let’s face the music and dance. As the song goes.

The past financial year has seen many companies look at their books and make some key investments in AI and future proofing their industries.  America and Europe have seen a similar climb to the UK, leading to wage increases unseen for nearly fifteen years, when the banking crises hit the global economy bank in 2008.

Redundancy rates are rife in many industries, while vacancies are looking for people who can hit the ground running.  Companies are struggling to protect work forces and customers.  Times are still tough and likely to remain so entering the new financial year.

All companies are looking at their costs and seeking ways to ensure they can maintain growth in a smaller and harsher economic environment.

So it seems odd that the UK government is choosing now to lower national insurance rates.  This weird tax in the UK was designed to fund the NHS and the welfare pot.  You had insurance, while working, to pay for health-care, etc.

No-one enjoys paying tax, but many in the UK feel a bit cheated as the government is funding less and life is harder, while not asking the rich to pay.  More importantly, by maintaining income tax thresholds where they were three years ago, is moving the tax burden more on to the young and less comfortable in society.

Economically, I’m right wing: I would like the government to own natural monopolies and maintain infrastructure and provide welfare and opportunities for education.  That means the people most able, need to pay taxes.   What I’d really like is an honest and morally incorputable government making the best decisions of the world country.

Times may be tough, but is not that how it should be?

I’m sitting watching the rain come to a stop on a cold March day in the UK. The sun is making an appearance and, for the time being, I am waiting for the miracle that is fiasp insulin to work its magic.

I’d had a good day yesterday with the insulin I’d programmed in a few months ago for this stage in my menstrual cycle, and the bolus decisions I’d made for the food I’d eaten all came to fruition. I was a little heavy handed for my evening bolux but on spotting that early still scored a respectable 99% time in range.

The night was even better, little variance over the period. I’d cleaned up the house and walked into town. The exertions meant I was a little low, but no biggy, I had emergency rations with me and treated appriotely. The low hid the fact that my cannula had stopped functioning about 10am in the morning. My blood sugar started soaring at 12:27 and by 12:57 it was obvious walking back home was not an option.

I’m lucky, I could afford to take a taxi back home, I stripped off my rain soaked outer clothing and less than 4 minutes later was admistering insulin through a newly inserted cannula. Of course, even an insulin analague takes time to lower blood glucose down from 3 hours worth of missed insulin doses, but 90 minutes later it is all looking good. I wait until we’re back down to 10mmol/l before working out how much I’ve potentially over treated and then compensate with the minimal amount of carbohydrates to ensure I won’t be hypo the rest of the afternoon.

I’m often told that as a “good diabetic”, a compliant diabetic, a diabetic who is “really well controlled” that I am not disabled. I do not incur costs related to my disability and I do not have anything “holding me back”. Technology is going to make my “burden less”.

Do not get me wrong, the fact I could see my blood sugar rise from 3.4 to 16 mmol/l in less than 45 minutes meant I knew what was happening, but given the cannula had failed, nothing was going to stop that happening.
I’m still disabled. I still have to wait for the subcutaneous insulin to do its thang and because this is an “unexpected event” this is not something I can leave to the hybrid loop to sort out. If it sees too much insulin on board, it will shut off the temporary correction I need to bed in the new cannula for a few hours and I cannot have it work out that is not a good thing.

So, please stop telling me it is going to be so much better because of the technology. I have a splitting headache caused by interrupted insulin infusion and a blood sugar 4.3 times higher than a none diabetic and it isn’t because “I’ve done the wrong thing”. My cannula should have been good until 9am tomorrow.

I’m still disabled, life is still not the same as it would be with type 1 diabetes.  I do incur monetary costs because of that disability.

Taking advantage of a discount and the fall out.

My husband has an interesting package with his job and after asking both me and our son if we wanted to take part in a small experiment, our grown son finally said yes.

To give a little background, I first met my husband before it was found that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection. I mention this has he had managed to treat a stomach ulcer successfully by moderating his diet for nearly two years. It’s never come back but since the ulcer, his stomach hasn’t really felt right.

