Finding the chase and cutting to it

thousand?

No, ten people, well actually nine, one person RSVPd after I’d done the shopping, so it counts as ten…

Concentrate.

Sorry. I thought I’d share how to “do it all”: cook the buns, make the burgers from scratch, coleslaw, salad, etc. for a home barbecue.

First, and foremost, do not panic.

Each time you do this, somethings will work really well, some won’t. It’s the nature of life. Personally, I had the added joy of a pump cartridge that was failing, raising my blood sugar and randomly dropping it.

Despite the best laid plans, life happens round the edges.

Choose what battles you’re fighting.

I made the buns, with a bit of an experiment on some brown rolls, part-baked from scratch. Worked really well.

I also chose to make the burgers from scratch. And the salad, and the coleslaw. But I bought in sausages for the hotdogs, dips, and reused sauces we had in the fridge.

Make a plan.

What can be done early? In our case, I made the first bit of the part-baked rolls the day before. 24 rolls to cover the 20 burgers and 8 sausages. That may seem a little broken, but 2 people didn’t eat bread (carb avoidance rather than Celiac’s), so it worked out well.

I also did the coleslaw. I prepped the herbs for the burgers, including washing the fresh herbs, and basically made it so it was an easy build day, not figuring out processes on the fly. I even pulled together the recipe sheets so I had one crib sheet for all the burgers on the Sunday.

What we should have done was planned our stow and serving strategies. I put the coleslaw in a container that would have worked really well for the burgers.

The day in question.

Build day for the cooking. The burgers all need “standing”. So before I had my shower, I made first the beef, then the lamb, burgers.

Whizz up the onion and garlic with the herbs, then layer meat and puree in the food mixer. Mix for 20 seconds or so, then wash up the mixer pieces, construct the burgers. and stow in containers to stand in the fridge.

Go and shower.

Again, I should have then started the salad when I got back from my shower. I didn’t.

We also didn’t sort out umbrellas and blankets – after five warm days, it was a bit of a shock sitting outside with it showering and blowing a brisk northerly wind!

Or a spare table for the kitchen – nine round our smaller than average six seater was a bit of a squeeze <lol>.

So how did it all go?

We seemed to have a great time, happy munching sounds ensued once food was served. We all caught up, learnt some new things, swapped stories about holidays, recipes, etc. A party.

So, organised chaos, but not too bad on the catering front. Those learning points for next year will help.

Our son thought it was the best set of rolls and burgers we’d ever done!

We also forget to offer wine with the meal.

Should be better next time! However cold that day might be 🙂

I’m type 1 diabetic: that means my natural state is hyperglycemia or having blood sugar above 7mmol/l when fasting above 11mmol/l two hours after eating.

For days when nothing else is happening, I generally manage to keep to those limits, which gives me a long term measure of glycated hemoglobin of between 5.2% and 6.5%.

But that doesn’t mean that task is easy. My pump is capable of doing “hybrid closed loop” but, in our house, we call it stupid because I generally outperform it in terms of keeping between 3.9mmol/l and 11mmol/l. Hence my glycated hemoglobin levels.

I have some tricks in doing that, but like a non-diabetic individual, it doesn’t give me perfection, just tolerable levels.

Let’s take today, a lovely sunny bank holiday in the UK. When I went to bed, my blood glucose reading (BGR) was 5.7mmol/l – pretty good. By 3:20am it was 10.1mmol/l – third night on a row I’d been woken by a high alert during the night. I started a higher rate of background insulin (twice my normal basal rate), aiming to bring my down to 4mmo/l and it didn’t work, a coughing fit and alarm from my pump demonstrated that I had climbed to 13.8mmol/l by 4:58am when I gave another bolus (5iu which should reduce my glucose levels by 12.5mmol/l) and lengthened the increased basal rate for another 8 hours.

