The road next to my house. Closed as it was under several feet of water. I resisted the urge to go and look, after all, it would have just been horrible muddy sewerage laden water swilling across the road and into peoples houses. I think that those poor house owners have more than enough to contend with, they didn't need a sightseer.


This is Gordon Brown and Parmjit (Our MP) when they visited our bottled water distribution centre. Just after I took this with with my phone (Nokia N95, cracking good camera phone), he stopped to talk with me. I was then interviewed by the ITN news team who seemed primarily interested in whether I blamed the Government. Blamed the Government? For what? Britains worst rain storm and flood in 300 years? Not even with my imagination could I find a way to lay that at their door. I was impressed greatly by Hannah though, she took herself up to the water distribution place yesterday and spent all day from 8am until 6pm giving out water. That is such a cool thing for a teenager (well anyone actually) to do. No seeking recognition, just doing it because it needed to be done. We didn't suggest it, prompt her or even talk about it, she just said 'I want to help' and she did.


This is the bowser near my house being filled for only the second time. A queue was already forming as you can see. Water is so in demand that the bowser was empty again within an hour. Part of the problem is human nature. I can see how parents are trying to turn this disaster into a bit of an adventure for the kids, and I see small troops of youngsters coming to fill bottles of water to take back home. (This is the only bowser for the housing estate, several hundred houses, school, so lots of families).


And the kids have all been laughing and joking, and that is good, most of the parents realise the gravity of the situation and don't laugh too much. (There are jokes circulating but they are are in poor taste, and when you realise that this disaster has greatly affected tens of thousands of people, jokes at peoples expense are NOT going to raise spirits). But lets be honest, the bowser taps are twice the size of the neck of the bottle, kids are not usually the most careful of people, and so the end result is a good deal of spillage. As the photo shows, the wet patch from under the taps.
I have no idea what volume of water is lost, but it is not just a dribble, and I know it does not compare to some of the stories of water abuse that I have heard.

Latest news from Severn Trent is that some 'brown' water may be back in the system on Tuesday, which may mean that it will get to us by Late Wednesday or early Thursday. It takes that long because we are just about 20 odd miles from Mythe and at the end of the route from the Mythe treatment works. A mile or so down the road and people still have running water. Their popularity has increased, as has their generosity (thanks nearby neighbours). The pipes are all empty and will take a day or so to fill up and get to us. And then we will still have no drinking water, as the pipes are so polluted from sewerage. It may be undrinkable for upto four weeks apparently.

Well, we are off to Solihull to my mothers today for a jolly good shower, and a shave (For ME! Not Yvonne!!), and we will bring some good old Brummie water back with us, it will make a change from all the bottled mineral water. I know that mineral water has a higher level of salts in them to what we normally drink, hence it being unsuitable for babies, and I know that psychology comes to bear, but since the floods and having to drink bottled water, I seem so much thirstier than usual. Is this my mind playing tricks, or my diabetes and body chemistry upset by the salts in the mineral water? I don't know.

I will try and see if I can take a still image from the news footage of me talking to Gordon and post it on here. Well, why not?

I have googled my house and taken this image. I have used photoshop to paint in the area locally that were flooded. This is not showing last fridays flash floods that caused so much damage in the area, flooding the roads and businesses and houses. This is showing the very local extent of the river severn floods of this week. Most seriously was the flooding of the sewerage works. That alone caused evacuations. The image is actually quite out of date as a stonking great new road has been built from the green bit to the right of the sewerage works going north. And yes, it flooded and was closed until Thursday. Only opened in May.

AN INTERESTING OBSERVATION
This week my car insurance is up for renewal. Last week I did a lot of online quotes. That was before the floods.

This week I did them again as I had not managed to finalise what I wanted before the floods came and the internet was lost for a few days. Lummy, most of the quotes have gone up, some by £50. Blooming heck, glad I renewed my house insurance last week.
One small consolation in all this, as my house was not flooded in the UKs worst flood for over 300 years, I guess I should be able to get reasonable cost insurance, in comparison to the poor people who have been flooded. Of course everyone will have to pay more, goes with out saying, and with around £25M in road damages alone, our council tax will shoot up next time too.

Well, there I was queuing up at Tesco's car park to get my daily allowance of free water, when GB, Gordon, The PM his very self, turned up and chatted and spoke to us, and lummy, there I was on the evening ITN news talking to him.

Best bit was, we got double water rations today.