Now his work deal was a (controversial) IgG test looking at what you may be reacting to in your diet.

The results duly came back stating that my beloved might benefit by giving cow’s milk, lemon, and eggs a miss and yeast was also in the “best avoided” list. So, Jon is giving it a go.

Unfortunately most of my recipes collected over the past four years contain these three ingredients!

Let’s start over. He can eat gluten, just not yeast => soda bread. Without milk or lemon juice to “activate” the sodium bicarbonate. Tricker but not impossible.

Isn’t it complicated enough with your thing going on?

Life never promises to be uncomplicated.

As you say, cooking from scratch has taught me a great deal about several foods.

Carbohydrate wise, pizza and french dough does not have extra sugar added to get the yeast going. French dough takes a long time to cure to get a similar rising to “English” bread. Ciabatta has more sugar added than an English loaf.

Pizza dough (used for pizza, garlic bread, and dough balls) takes 45 minutes to rise. Both french bread and pizza dough needs far less insulin to use.

Pizza is a little awkward because it has a great deal of cheese, typically. This means it has a really long bolus requirements. Dough balls don’t.

I’ve had ciabatta a couple of times – it not only requires a great deal of insulin but its fat content means a longer bolus as well. Let’s just say, I avoid it like the plague.

Soda bread, because it uses weak flour, is actually a great bolus pattern. For the weekend, it might be a great option for me.

So are you doing the IgG test?

No. I definitely benefit from having breaks from bread every so often, and I get clues when that’s coming up. I know about the aspartame.

I’m obviously not allergic to anything. I think I’d rather not know…

When I was diagnosed diabetic, one of my parents’ concerns was if I’d get to have children.

As a young child, with a mum and dad who didn’t spend much time at home while they were growing up due to going to boarding schools, they didn’t have much of a social life outside of work. Few of their friends had children.

I did not feel a social pressure to have kids as a kid but it was a vague idea. I was absolutely certainly I didn’t want to be having kids when I was past 30 – at that age, I’d have had type 1 diabetes for 26 years and that didn’t seem a viable option.

I’d spent a great deal of time travelling round the country for work before I got to university. Many of the men I dated seemed to want to get married. Getting married wasn’t really an ambition either (I am coming up to my 25th^th wedding anniversary this year). I’d dated and did feel quite sad when things ended, but it wasn’t love in those cases. My husband is the only man I’ve cared about enough to argue with.

The travelling (and dating) made me want my own home. I didn’t go on holidays or buy flash toys and cars. I bought my house as a singleton in 1998. It was near my family, as mum had promised to help if I had children – both my parents were still working when I had my son.

Of course, life happens around plans. My pregnancy was not the joyous experience we’d waited two years for: an ovarian cyst meant it was painful for the majority of the time. We’d also bought a house 8 weeks before our kid was born in another village. Whihc meant my savings were not going to cover a year – my savings were swallowed up in the move. My granddad also had a stroke.

So my folks went from looking after their grandchild for a day down to nothing. Indeed, we my grandfather died moved 45 miles, but 124 minutes journey away.

I was lucky, my childminder was able to pick up the extra day.

And here we are.

Yawn, so what? You’re a boomer…

No, I’m a gen Xer, I just happened to do the kid thing early. I did get sterilised when my son was 4. This shocked my friend, who ended up having three kids: the doctors agreed to that? Type 1 diabetic, I have had a child, I knew what I was asking for and, long term, it would have been much cheaper and less impact on my body. My husband wasn’t even there for the conversation though he did chat to the obstetrician on the phone.

If you are not diabetic, women do not seem to be allowed to do this, even if their partner feels the same way. This seems bizaare: pregnancy and childbirth are not trivial processes to go through.

Of course, my friends are not the only people not having children. The number of births last year per woman went down to 1.6 children in the UK. I was considered a little young at 27 when I was doing this long task, the majority of new mums are in their late thirties.

At least we’ve done our bit.