By 7:20am I was 11.2mmol/l (another alarm had been raised) and I gave a further 5iu. I have just over 9iu floating about my system from the boluses, at this point, plus the extra from my basal increases. But this time, things seem to be working, and I start to drop by 7:35am. By 8:15am. I am 6.0mmol/l and I get out of bed. I need breakfast soon, or the hypo is going to be a doozy. I have 85g of carbohydrate (yogurt and granola, orange juice, banana (useful for the potassium), and a wispa chocolate bar) and still drop to 2.9mmol/l by 8:45am, but I hold my nerve and shut off my basal. By 9:00am, my blood sugar is 4.3mmol/l, I still have 5iu of insulin working (plus the extra basal), and I take it easy. A bath sounds real good, but my beloved is enjoying a bath, so I just take it easy downstairs. With my basal back to normal.

Was it an infection, with my body hunting a hypo to fight the fever? I definitely have a blocked nose and sore throat?

Who knows, let’s see how today plays out! Definitely having that bath later, though…

Why not turn on the automated loop at 3am?

Because it won’t bring me down quickly enough, it will bolus, but only when basal rate increases aren’t working. It might have prevented the hypo at 8:45am but I actually wonder if being hypo is actually what my body is seeking – it is how non-diabetics generate a fever.

Because I treated early enough, the hypo was relatively short. But even so, the raised body temperature is useful for fighting infections, and I do wonder if that’s why my previous efforts hadn’t worked. If you body is seeking a hypo and you’re only giving enough insulin to bring you down safely, what is going to be happening?

I don’t do that very often – the first dose is always conservative, unless I am very high – and you can’t do that if you are travelling. But it means I am not generally above 10mmol/l outside of meals very often at all…

The week 28th April to 4th May has had some brilliant solar collection days in our little part of the world.

Indeed, April itself was the sunniest we’ve ever had, with a whopping 524.5 kWh being generated by our grid – and the thing about solar is that everyone whose cells were orientated in the same direction and elevation could get the same results.

All thanks to a photon hitting a part of the photovoltaic cell induces a current by displacing electrons from one part of the material to another – measurable as a direct current.

Thanks to the density of the material, that can happen for many years: this August our cells will be 11 years old.

Theming this up with our air sourced heat pump means we only used between 160W and 220W a day during this week from the grid. That was basically noise when the sun dipped and the battery wasn’t quite balanced against the fluctuating needs of the house.

When we first got our cells, batteries weren’t really available at anything like reasonable cost or cost to benefit ratio. It’s partly why feed in tarrifs existed along with selling your excess power back into the grid – which only really possible with appropriate meters. It just shows what progress has been made in the past 11 years.

Every little bit helps, of course. I’m writing this on the last forecasted warm day of the next five, and if we’re not warming the house, our energy needs are not super low, but are not too bad. Our energy supplier does a comparison to “similar homes” – five bed (or more) houses, with washing machines, dishwashers, tumble dryers, electric ovens, microwaves, electric hobs, heat pumps, EVs, home battery sources, and solar cells. We say how many people are living in the house too.

Hold on, aren’t you living in a four bedroomed house?

Yes, but if I do that, the numbers are even worse in how much better we’re doing and actually, volume wise, our house is nearly twice as big as most four beds, nearly 80m² bigger than many five beds in the UK. I thought that was a good way to balance the scales.

Anyway, we’re not making a big effort to energy save, but our usage last month from the grid was dramatically lower (205.8 kWh compared to 709 kWh) than the similar homes.

It’s true, we have a nice home, mostly we just do big trips once or twice a year. We do a significant amount of our own cooking, and the move to the microwave and induction hob has made a big difference. We have an insulated house and none of our bulbs are rated above 6W – we’re not sitting in the dark, just making the investment on the cost of the bulb against it’s usage. Tapo/Kasa helps by dimming lights when we can too, and turning thigns off.

Our battery app lets us see when we’re off the grid allowing us to time things like the washing machine and dishwasher to run without the need of the grid. The peak draw on the grid is between 4pm and 7:30pm – during the summer, our battery allows us to use electricity stored up from during the day.