Come again Gordon!

We are, I suspect, about to face a trying time. Fortunately, even though we are very close to the river Severn, we are away from streams and we haven't actually been flooded, but we are suffering the inconvenience that many in Gloucester are. No Power for most of today, but eventually we did get it back, although at a lower voltage than usual. No water, and so we have to go and collect water from the bowser, and try and get bottled water when we can. We have no telephone or internet, some neighbours also have no TV if they are on cable, luckily we have sky, so when there is power, we are able to watch TV.

Unfortunately we were due to do our big food shop on Saturday, so we are low on food stuffs, and the supermarkets, understandably, are not open except for some basic emergency provisions. I might have to drive across country and find a normal supermarket and do a big shop. Disinfectant and bleach is essential, and there will be none available locally.

But, having seen the pictures on TV, and having seen the awful conditions just a few hundred yards from my house, we know that we are lucky and so are thoughts are with others, we can cope, we are dry and relatively warm,.

Let's just hope that the river spares the substation and 500000 people, including us, don't lose power big time. We are already trying to come to terms with the likelihood of no water for two weeks or more. No electric for a week or so would make life a tad trying.

I am not posting any pictures. I am not going to go out and photograph other peoples misery and misfortune. Sorry. For that you will have to look at BBC World or Sky News. No picture can do justice to how bad it is for some of my poor unlucky neighbours in Gloucester.

Chin up.

It appears that I have Metabolic Syndrome. it says if you have 2 out of the 5 then you have it, lummy I have 4 out of the 5!
Here is an excerpt:

Drinking milk cuts diabetes risk

Milk consumption has fallen in recent years Drinking a pint of milk a day may protect men against diabetes and heart disease, say UK researchers. Eating dairy products reduces the risk of metabolic syndrome - a cluster of symptoms which increase likelihood of the conditions - the Welsh team found. In the 20-year study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, metabolic syndrome increased the risk of death by 50%. Experts recommended people only eat two or three portions of dairy a day. Dairy products are an important part of a healthy, balanced diet and we would recommend people aim to eat two to three servings of low fat dairy a day Jemma Edwards, Diabetes UK The University of Cardiff study of 2,375 men aged between 45 and 59 classified metabolic syndrome as having two or more out of high blood glucose, insulin, blood fats, body fat, and blood pressure. Here is the whole article on the BBC website And here is an article on the BBC about Metabolic Syndrome itself. I think I might as well give up now. Oh, I wish i knew which of the blood pressure tablets gives me the raging irrits and makes me need to keep scratchin.

Rummaging around the internet, as you do, and I came across this trick, I know it is an old one, and I knew how, but not everyone does. It is called 'How to win a bet at parties' - go on, have a look

Getting on well with the new book, working title is Kings Ransom. A bit of an extract below, a little scene setting perhaps, a history lesson perhaps, or pure fiction? You decide...

“The threats are real, that is why we are here.”

“I thought at first that you were, well, regular spies, you know. I never realised exactly who we were protecting.”

“No, I realise that. By our nature we have to be reclusive.”

“Things I expected you, sorry, us, to be involved in, we aren’t. I am struggling sometimes to understand the defining line. I mean, with that business with Ivan, Edward, Henry, you, all acted exactly like spies would. ”

“If you just sit back and look who is at risk, rather than what, then you will be able to determine if it is something that warrants our attention, and if so, how urgent that attention need be. Like any one, when people we love are put at risk, or in George’s case harmed, we use all our resources to strike back. On that occasion it pleased Her Majesty’s Government to allow us, rather than the usual services, to deal with the matter. If it had gone awry, then there was deniability and we would have just been portrayed as people seeking private revenge.”

“I understand that, but then, I am trying to catch up here, because I am new to all this, looking at what we are supposed to be doing, you know, for our day job, I have been reading the files. It adds to my confusion. Didn’t we fail in Paris?”

“Oh no, any thing but, we succeeded greatly in Paris, and the world also benefited from an outcry against drunk drivers. Three deaths in that underpass saved countless more by keeping many drunk drivers off the road.”

“But Henri Paul wasn’t drunk.”

“No, but crucially the autopsy showed that he was. And the rider of the motorcycle will never be found, despite The Grocer’s money. The white Fiat is also now a dead end following the Andanson’s suicide.”

“But it wasn’t suicide.”

“The coroner thinks that it was. Everything found was consistent with filling the car with petrol and setting light to it by himself.”

