…well, sort of.  For several reasons, I’ve been holding off publishing some of my recent blog posts.  For all I know, none of my real life friends or family read this blog at all.  On the other hand, it’s always possible some of you do, and I’ve preferred to keep a lid on some of the things that have been going on, partly to avoid worrying any of you, and partly just to avoid answering questions I preferred to dodge until the situation was a little clearer.

So if it looks a little like there’s some time travel going on over the next couple of weeks, it’s just me going through and publishing older posts if I still think there’s any point in doing so.

I have often wondered whether I would ever see this day.  Not specifically Jan 29 2010, which is not an especially significant date for me.  But it has been very significant in that I have picked up my first ever prescribed gluten-free food.

Not that we have an official diagnosis or anything like that, but I have finally found a consultant at Bart’s who understands the important thing here is not a label to attach to a condition, but an appropriate treatment for whatever the underlying condition may be.  So, at the beginning of December, he promised me he would write to my GP recommending a gluten-free prescription.  Phew.

Needless to say, I’ve been checking with the GP ever since to see whether they’d received the letter.  Up until last week there was no joy, but since I had pre-booked an appointment for yesterday with the GP, on the basis that a month and a half was quite sufficient time for the consultant to have written, I chased the department last week.  They apologised, wrote the letter and posted it last Thursday.  By Wednesday of this week it had failed to arrive, probably because the postal deliveries in our neighbourhood can be something of a lottery.  Booted the department again, who said they would fax a copy over to my GP, and turned up to see her yesterday morning as planned.

Not that the fax had been seen by her but, thankfully, she trusts me not to fib about these things and was prepared to start the gluten-free prescription right away, while she waited to see what the letter might hold.  We picked three products at random - white flour mix, multi-grain bread and pizza bases - and decided to leave the rest until we were both more clued in on what we should or shouldn’t be doing.

For some reason, it didn’t occur to me to check whether the things we were ordering were lactose and/or soy free.  I doubt it would have done us much good anyway, as each product appeared as a line on her computer and didn’t have additional information to assist us, but I probably should have given it more thought.

And, today, my first gluten-free prescribables arrived at the pharmacy.  These were the white flour mix and the pizza bases.  Unlucky for me, the flour mix contains both lactose and soy, so I shall probably be keeping that for some time when I’m catering for a group, or maybe Freecycle it out to someone else who can use it.  I suppose it might be handy in an emergency, but the kind of emergency that will make me want to make myself ill would probably preclude taking the time to bugger about making bread, cakes or pastry.

Just as well the pizza bases look OK, then

However, this did get me wondering: how many of the gluten-free prescribables are also lactose and soy free?  In the mainstream shopping environment, this is a pretty tall order, and I have regularly been frustrated to see things containing either lactose or soy for no obvious culinary reason.  If Montezumas can make amazingly good chocolate without either, I don’t see why certain other manufacturers can’t.  For example.  So for a while I had a bit of a wobble, as it seemed like I might not find this whole prescription process as helpful as I’d hoped.

My 2010 Coeliac UK food directory hasn’t arrived yet, so I couldn’t check all the manufacturers in there, but the lovely Kathryn I reached on the hotline emailed me a list of them, complete with email addresses, so I’ve started the process of contacting them all to ask what they have that might work.

My first email left at 16:06.  If I’m honest, I didn’t expect any answers on a Friday afternoon, but hoped to get some in on Monday and Tuesday, by which time the doc should have sorted out what number of products I should be having each month.

So far, I’ve had emails from two of the manufacturers contacted, which is an encouraging start, and at least one has promised to send me a sample so I can see whether their food is worth eating, as well as being safe so to do.  Fingers crossed next week brings in some more responses and I can finally get myself sorted.

Maybe it’s because it’s winter.  It’s been bitterly cold, the rain pissed down relentlessly all day yesterday and I’ve had to get used to the idea that the much vaunted Indian summer just ain’t gonna happen.  FFS, it’s November.  Get over it already.  I know.  Really I do.  Not that anybody has ever suggested my depression is down to SAD or anything like that.  I can be miserable in summer as well as winter.

And yet, this year, it’s hitting me harder.  I’ve been hitting Napster fairly hard as an antidote to all this.  Music has long been my therapy, and Napster is a great way to find all kinds of tracks, especially when you have fond memories of a particular song but can’t remember whether it really was good enough to justify buying the damn thing in the light of your adult critical reasoning, or whether 20 odd years have given it a quality it never earned at its composition.

