My ongoing type 2 diabetes recovery

I blogged last year about how I had a diabetes relapse and was making a recovery. I'm really pleased that at my follow up check up today, my recovery from type 2 diabetes was well established. 

My HbA1c - the measure of blood glucose over time that shows if you have diabetes - was down to 38. (It needs to be below 42.) 

At the end of April 2025, my HbA1c was 54, so I have dropped it by 16 points in 13 months. The nice practice nurse, Fiona, printed out my graph for me. Check it out:

This graph doesn't have the very first HbA1c result that got me sent to hospital way back in January 2015. But it wouldn't fit on this graph anyway because my score then was 91. (Strangely that first result doesn't seem to be on the system at all, which might explain why I keep having to tell my diagnosis story every time I see a different healthcare professional.)

Anyway, this is the lowest my HbA1c has been since 2020. I'm not saying the pandemic is to blame, but the shift to home working didn't help my waistline much. Losing 11 kg since April last year is what helped me drop my diabetes score. (I recommend canvassing - my foot mileage in election week was quite high!) 

I feel I can now safely say I have reversed my diabetes twice. The challenge will be keeping it this way. That's why I like to refer to it as Recovery. Every day I have to make the conscious decision to make choices that are better for me - what to eat and when to exercise. 

Some days are easier days to make that positive choice to stay diabetes-free. But on the hard days I now have a graph to remind me what's possible.

Review of my record-breaking football season

On Wednesday I went to my 60th and final game of the 2021-22 football season. This was a record number of games for me and through judicious planning I ended on a nice round number!

The result of the game on Wednesday was disappointing, as Wales succumbed to a late, late goal and lost to the Netherlands. At the end of the game, Gareth Bale's body language said it all.

Still, at least the rain held off. I got there early with my friend Paul and we were able to thoroughly dissect the Barry Town AGM that we attended the previous week, and discuss how we felt the team would fare in the coming season in the Cymru South. 

Anyway, on to my season stats, courtesy of the Futbology app.

In addition to it being the highest number of matches I'd ever been to in a season, it was also the highest number of new grounds (22) that I'd visited in a single season. Futbology has a map feature that displayed all 22 grounds for me.

The majority of new grounds were in South Wales, naturally. Hillsborough in Sheffield was an outlier. The two grounds in North Wales were The Rock in Cefn and Cae y Castell in Flint. Over there right in the middle of Cardigan Bay is Aberystwyth Town.

The grounds I visited in South Wales fir the first time tended to follow the A470 corridor up to Merthyr Tydfil.

Heading from the bottom of the map, there's Bridgend Street's ground in East Cardiff, then that line of five grounds in sort of a row are Canton Liberals's brand new pitch in the Cardiff International Sports Village, Lydstep Park in Gabalfa where Cardiff Draconians play, Cardiff Corinthians's ground in Radyr, Taffs Well FC and then the University of South Wales sports park in Treforest that Pontypridd Town call home. Also on the map are Pontyclun, Clydach Vale, Treharris, Penrhiwceiber, Aberdare and Penydarren Park in Merthyr which hosted the Ardal Southern Cup final at the end of May.

The last two seasons really have been famine followed by feast. After the pandemic curtailed the season in Spring 2020, there was an entire year (actually 16 months) where I didn't go to football matches. This is reflected in my graph of games attended with a grand total of zero games rocketing up to 60. 

If the 60 games this season had been spread over the last two seasons I would be round about average compared to previous seasons. At the start of the season I had secretly hoped to make it to 40 games. I overshot that target by a considerable distance, despite the lockdown in Wales suspending football here for about a month over Christmas. I more than made up for that with my 'decamonth' in April - although that wasn't the month with the most games; I started the season strongly with 11 games in August.

And that just about wraps that up. There are already details of friendly fixtures coming through for a few weeks' time. The new football league season starts on 30th July. Football will be back soon enough!

Senedd 2021 post-election review

Well the election took place last Thursday. Most of the results came in on Friday and the final couple of regional lists were counted on Saturday. We had one more leaflet arrive after I published my review last week. It was from Labour and took them into the outright lead in terms of literature. 

The updated graph looks like this now:

For the first time in my chronicles of election bumf there were more leaflets from "other parties" combined than from the main contenders. That included the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party who were trying to become main contenders. 

There was an uptick in leaflets from all the main parties compared to the 2019 General Election when it feels like nobody was really trying. UKIP reappeared on the radar this time, although that might well be a 'dead cat bounce'. In fact, that is one of the most interesting aspects of this Senedd Election - the absolute failure of the right wing parties to score seats.

In 2016, UKIP gained 7 seats, mainly off the regional lists. The EU referendum was the big thing that year, with a month to go. However, since then those 7 Senedd members have fallen out with each other multiple times, sitting as 'Independents' or representing other parties. Hence why there were sitting MSs from Abolish the Assembly and the Brexit Party when the Senedd dissolved for this election.

The funniest comment I saw on Twitter about the right wing collapse was that Abolish the Assembly wanted to get rid of Welsh democracy, and then Welsh democracy turned around and voted to get rid of Abolish the Assembly. They claim they will be back but it's hard to imagine them surviving five years without a base in the Senedd. Meanwhile UKIP did incredibly poorly, and Reform UK, which was the Brexit Party two years ago, similarly made little impact.

UKIP, Reform UK and, to an extent, Abolish, were all pushing the same main policy point - get rid of the Welsh Parliament. But the original primary reasons that drew people to UKIP and Reform UK, the push for Brexit, have been robbed from them by the Conservatives. If people aren't happy with devolution and Wales governing itself within the current limits established by Westminster, then the Welsh Conservative Party are firmly Unionist and the natural home for the regressive right given their current stance on immigration, the EU, foreign affairs, and London calling the shots in the United Kingdom. 

Certainly, I would interpret the rise in seats for the Conservatives as hollowing out the hard right wing party vote, and combined with the infighting and rebranding and, let's be honest, toxic personalities involved in those hard right parties, those Conservatie policy shifts were enough to capture the voters they had previously bled to the right. 

So will any of these parties be sending me bumf in the next election? I wouldn't bet on it. But who knows? The regularity of elections these days mean we are probably due a General Election soon enough. We will definitely be getting one in 2024. The next Senedd election will be in 2026 unless something totally unexpected happens. 

Meanwhile, a wad of leaflets are going in my recycling bin tonight!