“Except the amount of carbon monoxide in his blood exceeded what he could have taken in before death from the conflagration.”

The Colonel dipped his head and closed his eyes and made no comment.

“Teacher will keep quiet?”

“Everyone keeps quiet. There are so few of us actually in the know. The Chamber only take on people that we can trust, and have only been let down once in the last three hundred and thirty seven years. We are not the kind of people to write memoirs or sell stories to newspapers.”

“I can’t believe the reason why we did it though, I mean, converting to Muslim? It goes against everything I believed I knew.”

“You have to understand her position and how the Establishment, as she saw it, was railing against her. She was seeking a safe port in a storm and the opportunity to fight back against her detractors in a way that they could not defend. It would have been catastrophic for the Monarchy and succession.”

“Let me read the files again, I’m still not sure. One other thing though, there seems so few of us.”

“We do not need a large organisation, we have other resources we can call on, as you saw last year in Gibraltar. The other issue is that the right calibre people are actually becoming quite tough to find. It is a vocation almost, and we need people who are exceedingly highly trustworthy.”

“You seemed to take me on very quickly; you couldn’t have possibly vetted me that quickly.”

“As soon as the first flag was raised on you, even before you did your bit on the Post Office floor, we started a file on you and started profiling you, and believe me, our profilers are the best in the world.”

“What do you mean, before the Post Office? I hadn’t even met Edward until then.”

“No, but you had encountered him several times. It was actually quite by chance that we spotted you taking an interest in Edward, but then a small chance is sometimes all it takes.”

“I don’t think I can quite believe you.”

“I am absolutely straight let me tell you.”

“I am sure that you are, but still, checking me out before I had even managed to garner Edward’s interest, probably before I even realised I was interested in Edward is a bit much. Let me see my file, I want to know what attracted you to me, and when, and then what you did.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But I have seen your file, Edward’s file, even Lord Chalford’s, why not mine?”

“Golden rule. We can all see every file, except for our own. Keeps us honest if we don’t know what is in our own file. Absolute rule laid down by George.”

“George, which George? I haven’t seen a file on anyone called George, except for the short one on Anne’s George of course.”

“King George II, son of King George I, father of George III.”

“Right, of course. Silly me, George II, I should have realised.”

“We are who we are. There is only us, we can not, must not, dare not fail.”

“I don’t accept failure, it is not in my makeup.”

“I know, why do you think you are here? You are here on your own merit, not because of whom your boyfriend was or who you are married to. Having caught my attention and interest, I would probably have approached you at some point anyway, even if you and Edward had amounted to nothing. Your profiling was better than Rosemary’s had been, and she had looked after us for many years, so long in fact, that I actually inherited her from my predecessor who also inherited her. She was a bit of a star, but perhaps a little bit ‘old school’. I could read her and knew her better than she knew herself. I could tell that she had begun to wane even before she knew her time was coming to an end. I was already looking for a replacement when you came on my radar. Your position, as my PA, is exceedingly important and I could not risk a long term vacancy necessitated by Rosemary leaving before I had identified a suitable replacement. Timing is everything.”

“Looking back now, I could almost think that you ordered that snow storm to see if I would still deliver my report to the council on time, or if I would just cry ‘Force Majeure’ and crawl back under my duvet.”

“Not even I would engineer weather of that magnitude on cue in order to test a potential recruit, although under the right circumstances, and with the help of the Royal Air Force, we can and do certain things at certain times. We have caused rain, but it can be inexact and that can lead to a deluge when all we wanted was an inconvenient rain storm. We explore that route only with the greatest of caution.”

“It was raining unexpectedly in Paris if I recall.”

“Was it? I don’t remember.”

“I understand. But don’t take me for a fool. If you don’t want to talk about something, then say so, don’t feign amnesia. I may not have been here long, but I do know how good your memory is, especially on major operations like that one. That operation was world changing. I do not believe that you would have forgotten a major detail such as the weather, especially if it was a key part of the operation. Treat me like a fool and I will leave. I shall not stay where I am not respected.”

“I stand by what I have said. Some things are better left unspoken, and I, Geraldine, shall not be interrogated.”

“Perhaps you should be. Who are you accountable to?”

‘You know that. I am absolutely accountable to only one person. There can only ever be one person.”

“What the public needs to know,” Dr. Guallar says, “is that most people in the have adequate selenium in their diet. Moreover, taking selenium supplements on top of an adequate dietary intake may cause diabetes.”

