Coeliac disease is a pain. It’s annoying to be unable to plan a holiday without having to think about how I’m going to eat, or to have to skip dinner because the pub I’ve gone to for a night out doesn’t serve anything safe. If asked “What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?” most people would answer with a list of activities they’d always wanted to do or celebrities they’d like to get to know a little more intimately. I’d have a fish finger sandwich with brown sauce on thick slices of white bread, followed by a slice of apple pie, washed down with a pint of Belgian beer. (And ok, maybe then Jamie Foxx. But definitely in that order). But bitching aside, I do think that having coeliac disease has actually enriched my life, although I say “glad to have had” rather than “glad to have” because I’m not going to pretend for an instant that if a miracle cure existed that would allow me to pig out on takeways and order whatever I liked in a restaurant I wouldn’t take it.
For a start it’s meant that I’ve had to learn to cook - after leaving home, it was that or subsist entirely on Trufree pot rice at university (the only junk food that costs four times as much as a meal made from scratch and still tastes of hoover bag). I know I probably come across as a pretty lazy cook on this blog, with my rule that I won’t make any sort of bread requiring more than two different types of flour, but I do genuinely enjoy choosing nice ingredients and trying to do something new with them. Not being able to just reach for a ready meal if I can’t be bothered has taught me to be a lot more creative with food.
I’d like to think that all that resisting of glutenful food has taught me willpower, but I suspect that this isn’t the case; willpower certainly doesn’t seem to be very much in evidence when the prospect of writing anything for my PhD looms! Still, if you tell yourself something often enough you might eventually start to believe it.
I also think that I’ve come to appreciate food in a way I don’t think I would otherwise have done. I get hungry on train journeys or if out for the day, in a way that people who can just buy a chocolate bar from the nearest vending machine probably don’t, and I think this makes me appreciate food more when I do get it. Interestingly Spider experienced something similar when attempting a hundred mile diet, eating only food sourced from within a 100 mile radius.
This leads me on quite neatly to my interest in all things treehuggerish – I’m one of those annoying people who hoards recyclables and tuts disapprovingly at people who take weekend breaks by plane. I honestly think my concern for the environment stems from having to read food labels and starting to think about where all these strange ingredients come from, as well as having to spend a lot of time in healthfood shops in close proximity to the be-sandled and be-dreaded. And perhaps this is too much of a leap to make, but I do think I can attribute my political outlook to coeliac disease; as a sickly teenager I was acutely aware that some people found life a little bit more difficult than others did, and that this wasn’t quite fair, and next think I knew I was a rabid socialist. I still am, just a slightly quieter one.
Coeliac disease has made me more confident; I learnt pretty early on that I needed to stand up for myself, not to be too embarrassed or too polite to ask what was in something or query the answer if I was unsure. I realise that this makes me a nightmare guest, but more importantly I have also learnt that my friends will understand. For me then, the greatest benefit of coeliac disease has been to teach me the people who are worth bothering with and the people who aren’t. The person who said they wouldn’t go out with me because they didn’t want to take the chance of ending up with unhealthy children falls into the latter category. Into the former category go my Mum, who made incredible sacrifices to look after two sickly kids, the friend who always keeps a cupboard full of gluten free pasta and cakes even though I only manage to visit her twice a year, the friend who drove miles to find a gluten free treacle sponge and then stuffed me so full of gluten free home cooking that I couldn’t eat it, and my lovely bloke who goes out of his way to accommodate my diet without once making me feel that it is an issue for him. Even though he does eat my biscuits when his own are a third of the price.
In my first term at university I was very upset by the fact that the people on my corridor referred to me as “The girl who can’t eat bread”. In retrospect I was being rather oversensitive – people just getting to know each other needed some kind of handle on each other, and for plenty of others that tag was “the guy who supports Chelsea”, “the really tall bloke” or for one unfortunate “the guy who masturbates really loudly” - but it hurt that my entire personality seemed to have been distilled down in peoples’ minds to one aspect of my genetic makeup, and one I was just coming to terms with at that. But nine years on I recognise that while coeliac disease does not define my personality it has shaped some aspects of it, and on reflection those are aspects for which I am grateful.
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