We’re making use of solar gain to ensure we do not need to heat the house at the moment. Our draw of 601kWh for heating and hot water in January has gone down to 187kWh in April and that was all powered by the sun.

We also try to avoid doing big things without the battery in place, a daily view from our smart meter shows we manage that fairly well.

Of course, our energy supplier reckons our energy footprint is 0.4 tonnes of
CO₂ per year, largely thanks to the fact we’re not doing anything with mains gas. That compared to 1.6 tonnes of CO₂ per year in the similar homes. But, our supplier has already suggested we pay only £177 to them a month (£2,124 pa) to cover all our heating needs.

Even so, 503.2 kWh a month of seems like a great deal to be spending for a few easy steps.

Doesn’t that mean you’d be significantly better off at the moment if you didn’t have a tarrif that had a standing charge?

The short answer is yes. For the 1st and 2nd May, we paid £0.09 for our energy usage and £1.39 for the standing charge…

Ouch!

Indeed, but typically when we had a standing charge free tarrif we paid 2.5 times as much per unit of energy, so our £0.09 would become £0.23 instead. Over a year, that’s quite a sum, and need sto be compared to the £170 rounded up on the standing charge. So we’ll think carefully before making that leap.

I was reading my plans for my holiday and felt I should be honest about what actually happened.

Best laid plans, do not always come to fruition and my holiday was certainly that, although, more from my gaze being further than my reach.

For a start, my gym was manic, so I didn’t get to have a relaxing day in the pool, though I did make use of my voucher and have a mud bath. Weird but true that it really does clean spots in a really soothing way.

The food plans did not come to pass either: the flan was baked on Wednesday, with left overs on Thursday lunch, really seriously tasty even on the second visit. The coq au vin Tuesday night was delicious, as was an impromptu stilton and celery soup on Thursday night with a sour dough baguette.

The house was very slowly cleaned and a great deal of walking. I did find a whole load of missing things! I also sorted out the TV in the kitchen – turns out a new coaxial cable was all that was needed.

I researched quite a few recipes and bought a Konro grill for the summer. I am way more excited by this than I feel I should be. I produced a table explaining how my microwave works in terms of power settings. Did I say I found a really interesting recipe for a microwaved honey roast ham?

Having a hectic job, I am sure many would find my holiday less than blissful, but I honestly don’t get much time to just enjoy my home. Isn’t that why most of us work for a living? To have a place to call home?

You can control what you eat and exercise levels is the statement often touted on facebook and linkedIn.

Unless you have an immune condition that means you are manually providing the means to control your sugar and potassium levels – things are a bit more complicated when you do that.

I have resisted a high fibre diet for many years – fibre is a major headache for me, indeed for high fibre foods (anything more than 5% fibre), I subtract the weight of fibre from the carbohydrate value to prevent hypos. It’s work I just don’t need and to be honest, thanks to being very active, I have got away with that approach.

Being over 50, I am aiming for about 0.35 grams per kilogram of my mass a day. That works out at just under 25g of fibre a day but if I lose weight, I need to reduce that.

I eat vegetables, bread, potatoes, use wholegrain rice, wholegrain wheat for my bread.

So, easy, right?

I am using a tracker, Samsung Health’s meal recorder, and it shows just how difficult this work is. Thursday I managed it (259g), but yesterday only managed 20.3g, and today with my planned meals it only looks like I am managing 16g. Physically, it is really hard work.

And that’s while keeping my diet balance – 55g carbohydrates, 25g fat, and 20g of protein. Many high fibre foods, like nuts, are very high in fat.

This is my third day and I feel quite nauseas and stuffed. I also cannot drink enough liquid.

Wholemeal rolls are a bit of a saviour. A ham roll does the fibre and protein hit for 65% of the daily totals.