My son has no plans of having children, it’s so far off his radar as to be unviewable. House prices had trebled since I bought my house as a junior manager, and wages have not yet doubled. Doing this on his own is not an option.

Childcare costs have more than trebled in the time. Quid pro quo, only young adults with private income can hope to have a chance of having young while they are young.

Because their 60 year old parents are still working and likely to be for the next decade. Unless they are rich and actually, they are the people with the interesting jobs…

We’re so obsessed with older people “earning their keep”, the young are ending up not having jobs.

In the meantime, while interest rates have gone up, house prices haven’t deflated because if you have a job, you cannot afford to move.

The people having child tend to be in bigger, nicer houses, so are using flexi-time to perform their own child-care.

Being disabled, it wasn’t an option for me. I would have been doing two jobs badly. It was hardwork anyway, but I can see why many are delaying the start.

Oh yeah, what should we be doing then?

The minimum wage works here. A parent has enough to live on while the other can earn a bit more than they’d have staying at home.

More importantly, gran and gramps can take that dip in pay to help out. This is what happen for my folks when my brother and I were babes and for a few months, helped me and family.

That reduces the need for as much paid for childcare, which allows the prices to drop. This works.

It works at another level too. Life is difficult with young children if you work and don’t have a car. The costs of housing and childcare mean those having children benefit from having two cars, and best will in the world, a push bike with a kid larger than a baby is very hard work. This is a nightmare for the environment – I have never done as many miles as I did when my son was below 12 and we had full time jobs.

The Bank Rate or the rate of interest charged by the Bank of England is important news, but as a history buff, when I sat down and worked out what it would cost me to buy a house I used a rate of 19%.

Why? I remembered seeing this as an advertised rate for a mortgage in Feburary 1991. The base rate at the time was 13.38%, but building societies often add 6% or so to their rates.

When I finally took out a mortgage in 1997, the base rate was 7% and I got a deal for 5.25% for 2 years, but I still worked out against that larger base rate, just in case the worst happened.

The Bank of England publishes this data at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/Bank-Rate.asp . You can see from here that the peak has been 17% in November 1979. Our current deal is 3.49% on top of the base rate => 20.49%, so actually the 19% wasn’t a bad worst case scenario.

Why are you talking about doom and gloom, surely this is terrifying some people out there?

That is not my intention. It’s just we’ve been very lucky the past few years with interest rates being so low and I am sure for many, it’s a nasty shock.

For me, it was an “OK, let’s take stock” moment rather than “let’s make a budget”.

Our plan has always been to pay off the mortgage as quickly as we can. Equity is only equity if you have no debts.

Which will leave us in a different situation once the deed is done.

I am lucky to have a full state pension and a 20 year BT pension (although my earnings weren’t that great, it is index linked). If I die, half of these will go to my spouse. These are not touched with a ten foot barge pole.

Like everyone in the country, I can have an ISA. While in debt, I didn’t do this but I was spending more than £20K per annum on my mortgage, so that’s a no brainer. I’m tempted to do three cash ones then some stock market ones.

Beating inflation

Saving rates never match borrowing rates. Full stop. So, any investments really need to earn more than inflation to be worthwhile.

Which is the game.

Of course, there is also liquidity. I’m over 50 and have 16 years before I can draw my state pension. I need to be able to feed, clothe, and run my house.

If I can save £20k per annum, I can live pretty comfortably off that, if I need to, even with inflation at 4%.

Of course, if I can maximise my earning potential over the next five years, that’s got to be key too. It would allow me to down shift when I get to 60.

That’s kind of what it’s all about. A big safety net, if we need it.

Thankfully, I got a whole seven and half hours sleep last night and finally got my blood sugar behaving itself.  Looks like the bug is on its way out, I now get to recover.  I’m taking a couple of days to gently get back some stamina before starting work again – the idea is not to go back too early and find I am then not fully recovered.

Hopefully, that’s a reasonable course of action.  If only foresight was as good as hindsight!

Yawn, is this just about being old?

Cheeky.

Now, I’ve been finding out about the freely available smart data available in the UK from a company called n3rgy.

