Nine days. I am not going to be euphemistic about it

Florist, on my feet all day. My routine, boring and unbroken for fourteen months:

Two large glasses of water before I do anything else in the morning, including the kettle. A walk at lunchtime, twenty minutes, whatever the weather. Kiwi fruit, two, most evenings, which somebody in this circle recommended in 2024 and which I have never questioned since. And the thing my pharmacist suggested, taken every day rather than only when things go wrong, because she said the whole point of it is that it does not work as a rescue.

That last bit was the change that mattered. I had been treating the whole business as an emergency service rather than a maintenance job.

Sixty-nine, new to the internet, not to hard work. Prunes. I know. But warm, in the little bowl, with the juice, first thing.

My mother did it, her mother did it, and I laughed at them both for forty years.

Type 2 for nine years, Leicester. What nobody told me is that the timing matters more than the ingredients. My gut wants the same things to happen at the same times, and when my week goes irregular — travel, a late shift, a wedding — that is when I end up where you were.

So my routine is really a schedule rather than a diet. Same breakfast time, same walk, same everything. Dull as a Tuesday and it works.

Farm shop, surrounded by food all day. Two things that helped me and neither is food.

One, a footstool in the bathroom. That is all I will say about that and it made a genuine difference.

Two, not rushing. I had got into a habit of going only when it was convenient, which over months trained me out of noticing anything at all. Giving it ten unhurried minutes in the morning was more use than any of the rest of it.

Sixty-two, type 2, feet much better. Bertie, the bit I wanted to answer is the demoralising part and the telling your daughter you had a bug.

I did that for nearly a year. It is such an unserious-sounding problem and it makes you feel about four years old. I eventually told my sister and she said she had been having the same trouble since March and had told nobody either. Two grown women in a kitchen in Ebbw Vale, both mortified, both relieved.

Walsall. Movement is the one nobody wants to hear. Not exercise, movement. On the days I sit at the computer from nine until six, things stop. On the days I am up and down and out to the van, they do not.

I have no explanation and a hundred per cent consistency over two years.

Excellent. I now have a schedule, a footstool, a bowl of prunes and permission to stop treating it as an emergency.

Gwenda — I told my daughter the truth on Sunday. She said, and I quote, Dad, I have three children, do you think you can shock me.