Balancing my insulin is hard work – the food is absorbed much more slowly, so a bread roll without butter has a 45 minute bolus split with a 25% up front bolus. The rice is over 20 minutes and I have to remember to remove the fibre amount from the carb count.

Hard work doesn’t come into it. It doesn’t feel like control, at all.

The funniest thing of all is looking at our Sunday food. Roast dinner gives me 49g of protein, 13g of fibre and a perfect balance of fat, protein and carbs, 650kCal. In one meal. A good range of vitamins, low in saturated fat. Tastes great too,

Is the humble UK roast dinner the new super food?

I’ve been working my way through an article in the Observer (20th April 2025) about boarding school following an announcement by my friend on her journey through life the past couple of years, and both resonnanted as both my parents went through at bording school.

My mum’s experience was very different to my dad’s. Mum went to the same school as her brothers, and, to some extent, it was an escape from a choatic family life – my gran was very disorganised and a bit of a hoarder. Mum was 11 when she left home, and it was a co-ed school with some day pupils as it was a grammer school. Her fees for boarding were paid by the RAF, as my grandfather was serving abroad when my mum was of school age.

My dad was the only son and went to a private boys school as he had failed the eleven plus. My dad was a late bloomer, not least as he was very asthmatic. Every holiday he was the stranger in the house, and school was alien and cold – I suspect in his younger years at school he was bullied. It wasn’t just the children who bullied you and at boarding school, there is no respite, no break, it’s 24-7. Every year he wrote to be allowed to come home and study in the local school and it wasn’t until 6th form that his request was granted.

One thing this shared experience meant was that neither of my parents had really experienced home life. My mum was determined we didn’t hoard like her mum did, but I think my dad never got over the experiences. There wasn’t the money at the time, but my parents would not consider boarding school for either me or my kid brother. As a grown-up, I am very grateful for that, and the traditions my parents set up for us – they had a relatively clean slate, after all.

One of the ones I remember was a ham at easter time. I did this for my family today – a honey roast ham, roasted carrots, baby corn, pak choi, baby cauliflower, and potatoes. I served it with a onion roux sauce and rosé wine.

It feels like a priviledge to be able to do that without a thought.

It’s been a while since we did a deep clean of our house. I usually make the effort to do this twice a year, once at the start of winter (ready for Christmas) and again at Easter time. Occassionally, I manage to persuade those with time on their hands to join me, making it a family affair.

But as we’ve had a bit more spare cash, this time has been spent on travel, entertainment, and generally relaxing, doing nothing.

Which is great, until you realise just how much time in your day is spent “looking for” what-ever it is you cannot find. Like many, I have too many possessions and are running around like mad with the career and other commitments to take good stock of what we have.

As I haven’t taken much leave since Christmas, so this is my plan for the Easter fortnight. To get sorted.

My plan is to generally relax too, but just get on top of the cleaning, the little jobs that should be done every 4-6 weeks, and tidy up the belongings. I was going to go to the gym for workouts, but frankly house work of this nature burns 200-400 calories an hour – so the spa is my aim rather than the weights – especially if I cycle there.

On my search list are two things I haven’t yet found during this process. But I am hopeful they will turn up as everything else has.

Hope is always the guiding light that keeps us going when the grind of general floor and carpet washing is underway!

Oh, that light shade is looking very dusty…

Actually, that’s not quite right: my man is home, but having started a new job, he has no leave to take for Easter if we want to make some plans later this financial year happen.

But I have an opportunity to catch-up on the housework, sort my office and bedroom out, find some misplaced things, go to the gym, and just stay away from the job.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, I work in a great team. But the reason we have annual leave is to recouperate and bring a revitalised person to the office on the Monday you walk back into the office.

I try to sit down with my husband on New Year’s Eve and work out where we want to go, want to achieve in the house, and be able to say at the end of the year that we grew in this way. Hopefully not in terms of waistlines…

This holiday, is all about not thinking but doing for me. Taking care of my hubby for a bit, as he took on much of the house work while he was unemployed. It will be great to repay the favour.