Simply register your meter with its MPAN (Meter Point Administration Number for electricity meters or MPRN for gas which is the Meter Point Reference Number) and its IHD MAC (the in-home display access point number).

Eh?

The MPxN is found on your bill – this is how the power generators and resellers get to bill you.

The IHD is a second look up.  If you have both gas and electricity, you only need the electricity one to get access through n3rgy.

It’s a lot of scribbling down long reference numbers but once registered you can get your browser to remember these for you.

Then the fun begins.

OK, I’m intrigued: how so?

You can download your meter data.  For gas, this forms two sheets, one with the tariff (largely blank for Ovo users), and the other with your consumption in cubic meters…

Hold on, m³?  Aren’t we billed in kWh?

Oh yes.  Naturual gas is not measured in kWh but in the volume of gas delivered.  This then has a calorific (power) value multiplied to it and a conversion to kWh and a correction (wobble) factor.  The calorific value varies day to day and is available from https://www.nationalgridgas.com/data-and-operations/calorific-value-cv but an average of 40 works quite well.  (This website is going to take some figuring out to get the data for us out, but there is a great deal of information out there.)

The electricity is all a bit easier seeing as a kWh is just what the meter is measuring and there’s none of these extra steps.

The really interesting thing is you can see what is really happening.  During the winter, unsurprisingly, the V2G is not coming to the fore overnight.  The windy nights we’ve had recently mean there is plenty of wind power – upto 60% – and a small amount of solar, meaning only 1.3% of our electricity in the East of England is coming from buring gas as I type this.

Which is really hopeful in allowing the UK to reduce its carbon footprint for energy generation, making the move to electric vehicles much better all round too.

If we could recharge me as easily, life would be pretty good.

I love reading, but just fiction wanes after a few days. So, I’ve been catching up on some type 1 diabetes literature.

The American government is particularly keen on publishing papers, and Type 1 Diabetes Through the Life Span: A Position Statement of the American Diabetes Association caught my eye.

One of the difficulties we have in replacing our insulin requirements with externally provided insulin is that’s only half the story.  Insulin production in humans is couple with C-peptide release, which shuts off glucagon production in the alpha cells of the Islets of Langerhans.

However, quite a few type 1s retain this ability, for as long as 40 years after diagnosis.  Only it’s not a constant, guaranteed rate.  If we imagine that my body, like yours, is still producing beta cells but, unlike you, then systematically destroying them – this makes sense.

But leaves us with an impossible conundrum – how much insulin do we need day to day?  “Madness is doing the same thing every day and expecting different results” is attributed to Albert Einstein.  With type 1, doing the same thing every day can lead to wildly different outcomes.

Hell, no wonder you sit there frowning at your meter!

Rude, that’s just rude  But yes, it is not always trivial.

Many see hybrid pumps as being the answer – I have to say the past few days, it has actually helped.  But that’s because I haven’t been eating and things have been crazy with my infection.   Who knew that’s what it would take to get it doing reasonable things?

Not eating is not a long term viable option though (my results when travelling into London have been helped a great deal by taking this approach, so short term: it’s fine).

One of the other things that’s been interesting with the articule has been the approach to care.  When I moved away from Ipswich, I found most GPs liked to “manage my diabetes” which was a different approach to the one I’d had in Ipswich, where the focus was training to allow us to make adjustments ourselves day to day and check it’s working every 12 to 6 months.

In my various type 1 groups, those of us who do better seem to be the self-managers. Long term. Surely if the numbers support this, that’s what every clinic and GP should be looking to do?

I did a maths degree and computer science because I love the synergy of what can be done with number processing.

Computers can chew through series without pausing to take a breath: what’s not to like?

While I’m physically laid up, and 45 minutes playing with these numbers, I am shattered – I am supposed to be going back to work on Wednesday…

Focus! Why are we here today?

Good point. I’ve pulled out our smart meter data, and it makes interesting reading:

I’ve enclosed the graph of the electricity and gas consumption against our electricity production.