So part of me has been meeting up with some old friends, in that sense.  Along with this, my battle with the Trust for appropriate treatment is allegedly reaching its close.  I say allegedly, because I was told I would hear something by, oh, last Friday.  Predictably, nothing has been seen or heard and neither I nor my advocate are any the wiser.  I hate that this has become the predictable outcome in my dealings with the Trust, but they seem determined to dump on the LRI guidelines whenever the opportunity presents itself.

As things stand, it seems you can tell a psychiatrist that you’re suicidal, safe in the knowledge that he will do no more than get his secretary to set up an appointment for one month hence to discuss which anti-depressant might be appropriate.  I wish I was making this up.

Constant throughout this, the voices and faces of friends and family.  Concern, fear, anger, yes, but most of all love, unbearable in the weight it places on me.  A love that stains my hands as I reach for the pills.  A love that binds and eviscerates.  A love my tears and pain can’t wash away.  A love that sprays red over the black and white of my state of mind.

Thank you, all of you.  You know who you are.

I would love to say that I had been off travelling the world or something and thus unable to write.  The truth is sadly far less exotic - too much work, too little time and way too little sleep to catch up and do some blogging in the evenings.

So this will be a brief update.  Gluten-free stuff is all going well - I’ve adapted to the routine fairly well, it’s just a question of making sure the rest of the extended family are as comfortable with what it entails.  The lactose issue is more difficult, however.  Until Starbuck’s, Costa and Caffe Nero work out that not all people who can’t drink normal milk are either happy or able to drink soy, I shall be without a decent latte.  Of course I know there are people starving in Africa, and that my latte craving should be put in proportion, but still.  It was one of my few remaining vices and is therefore sorely missed.

The real problem I’ve found on the food front is the soy.  It seems that, whatever doesn’t contain either gluten or lactose (or often both) seems to contain soy, frequently in the form of emulsifier soy lecithin.  Even Black Farmer sausages (which are delicious, by the way, so do try them) currently contain soy.  Top marks to them for answering my email so swiftly and nicely, though, when I raised the issue with them.  I’m hoping Wilfred and his colleagues manage to put together some soy-free recipes soon.  Much as I love making my own sausages, it’s nice sometimes to just be able to buy the darn things ready-made.

The real hero food for the last couple of months has been the Look What We Found range.  They have some truly delicious dishes, don’t need to be kept in fridge or freezer and aren’t at all bad on the calorie front, either, so they’ve even been compatible with me doing WeightWatchers.

Oh dear.  I really must be on a diet - an entire post obsessed with food.  Will try and catch up the rest over the next few days, and start adding in some recipes I’ve been playing with, probably in another part of the site, and see how it goes.

Chris and Nick have come up with a lovely competition: the chance to win a weekend in a Landmark Trust property.  No purchase necessary, just post a wish on the site and you’ll automatically be entered.

You can find out more about the competition here: http://www.youwish.com/index.php?cat=general&id=landmark

Just thought I’d share

I love Facebook.  I really do.  And it would be incredibly easy to spend my entire day there chatting to friends, trading status updates and comments and playing some of the many games that have been developed as apps for the site.  And there’s an extent to which that behaviour could even be justified by some of the work I’m doing at the moment, since social networking has become an important component of start-up marketing strategies everywhere.

But there are some inherent dangers to getting too involved with Facebook.  Beyond the ‘Facebook ate my life’ scenario where the only people you ‘talk’ to are Facebook friends you’ve barely met more than a couple of times in real life, and the pitfalls of posting on Facebook when you should be either hard at work or have called in sick with a migraine and your boss happens across it, there are some other areas that need exploring with caution.

Mafia Wars is one of them.  Similar to apps like Robin Hood, it involves earning cash and points and levelling up.  And you can improve your chances of success by increasing the size of your mafia, which means either inviting your friends or exchanging points for virtual mafiosi.  So far so good.  I started playing the game this afternoon after being invited by one of my friends to start playing and join their mafia.

While I should probably have expected that such a thing would exist, I was nonetheless surprised to see that there is at least one group dedicated to the task of helping people grow the size of their mafia.  Surely they could invite their own friends and not resort to strangers?  Well, actually, I get why people don’t invite their own friends.  For one thing, depending on your age group, computer games are simply something you don’t admit to playing unless it’s a hand or two of poker.  As a long-standing Runescape fan I have less hesitation at admitting my love of gaming, but from there to inviting a friend to play Mafia Wars when I have no idea whether they like that kind of thing or not… let’s just say it’s not going to happen.  

