It feels too hot for analysis, so here’s something lighter.
There was a moment over the weekend at the Richmond riverside when I walked past a stall selling, wait for it, crème brûlée crullers.
I had never heard of crullers, but they are a kind of doughnut, made with a profiterole-like choux pastry. The best-seller, I was told, is covered in a glazed, crispy and ever-so-slightly burnt caramel top, astride a generous amount of custard cream.
Now. I’m not a calorie counter, but I know one really shouldn’t eat such things, especially if you’re approaching 50 and struggling against the odds, and not entirely convincingly, to bring back your 20-year-old body.
And so, heroically, I resisted. Even with his charming French accent, the man encouraging me was not one of the crueller cruller salesmen, those who cannot be resisted. So I smiled and gestured a no, but inside I was embellishing the scene: “Non, Monsieur!.. And I was trying and failing to muster enough schoolboy French to say: “While I greatly admire your craft, and you have my full moral support, for the sake of my health, dignity and honour, I dare not partake.” With an old-fashioned theatrical cadence, it might go something like this:
Pour grand que soit mon admiration pour votre art, et quoique vous ayez l'entier de mon appui moral, je n'oserais, pour le bien de ma santé, de ma dignité et de mon honneur, y prendre part.
And so, despite the notice below, I felt I could survive without one, and I walked away.
But a few moments later, the gods came down to earth to get me back in the game. My blood glucose measurement app (I’ve been a type-one diabetic for 43 years) connected to a sensor in my left arm started to beep, protesting that my blood sugar had dropped below 4.0 and I was now officially having what is clinically and somewhat dramatically known as a hypoglycaemic attack, but which diabetic old-timers (since I was 6) are very familiar with. We call them hypos. They feel like a kind of dissolution, of going out of focus, of losing control - there is a kind of interoceptive tingling, an unjoining of the dots.
If you are well controlled, hypos should not happen very often, perhaps once a month, but ‘well-controlled’ is an exacting demand for a life that is not regimented. Diabetes raises glucose levels, and our job is to keep them down without, inter alia, a working pancreas, and instead with judgment, discipline, and routine. The snag is that normal glucose levels are so close to hypos that the effort to be well-controlled can make hypos a more common occurrence in phases of life when, for a variety of reasons - a schedule change, a steep flight of stairs, a misjudged potato- can drop from the normal range into levels that normal physiologies have built-in defences to, but diabetics don’t.
A hypo can affect cognition, motor control, make it difficult to walk or even speak, and it can even render you unconscious, place you in a coma, or worse, so please understand that I am aware it’s no joke. Hypos can be a serious medical emergency, and I have twice been taken to hospital to recover (both before I was 12). But I am lucky to have (almost) always been able to sense them coming and catch them before they become too debilitating, and now my sensor confirms my impressions.
And it’s precisely because a hypo can be so serious that it is also rather funny. After all, it is the only bona fide medical condition that can be treated with treats…sweet treats.
Now, earnest clinical types think in terms of medical efficiency and tell you that it’s all about glucose absorption and speed of uptake, so we are advised to drink Lucozade or orange juice or eat jelly babies (no, really). However, for me, a hypo is less like a medical emergency and more like a slightly bothersome friend. More to the point, diabetic old timers know there is more than one way to rapidly raise blood sugar, including, yes, you guessed it, crème brûlée crullers.
So I went back to the guy and ordered one with a nod, while inside I was saying: “I’ve changed my mind; it’s a tough old life, but it looks like I’ll have to have one after all.”
J'ai changé d'avis; la vie est dure, mais on dirait qu'il va bien falloir que j'en prenne un, après tout.
I paid my £5.50 (yes, a bit pricey) and went to sit in a shaded area. I felt like one of those animals, perhaps a leopard, that takes its prey into the bushes to eat out of sight of, let’s say, hyenas.
In this case, in the bourgeois summer glow of Richmond, I was merely hoping my nearby family would neither find me too soon nor have to look for me for too long. These moments of gratuitous indulgence are about the only good thing about being diabetic. A diabetic hypo is not a good excuse to eat, for instance, a doughnut, but it still helps to assuage any guilt I might otherwise feel. While it is possible to respond in a more targeted way - minimal calories, maximal glucose absorption efficiency, minimal change of rebound high blood sugar - where is the fun in that? We walked quite a bit afterwards - exercise lowers blood sugar - and my levels remained more or less normal.
And yes, because I know you are wondering, the crème brûlée cruller was delicious. I savoured every bite. The pastry really is light and crepe-like; the crispy caramel béret added texture and definition to the ambient goo-fest, and there was more than enough glucose to keep me conscious. The momentary exile and personal indulgence also felt like just enough deviance to keep me awake to myself, so that I would not disappear in the conformity of the cultural arena.
So I rejoined the group - my wife, younger son, and a Greek house guest - and they were none the wiser about my absence or recent provisions. There was talk of lunch, but I suggested we might wait a while…
I doubt there is a moral to this story, only that there are moments when we have to take time out to look after ourselves, and they sometimes involve doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. It seems to me that we have to savour the gift of our predicament, and live and write as if creating memory, knowing that time will dissipate, and moments are all we really have.
Too hot to leave a smart comment, too, but this piece made me laugh a number of times - thank you for sharing it. The crème de la crème is that you’re well!