Now, this data is looking at the full 90 days available to me, though I might start just pulling off calendar months…

We can see here that while we are consuming electricity, we are also producing (and donating) electricity. Though at vastly different rates.

In our case, that production is from our solar cells and are car donating electricity into the grid.

The only way we can tell which is which is by comparing our solar and V2G logs.

We are not in Kansas any longer, Dorothy. Imagine how complex this gets once you combine in microgeneration from combined heat and power units or from wind turbines…

That’s not to say what the UK is doing is not very sane in terms of getting consumers to group together with feed in tarrif payments and buy-in subsidies. Since these have disappeared, of course, and prices have climbed, many more people are looking at batteries and other power storage mechanisms such as heating hot water (we’re doing this with a Solar iBoost).

Yawn…

Actually, Tonto, this might be one of the more interesting of the things I talk about here.

If we want to keep our energy targets and reduce global warming, this kind of thing becomes very interesting. Simple choices, such as cooking by microwave (last week, I used dramatically less electricity by cooking from scratch in the microwave). We all have a part to play and it doesn’t have to be by expecting other people to tell us what decisions we need to make.

This data is available – what can you do with yours?

I’m unwell.  I run a low body temperature, but when my body was doing everything it could to generate a fever on Tuesday, I took the hint, so while the body is weak, the mind is racing.

Type 1 diabetes means that all the mechanisms my body is relying on to get a fever are being over-riden by my desire to not die early, develop a blood clot (resulting in stroke, blindness, septicemia, or a heart attack), or diabetic ketoacidosis – which is a ticket to a hospital ward and a reasonable question of “what went wrong?”.

So it takes much longer to develop a fever and kick an infection to the line.

But type 1 is “just type 1 diabetes”, everyone knows that’s what happens when we’re sick 😉

What are you whinging about now?

Just that, we’re not that usual.  Rare disease day is coming and I was a little curious about what makes something a rare disease.  Aren’t you?

I guess, but your thing definitely doesn’t count!

That was my thought.  But this is a question of scale.  I’m one of around 8·4million in the world with type 1 with type 1 diabetes in 2021 (best confirmed numbers) against a world population of 7.888 billion (a 1000 million).  That means an prevalance of 0.106% of the world’s population or 10 of us per 10,000.

So, we’re not that far off meeting the World Health Organisation’s definition – an incidence of 6.5 (or less) per 10,000 or 0.065% of the population.

I’m a bit of a numbers geek, and as I said, it is all about scale.

Let’s look at Europe as per The US Government’s National Library of Medicine, Prevalence and incidence of Type 1 diabetes in the world, 2020, Table 2.
Only one place in the world where type 1 has a higher prevalance of 6.5 people per 10,000 in the world and that’s in Asia.

In my humbe Europe, we only count for 2.12 people in 10,000.

The numbers fall down when we look at the UK.  We have around 7.5 people per 10,000.  Common as muck 😀  Though in Scotland, that rises to 22!

Which is a bit surprising.  And also leads us to the definition of what type 1 is.  An autoimmune condition causing destruction of the beta cells.  Not someone who needs insulin to treat their diabetes.

This might seem petty but it is really important because insulin treatment can be a progression for type 2 diabetes though a sustaintially different and complex condition in its own right.

Those taking insulin (or prescribing it) are not necessarily the best people to ask.

Which leads us naturally to the fact there are three kinds of lie: lies, damned lies, and statistics – Mark Twain.

But no, unusual but not rare for the 29th January.

In 1989, the then Conservative government brought in a poll tax. Rather badly as it happened as couples with a stay at home parent often had a much larger council tax bill each year – indiscriminantly, so the less well paid workers were hit hardest. In May 1991, the tax was abolished and a property valuation tax was introduced instead.

Personally, I like the idea of a tax you actually get to choose, but no further valuations of property have happened since 1991 – so we have bizaare cases where extended houses, which have a bigger impact in terms of waste generation and consumption of services may be paying very little to contribute.

Property valuation is also subject to interpretation.