And I really am not sure quite why it works.  Mafia Wars, while better resolved than Robin Hood in so many ways, is still a very slow, clunky game.  I really couldn’t tell you what the appeal of the game was.  My own experience of Robin Hood had me bored within a short space of time and that was that.  There’s nothing that really happens and it soon just gets to be about how many people you can get involved in your gang.  While MW does have more complex gameplay, it’s still not that great compared to the many other MMORPGs on the market.

But this is Facebook, so maybe there are other factors at play.  Out of idle curiosity, I had a look at the group my friend had joined and discovered a wall post that allowed people to request adds and invitations.  Complete strangers inviting other complete strangers to become part of their friends network with the sole purpose of having enough bodies to advance further in Mafia Wars.  Now, it’s entirely possible some real friends may develop from this, as is the case in many an online forum or game.  But the next generation of this is already in place - people developing a different Facebook identity in order to add lots of random people to their mafia, which is clearly not what the game’s developers intended.

For someone who uses social media to help clients spread the word about their product or service, the idea of this is in equal measures appealing and worrying.  It’s appealing because it allows me to cherry-pick a bunch of people to add as friends before inviting them to join me on MW.  I can simply pick people from UK networks and I suddenly have up to 500 new contacts to add on MW who, as ‘friends’ will get to see my status updates.  Which is great for helping promote sites, groups and pages, because some 650+ people can see each of my updates, assuming they’re not hiding me on their home page.  Even with a 1% conversion rate, I get 6 or 7 people buying into what I’ve promoted, and each of those has other friends who will see their ‘news stories’ and have the opportunity to investigate what it is and join in for themselves.

So there’s a huge capacity to tap into the networking side of this.  On the other hand, if everyone playing MW decides to add 500 total strangers, they will either have to stop reading their news feed from simple overload, or they will start hiding the majority of the new friends so they can focus on those people they actually want to hear from.

I decided to conduct an experiment.   I added a few people at random from the group.  Within 10 minutes I had 10 new friends, who are all now part of my mafia, as I am part of theirs.  And the results so far are interesting.  While my personal instinct, and that of some other players, is that I’d like the option to separate off different categories of friends in order to keep my news stories relevant in a real world context, other people are enthusiastically playing the game, letting it publish stories to their news feed and using their status to invite friends to join their mafia, as well as to ask people to send them items they need to complete ‘jobs’ in the game.  And other players are responding, so clearly not everyone is filtering yet.

While I’m only a sample size of one, so I won’t go reading too much into my own reactions, I’m looking forward to watching how this develops.  Either there is huge potential to tap or it’s a flash in the pan, and right now it’s too close to call.  I’m sure a few of my fellow mafiosi will be happy to answer some questions on their experiences, so maybe we can get some actual research into this.

Want to be part of the experiment?  Add me on Facebook and invite me to join YOUR mafia

m xxx

This is one of my husband’s favourite quotes, and he has a point.  If someone’s busy, there’s a good chance they’re organised enough to be able to fit something into their schedule.  Sadly, I have the feeling that whoever originally said this had a PA.  I most definitely don’t, and fitting everything into the day can be a bit a bit of a challenge, especially with an unpredictable toddler on hand.

Early this week, our plans got thrown by H needing a trip to A&E after falling and getting a huge splinter in his hand.  He was very brave ‘because I’m a big boy, Mummy’ but had to miss pre-school that day, and then had the rest of the week thrown out with trying to get back into the routine after the Easter holidays.  If it makes me a bad parent, so be it, but am I the only one who thinks it would be great for them not to have long breaks over Easter etc?  Two weeks is just long enough to mess up the schedule.  I dread to think what we’ll do come the summer holidays.

And it’s been a busy week in other ways, too.  I’m starting work on a new project for a former boss of mine, Chris Robson.  He’s started a company called YouWish, which has a neat little idea at its root: instead of trawling through hundreds of pages on Google to find those elusive things, especially the less tangible ones, why not post what you want on his site and let registered businesses who offer the product or service you want contact you directly, or let other users make their recommendations if they’ve already been there and done that.  

