Marianne Talbot with her mother I don’t think I have mentioned before that mum has coeliac disease? This means that she can’t eat gluten – no wheat, rye or barley. To put it more meaningfully: bread, pastry, cake, batter, biscuits or cereal are all off limits.
I can’t tell you how much of a pain this is.
If we go out, for example, I have to take supplies. You can bet your boots that otherwise she won’t be able to eat anything. Buffets, for example, are a real ordeal – sausage rolls, sandwiches, pizza slices, breaded ham, pastries, cake... Poor mum: eating is one of the few pleasures she has left.
So mum can occasionally enjoy some of these things, I bake. Yes, bake. In my spare time of course.
Mum was fine until she was 70. Annoyingly this means that her new diet didn’t have time to ‘take’ before the Alzheimer’s set in. So mum doesn’t remember that she can’t eat these staple (and much loved) foods, and I have to watch her like a hawk.
I am forever whipping biscuits out of her very mouth, for example, just as she has said to the person offering it: ‘oh how kind, I’d love one.’ You can imagine the looks I get.
And the comments: ‘Oh can’t she just have one?’ they’ll say. ‘Yes, says mum, ‘surely one can’t hurt?’
But one will hurt. Coeliac disease is not a food intolerance, it is a condition in which the intestine cannot process gluten. When mum eats it she gets a painful rash, which is horrible for her. She also gets diarrhoea, which is horrible for me.
I feel like a bully when I refuse her ‘just one’. There’s no point in saying ‘you’ll thank me’ because of course she won’t, she just thinks I am being mean. So does everyone else.
Restaurants don’t help. This weekend, mum went for a pub lunch with her brothers. They were assured by the chef that there was no gluten in rye bread.
WRONG!
So I’m in for a bad week.
I should, of course, as a service to other coeliacs, write to the pub and, probably, the restaurant who assured me last week that pasta is gluten free, and all those helpful people who think spelt is wheat-free. If I were to write to everyone who gets it wrong I’d do nothing else.
The fashion for food intolerances has made my life easier in some ways. There is far more gluten free food available for example. In other ways it has made it more difficult because people have become sceptical.
I would like to hang a notice around mum’s neck. I wonder if people would think me less of a bully?