of the curious short-hand I'd used for references in the footnotes as I was writing. There are 257 footnotes, so it wasn't the easiest or quickest of jobs. The final bit of research was to find out what reaction there was to Stan Lee visiting the UK to promote Captain Britain, as that title was launched just as newspapers were getting their teeth into comics.
I'm now starting on the layouts. I had an idea of how the book should open and spent Tuesday and Wednesday trying to make it work. I'm still not sure it does, so I may need to rethink the whole opening; I have one idea I need to try out before abandoning the pages and starting afresh.
I'm writing this Thursday morning while things are quiet. We've had a firm (Cadent) fitting new gas pipes in our road, delayed over two years since 2023, when they missed off the last section of houses (including ours) because—we were told at the time—they needed to set up traffic lights and it would take too long to organise that through the Highway Services... so they moved on elsewhere.
Now they're back and they've simply shut the road down. Lots of digging which in the past were done by Irish navvies (Gen X) or Polish navvies (Gen Y) shoveling dirt around. Nowadays it's done by a big drill that breaks up the asphalt and a big truck that sucks up the broken surface and the dirt below. The first time I walked down to the Post Office, I was expecting Belle Vue Road to look like the Somme. But, no... the road was lined with neat hole and was rubble-free.
They have to dig down quite deep to expose the old pipes, which are rusting and becoming increasingly leaky. But, rather than simply replace them, they're pushing new plastic pipes through the old pipes, so that they can be easily connected to each house. I'm expecting to have the house supply turned off at some point in the next hour or two. Hopefully the new pipe will reach the meter in the kitchen; if not, there's a point just outside that they should be able to get it to.
The gas supply will also be turned off on Friday to put in the main pipeline and connect all the pipes that go into houses before they fill in the holes and move on. Gas will be off all day until 7.00 pm.
I've made plans: if the gas is off, I've made myself a big saucepan of stew that I've divided up into meals that I can microwave. I'm making curry for dinner tonight that can also be done in the microwave and I have microwavable options for Friday, just in case.
How this will affect my glycated haemoglobin levels, I don't know. I had a HbA1c test recently so I added to all the usual Christmas/New Year distractions by trying to find out what all this wizardry means. So... glucose in your blood will stick to the red blood cells and since they last for about three months, doctors can draw blood and see how your blood sugar levels average out over that time period. My previous figure had been 56 mmol/mol [millimoles per mole] and it's now down to 52, which is still in the diabetic range. I need to get below 48, which is thought of as "pre-diabetic" and, ideally, below 42, which is what it should be.
We're cursed with food manufacturers who put too much sugar in everything to make it taste better. You should have no more than 30g a day; the curry tonight will have 5.4g, so that's fairly healthy. But I had a large apple earlier which alone has contributed about 20g of sugar. So whatever I have for lunch needs to be as sugar-free as possible. (Watch out if you have more fruit as part of your 5 fruit and veg a day A grape can have 16-23g of sugar; a medium-sized banana 14-15g; mangos, sweet cherries, pineapples, pears and kiwis should also be off the menu if you're trying to lose weight... I'm learning this for the first time as I write!)
(And you might take a mickey out of "kids today" and their eating habits, but what food is low in sugar? Avocado!)
Not to dwell on the subject, but my weight is down by a few pounds since my last check-up and my annual diabetic eye test is now every two years. So things are moving in the right direction.
Talking of which, I should get back to those layouts. They're not going to design themselves. Hopefully I'll be able to show off a few pages of my own "Work in Progress" once I get into them and you'll be able to see what I've been up to for the past couple of months.
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