Selenium rich foods include shrimp, crab meat, salmon, halibut, brown rice, light chicken meat, and pork. Brazil nuts from selenium rich soil are one of the foods that contain the highest level of selenium.

A scientist affiliated with foodconsumer.org suggests that just one dose of selenium supplements in the study can not rule out other positive effects associated with other usage levels. He says selenium is an important micronutrient. But like many others, too much of a good thing can be bad. He suggests consumers should follow a nutritionally balanced diet to prevent chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

So concludes a report that shows a group of people taking selenium supplements had an increased take up of Type II Diabetes, compared to those in the control group that tool placebos.

Read the article HERE .

Good news for Diabetic Rats: This from the Times of India

Pumpkin may treat diabetics 10 Jul 2007, 1148 hrs IST,PTI BEIJING: The common vegetable Pumpkin will now be more tastier than ever as Chinese scientists have claimed that it can "drastically" reduce the need for daily insulin injections for millions of diabetic patients worldwide. Scientists have discovered a compound in pumpkin that has been known to promote the regeneration of damaged insulin-producing beta cells in diabetic rats, thereby improving the level of insulin in their blood. Laboratory data showed that diabetic rats that had been fed pumpkin extract had only five per cent less plasma insulin and eight per cent fewer insulin-positive cells than normal healthy rats, according to a research paper published this week in the US-based Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. The researchers fed 12 diabetic rats and 12 normal rats either a normal diet or a diet supplemented with pumpkin extract for 30 days. On average, the rats receiving the pumpkin supplements experienced a 36 per cent increase in plasma insulin compared to the untreated rats, Professor Xia Tao, the paper's lead author and a teacher at Shanghai's East China Normal University said. However, Xia, a professor at the College of Life Science, emphasised that further research was needed to evaluate the effects in human beings. "But I tend to believe pumpkin extract could also promote regeneration of pancreatic beta cells in humans," he was quoted as saying by China Daily .

Now this is what I am talking about. The full article on the BBC is here. Science fiction is becoming science fact. Below is an extract:

Jeremy Smith, who is studying for his A Levels, is one of the volunteers.

The 17-year-old has had several overnight stays at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge.

Computerised dose

Each time the diabetes care team fit him with a continuous glucose sensor which sits just under the skin.

The artificial pancreas could dramatically improve quality of life, and life expectancy Karen Addington Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation

This beams his blood sugar readings to a monitor.

The idea then is for a computer programme to work out the right dose of insulin, which is delivered via an insulin pump.

The artificial pancreas would automate diabetes care and free people from the repeated need for finger prick blood tests and insulin injections.

But the system has not gone live yet. Instead Jeremy's glucose levels are checked every 15 minutes throughout the night and his insulin dose is altered manually.

It will be another six months before the first automated, hands-free trial is conducted.

Mathematical problem

The main stumbling block in the development of an artificial pancreas has been mathematical: no-one has perfected a computer programme sophisticated enough to work out the right dose of insulin at any moment of the day.

The human body has a very clever way of working out exactly how much insulin the body needs, and we are only just beginning to understand that Dr Roman Hovorka University of Cambridge

That is why the scientist leading the trial is not a medical doctor, but a mathematician.

Today is July 5th 2007 and it is my birthday. Whoopee I am 52.

So, Affluenza is it? I quote:

Diabetes will this year kill as many people around the world as Aids, prompting scientists to call the fast-growing disease the greatest epidemic of current times.
Around 3.8m people are expected to die from diabetes this year. While the type 2 version of the disease has been nicknamed "affluenza" and is mostly associated with obese people in the US and other rich countries, 80pc of sufferers are on low and middle incomes, according to the International Diabetes Federation

The full text article from the Telegraph is here.

So. It's to be a stone age diet is it? See this article or this one. I guess that means a diet of fish and lean meat, nuts, vegetables and fruit, pretty much the scavenger food of a few thousands years ago. Todays scavenger of course lives of fries and burgers and chicken bones from the bins and footpaths outside fast food restaurants. Fast food restaurant? Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

I kind of thought that stone age man pretty much lived on a diet of raw bison in terms of protein, is bison meat lean? I guess also that the seas hadn't been over fished or polluted, and so there was probably a lot more fish available than there is today. But then, did people live long enough to develop type ii diabetes in the days of stone age man?

Apple any one? Yes, I guess, unless you live in the Garden of Eden.