I’d quite like to see a footprint tax, one that encourages the use of smaller properties by responsible owners. It is much easier to build a highly efficient property in terms of water and energy use if the property is smaller.

So, the first measure should be habitable space in the property. I think our council tax is about right and our house is 244m², so shall we shall £12 per square metre?

The next measure is the ground space – how big is the plot and how much is laid to garden? Our plot is about 793m² and about a third is lain to garden. Let’s say the house is 122m², so that’s an available plot of 671m² and about a third is lain to garden – that’s 115m² – we need more soak aways and carbon sinking ground, so that’s charged at £1.50 per metre squared. The remaining 556m² should be at a higher rate, so £3 per unit.

We should then do an environmental disturbance discount – we pay a grade lower for our house because we live on the busy ring road. Say, 15%. Railways, roads, etc should allow be taken into consideration because this is vital infrastructure to keep the country moving.

So:

• House = 244*£12= £2,928.
• Garden= 115*£1.50=£172.50.
• Non-habitable, driveways, etc = 556*£3 = £1,668.

Total = £4,768.50.

Apply the discount for the ring road, and we get £4,053.23. This is about a £1,000 per annum more than we’re paying at the moment but this took me 10 minutes to calcuate and seems relatively fair, it seems representative of our impact on the world. If we built an extension, it is easy to calculate the footprint and add that to our council tax bill. In fact, you could automate that with planning applications.

The average house in the UK is 80m² in urban areas and 123m² in rural areas. The average garden is about 140m² in London and 190m² in rural areas, though modern builds it is much closer to 120m², with two thirds laid down to garden.

The average family in a city would therefore pay £1,240 and in the country £1,856. We live in Ipswich, and an average home is deemed a Band D – £2,154.69. So this works out at just under £300 pa less, though I think in Ipswich there could be a great deal of difference between some small band Ds and some larger, extended ones.

An average house in a city is less likely to have a garden, so the flat owners would have a smaller bill. They are less likely to have off road parking, etc.

Isn’t it unfair if you build an extension which doesn’t go into a garden, like a loft conversion?

I’m going to throw that back to you: you convert the loft into habitable space, what are you doing to keep it habitable? You have things in there, heating, lighting, windows, flooring, etc. Things all have costs in terms of environmental impact and the extra living space will be used by the next people who live in the house. Which is likely to drive up environmental costs and potentially service costs.

One that chews up garden is going to need foundations, is removing soak-aways – that cost is bigger, but you are losing space outside. Let’s say you build an attached garage with a room above it – the garage could be charged at £3 per metre squared and the room for £12 per metre squared – you would only be billed the extra for the extra space.

One of the beauties about this is the council tax bill is equivalent across the country – a small house in London (and many properties in London are small as there is a finite space and people who want to live there) would pay less than a big house in the country even though the cost of the properties is likely to be similar. London council would still have a fortune coming in, because there are millions of households. Council’s across the country would have an easy way to calculate their budgets because they know how much habitable space is in there boundaries. Much more importantly, when people extend small houses, removing them from the housing stock, the council can easily get the money from those changes.

We’re in the barmy situation where living in Ipswich is a larger house is significantly cheaper than living in the country where we’re paying a “rural tax” for some services. Our council tax bill for a house that is 80m² bigger is £750 on average less a year!

You could even link up the EPC to help: an EPC is generated each time a house is sold if not every 10 years. They do measure the living space, as this is a key factor in determining how energy efficient a house is.

What about discounts for sole living and empty houses?

Because of the lack of housing stock, the “empty house” rebate is no more.

But what about sole living? If my husband died and my son moved out, I am living in 244m² house on my own.

I do think it’s different if you have dependent children and perhaps there should be a discount in that case, especially in the case of death. But we have families living in small accommodation when rich people get to live in large houses: shouldn’t there be a redistribution of wealth if we’re not getting family houses being freed up?

Council tax is the only tax you choose the rate at which you pay. Shouldn’t what you pay be determined by what you have chosen to live in?