It’s beautiful in its simplicity, and while there is still some tweaking to be done on the interface, I think he’s got the foundations of something quite special.  Search in reverse.  I’ve been having a play and entering some of my own wishes, though decided against posting some of them.  I’m pretty sure there’s no way to retrofit a volume control to a toddler, or a remote control that can clear foot traffic from Brick Lane on a Sunday when you actually need to get from one end to the other at something more than the pace of a lethargic snail on valium.  I can dream, though

S and I have also been having some ideas for one of our spaces at the Rag Factory.  We have a lovely gallery space here and have been wondering whether there was something more we could do with it to help the artistic community.  And we think we’ve come up something that could be quite fun.  I’ll post more about that at a later date, as we have to work out a few of the details and think how best to get the word out, but it could mean that independent artists could exhibit their work at a very low cost… has to be worth exploring, anyway.

And for those who’ve been waiting for it, The Gemstones web site is up and running.  It’s not what I’d call finished yet, but it’s not a bad placeholder.  We’re singing at a memorial service on Wednesday, but some of the more fun stuff is up on the site already.  I’ll be adding more when I get the time.  

One last note… for anyone who sees this before Monday, come down and see Havering College’s excellent 12 Degrees show.  Some very good work there, and a number of the pieces have already been sold - not bad for 2nd year students.  If he has any sense, Saatchi will be attending their degree show next year.  Definitely worth the detour if you’re in the Brick Lane area.

Sadly this is once again in much haste, as I keep running out of hours in the day.  Have recently been asked to become a Site Steward on Helium.  I was very surprised to be asked, as I’m far from the most prolific of writers on Helium, but I’ve accepted.  

It’s not just the recognition - although it’s obviously nice to see that my work has been noticed and appreciated - it’s the fact that I can contribute actively to improve some of the things I find most frustrating about the site.  And since the specific area I’ve been asked to join is Parenting and Pregnancy, with particular responsibility for the Infertility Subchannel (which is where miscarriage sits), I’m looking forward to improving that whole area, coming up with new titles to complete it so it’s more useful, etc.

In other news… while I may have missed watching the Boat Race because of the Gemstones gig at the Cavendish Arms the same day, I was very pleased to hear that Oxford had won by 3.5 lengths.  Still can’t believe I wasn’t at Hammersmith Bridge, so will have to get next year’s date in the diary early and avoid a repeat.

Must go to bed…

While I think of it, you can now find me on Twitter.com.  Either follow this link or search for Meelzebub.  Haven’t yet decided whether to install a Twitter widget for this WordPress site yet, but that’s where you can find me for now.

In all, it’s been quite a couple of weeks here.  Yes, life is always busy, but this has been one of those rare times when busy didn’t really come into it.  Thanks to the infection I ended up with after the gastroscopy, I’ve lost a sizeable chunk of the last fortnight being ill.  While I can work through most things, even I can’t function properly with ears and sinuses causing me to lose my balance and making me nauseous just for moving my head.

Thankfully, I have some lovely clients who’ve been very understanding, and with Mum coming down to help out with H for a few days we managed to get through the worst of it.  While S was fantastic about helping with things like getting H to and from pre-school and sorting out meals for him, it was one hell of a workload for him to have to take on… not least because he ended up with concussion last Saturday doing some work in one of the spaces and has not really been feeling quite right ever since.  Yes, I know, what a pair

Throughout this week we’ve been playing a game of will-she-won’t-she about this afternoon, which was when our group, the Gemstones, was due to be performing a showcase at the Cavendish Arms in Stockwell.  Still too ill on Thursday to sing in rehearsals (or anywhere else for that matter, not even in the bath) and unable to make the final rehearsal yesterday afternoon as my voice was still rough, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I’d make it.  Thankfully, the antibiotics have been doing their job and I was able to make it to the gig after all.  While I had some worries about my voice making it through the whole set, the whole thing went without a hitch.  The audience responded well, our musical director was happy and I think we’ve built our confidence in preparation for the gigs we have coming up next month.

The only cloud in sight is the knowledge that I will have to head down to A&E in the next day or so, as I fell and caught the index finger of my right hand.  Obviously I ignored it at the time, but with it still painful and much more swollen, I need to check that it’s not broken or, if it is, that it sets straight.  The last thing I can do with is losing mobility in that finger: since I’m right-handed it’s already affecting my ability to chop things, write, type or even get H dressed on occasion, so it’s off to the docs with me.  Again.  

But, in all, life is good.  I’m feeling human again, the gluten-free lifestyle is starting to make a difference, the gig went well and I have a good week’s work ahead of me.  Knackered I may be, but I know there are plenty more good things out there to look forward to.