The idea is to take it easy too. My gym is newly reopened (in terms of its pool area), so clean a room then chill in the health club.

To be honest, it’s to enjoy our house too. We’ve been here 12 years this May, and it looks amazing.

All in preparation for this nivana, I went shopping today. I bought the ham for Easter Sunday (unsmoked but ham is a preserved meat, so has a good long life on it), a chicken for this and next week, and loads of fresh vegetables and salad. My plans are:

Saturday – apple and blackberry crumble.
Sunday – eating out!
Monday – pasta dish – I’m in London during the day.
Tuesday – joint the chicken, this night it will be coq au vin, with home made stock. I’ll make at least two batches.
Wednesday – chicken rissotto with home made stock.
Thursday – butternut squash soup and home made french baguettes.
Friday – Good Friday, hot cross buns and a goat’s cheese flan.
Saturday – Remainder of the flan and some carrot and bean soup for the other meal.
Sunday – ham.

I haven’t got to the second week yet, but left over ham and chicken is likely to feature large. With salads and vegetables. I have some pastry for some pies.

My plans are fairly lose, the whole idea is to relax and enjoy myself. I have some books to read if the house work runs out. My motorbike is ready to go, as is my push bike. The garden furniture has made its way out of the shed.

Let the good times roll!

As I type this at 07:45 British summer time, we have only just stopped using our battery to supply our power and yesterday we used just 0.6kWh of electricity sourced from the grid.  At 26p a unit (I know, I know), that’s a whole £0.16 bought electricity.  Which beats Friday, which was a whole £0.25 spent on purchased electricity: that’s for our hot water, travel, everything!

For us, April is a great month, usually, with generation figures between the high 300s and mid 400s kWh. It’s still cold enough to be efficient (solar panels benefit from running a bit chilled, don’t we all?) but the sun is high enough to hit the panels for longer and the leaves are yet to put in an appearance on the trees. This year, we’ve averaged 22kWh a day.

Of course, being chilly means we’re still heating the house, so we’re not quite off grid, and it’s all subject to the weather – clouds at midday make a huge difference to our generation values.

But we’re making the most of it. Keeping our waste quantities down too, we cook much of our own food. Careful selection of the containers used for raw veg means we are keeping our carbon footprint down in more ways than one.

When solar first became available in the UK, I said it would impact gas providers. I didn’t predict heat pumps or the UK government making them mandatory, but by 2014, we weren’t using gas over the summer.

The response to a decreasing market has been for energy providers in the UK to put up electricity prices and keep gas low. Basic A level economics in action here, cut demand by putting up prices and generate it by keeping the price low.

Which is one of the painful things about our power providers being commercial operations rather than government owned – they need to make a profit, with regulation being used to ensure to the UK meets its climate promises. How big a fine makes it worth the cost of obeying the rules?

For us, we’re just enjoying the lower costs, because we’re still coming out ahead. From Ovo’s Energy Insights calculator and comparing us to “similar homes” (battery, solar panels, electric car, washing machine, tumble dryer, 2 people, electric cookers, etc), we are consuming roughly half the amount electricity the others are on average?

Which seems odd.

I don’t think we’re being overly careful in our usage. My house is warm: I’m having baths a couple of times a week! We wash our clothes, use the dishwasher. I don’t use chemicals to clean the house – that’s all done by a steam cleaner!

Charging up the car battery does take a load of power: the last time we did it was Tuesday, and that took 7kWh compared to our daily usage of 20kWh. We’re both making more effort to use the car less as the weather has become warmer, at 08:15, it’s a balmy 7°C out there. Even so, my commute on Monday into the local office typically uses that very same 7kWh. I should drive more economically…

A goal to aim for?

As a closing thought, we’re not the only ones to enjoy a good April – 1st April 2025 is the first day the UK reached 12,569MW being generated by solar power.

I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it, I’m about…

Why are you singing like that, with a stupid grin on your face?

Well, today is the day…

Mother’s day?

No, concentrate, I get to look at our heating costs and compare a winter with an air sourced heat pump to a gas boiler – like I said, I’ve been looking forward to doing this analysis.

You really ought to get a life, you know, you only get one!

Cheeky, this is what I like doing. Making things better and I like to be a person of action. It’s been killing me the fact we couldn’t make this move earlier…

Would you mind doing the figures, so we can all get on and have some fun?

Sorry. This is the approach I’ve taken. 1st October to 31st March is the duration of a British Winter. Taking our old figures for gas consumption from https://www.n3rgy.com/, I have compared that to the heat pump’s consumption figures.

This makes sense for us because gas was only ever used to heat water and the house – no gas appliances here.

I have cross checked the heat pump’s usage figures with our hourly usage for electricity, and again that seems a reasonable way of sanity checking them.

Each winter is called the year of the January it falls in, so this winter was 2025 (1st October 2024 to 30th March 2025), last winter was 2024 (1st October 2023 to 31st March 2024).

Wait a second, this winter is going to be a day short!

Yes, I will complete the figures tomorrow or later this week, but I didn’t want to delay publishing.

So, what are the numbers? Does a heat pump make sense from an energy conservation point of view?

You’re finally interested – a contented sigh this side…

Here are the numbers, going back to 2022, all in kWh (kiloWatt hours).

Year	Total power used (kWh)	Jan – Mar usage (kWh)	Oct-Dec previous year’s usage (kWh)	Winter totals (kWh)
2022	15,013.391	5,502.894	7,109.310	12,612.204
2023	13,270.888	5,360.847	6,727.941	12,088.788
2024	4,433.757	3,105.757	6,170.366	9,276.123
2025	2,075.000	2,075.000	1,328.000	3,403.000

In 2025, the “Total power used” and other figures are electricity, all the others are gas.

Now, the difference between 2022/23 and 2024 was the use of programmable radiator valves and zone thermostats. The average temperature in a room was 18°C, but the lounge and kitchen often run at 20°C and above for all years.

Temperature-wise, the winters were comparable. Last winter, we didn’t have a winter’s holiday but in the end, we didn’t turn down our heat pumps running while we were away, so again, probably a fair comparison.

Our boiler died on the 23rd March 2024, so last year’s figures are a little light, we used electric radiators on the cold days, but I am not counting them.

So, what is the usage difference between 2024 and 2025? 5,873.123 kWh or 37% of what we used last year.

So, from an energy conservation point of view, it’s a no brainer.

Cost is a harder sum. In March we have generated 476.9 kWh of electricity from our roof, and our solar batteries (the second one finally got installed on Monday), which goes towards heating, lighting, dishwashing, laundary, transport (our Leaf), and cooking.

Which covers our heating costs this month (469 kWh) but it’s close. On average this month, we’ve paid £4.54 a day for all our power, or £140.74.

January was by far the coldest month: our gas usage last year was 1694.77 kWh, this year it was 909 kWh, nearly half the power we used went towards heating and hot water, of course some of that was generated. The costs were, on average, £10.61 a day for the 1327.0 kWh we bought.

Of course, that’s not our total energy bill: for January, it was 1327 kWh or £328.79, that’s on top of what we generated, which was 92.7 kWh (it was a dull and overcast January, our worst ever, typically we get 145-170 kWh off the roof).

Feb we paid for 1044.6 kWh and generated 146.3 kWh. March was 544.2 kWh bought, and generated 450.7 kWh.

We’re relatively heavy users of electricity. But it is powering our car, as well as the house. My commute to work has relied heavily on the car the past few weeks: while it is now sunny, it is still chilly.

So, is it cheaper than using gas? If you’re not generating your own power, possibly not. Over the summer, we should be grid free.

If you are, it’s an absolute no brainer, go heat pump!