I am carrying on

I am London, Yorkshire and Crewe

I am British, Italian, and Jew

I am Catholic, Irish and Dutch

I am this and that, I am much

I am born from survivors and skivers

I was bred from majorettes and taxi drivers

I am sugar, bread and tea

I am all these things you see

I am bleach, smoke and dirt

I am cosy words and hurt

I am rock, rap and pop

I am everything and I won’t stop!

I am velvet, coir and leather

I am lavender, hollyhock and heather

I am heavy but my heart is light

I am everything in sight

I am a library, a kitchen, a spa

I am going places, far!

I am sunshine and the rain

I am humour though inane

I am dreaming and I am real

I am carrying on until…

What is it?

How Italian am I?

In my opinion not very much, but my heart is with that side of my family!  I at least learn Italian and I do cook Italian food a lot, but ultimately I say my family hasn’t readily been open about our ancestry – or least my mother’s generation hasn’t been.

Why?  I am a fourth generation Italian/Brit or as some people call us Britalian.  My grandmother’s generation was more ready to acknowledge the Italian ancestry in us, but my mum’s generation fought really hard against all their cultural mixes because they experienced extreme racism in the 50s and 60s growing up in London over it.

My grandmother’s family are a mix of many cultures in the past six generations, Romany, Italian and Greek or Greco-Italian being the strongest bloodline hailing mostly from Naples/Napoli, my grandmother is quite dark skinned and that’s because her great grandmother was mixed race black American and there is Vietnamese in her side of the family too.  So there’s a lot to chew on there. 

Her husband, my grandad is simpler Jewish and Roman Catholic mixed, Welsh, English with some unknown Slavic origin they believe may be Polish or Romanian but they don’t really know, it’s also rumoured there is Italian there too, but again no one has proved that yet – but we do know his Jewish family are considered to be mostly Levite and Sephardic.

My dad’s family have a very ancient history in Italy, they became mostly English though by 1919 as the family became too poor and too lethargic to keep skipping countries as they used to.  Italy, France, England, Italy, France, England, you get the drift, almost every one or two generations the change went on.  Once again his Italian ancestry is 2306yr history in Naples and Amalfi and an ancestral home is supposed to be Montalto castle in Chianti which is much farther north of Italy.

Both sides of my family fled Italy almost permanently around 1919 to 1950 because of various problems with fascism, though some started to come to the UK much earlier than that as they were seeking to better themselves outside of Italy as some of the ancestors felt there were better educational opportunities for their children in other places.  Particularly my dad’s family, they wanted to spread their genetic legacy to other European aristocracies. 

My mother’s Italian ancestors were mostly farmers. 

But as a fourth generation Italian Brit, I was very interested in all the culture I am a mix of and so I was always begging information from the oldest members of the family!  The most vocal are the Italians, Jews and the Greeks in the family.

Everyone else is shy about their heritage, because hey, we’re British now.    So in my mind, my personal culture has been shaped by the most vocal and the most proud of my family.

Unfortunately actually knowing Italian is rare in my family, because nobody sees the point in learning a language unless they are going to move to the country.  So only the oldest relatives knew any Italian and my mum forbade most of them to teach me anything!

As an adult I taught myself, because it was safer that way – my grandmother who knew a little bit of Italian was a rude and naughty woman who taught me all the bad things to say first – as she’s a natural imp!

So there’s lots of things I know about the family and their ways, but it is very different to how other non-related Italians do things… for example, I had an ex called Tony who was half Japanese and half Italian, his family love ragu/Bolognese – to them bolognese is meat, onion, salt and pepper, and pasta, nothing else – no tomatoes and the meat is always beef!

My family however we use lamb in almost everything!  Our Bolognese has tomatoes, tomato puree, bell pepper, onions, all the Italian herbs, sugar, cinnamon, salt and pepper and minced lamb.  Yet it’s not traditional in Naples, some Neapolitans say they either have vegetarian ragu or they have chunks of pork in it.

There’s lots of food traditional in my family, that I don’t even have a name for!  Some are Greek and some Italian; sometimes I don’t know which is which!

The confusion of mixed cultures gets me all the time!

Chicken Arribiata is popular in the family; we really spice it up because you’ve got to make that chicken angry!  Arribiata means ANGRY!  So we put chilis in that dish, cinnamon, onions, tomatoes, salt and pepper, cayenne – but you know so many people in my family they are wimps!  You give them that amount of chili and they cry about abuse!  But you just want passive chicken then, you don’t want it to be angry… lol

It’s fun in my family, you have the cultural deniers and the hard-core proud – eh what’s this long vegetable that looks like a cucumber but its slimy and bitter?  It’s a courgette innit?  No it’s a zucchini, that’s American – no not at all I say, nana what’s this vegetable called?  Zucchini!  See I told you!  It’s Italian for courgette!  Whatever!

I get served some green leaf vegetable with nice herbal rice inside it like a parcel and I ask my cousin Maria, hey Maria what is this?  It’s food innit, she says!  No I mean what is it?  Why you don’t like it?  I didn’t say that I just wanna know what it is!  Its vine leaves wrapped around rice and herbs, you know what it is you’ve had it before!  But what is it called, I say!  Stuffed vine leaves I just said!  What is it called in Italy?  I am fucked if I know, just eat it!

I ask my older relatives who all say stuffed vine leaves with rice with a shrug – I ask them but what’s it called in Italy?  50% will say it’s Greek not Italian and the other 50% says it’s Italian not Greek!

You can see why I give up!

Ok so next up we have a large style macaroni dish that’s like tomato macaroni and cheese, super cheesy, real big macaroni style pasta – what’s this called?  Pasta!  No what’s the name of the dish in Italy?  I am fucked if I know!  Eye rolls, same answer every time!

I go and research and find out its Ziti!

I told my cousin Sabrina, hey that dish you make it’s called Ziti in Italian!  Ew that sounds disgusting don’t say things like that at the dinner table, you make people feel sick!  No that’s what they call it there – I don’t care it sounds gross in English!  You don’t like my cooking?  She asks.  No I love it, but I went and googled it and found out it has a name – well keep it to yourself will ya that sounds insulting!

There are lots of dishes in my family and I am still trying to find out what the blazes they are – ironically 50% of the dishes my mum makes are Italian, yet she tells me it’s English.  Haha – she’s the biggest denier of her heritage in the family, but she won’t stray from their cooking or idioms!

Why am I posting this?  Because a lot of my family home cooking has no names, so I don’t bother including them in lists because I am more or less writing the recipe out to describe it, lol.

So with that being said, I was raised in a family that didn’t accept any cultural qualities at all – all of them make shifting a new British ideology and failing miserably whilst still eating traditional family food and shouting typical Greek and Italian idioms everywhere but in English this time, because we’re British now!

LOL.

For the word, since living with Paul I have thrown myself into learning more about proper Italian and Greek culture, but mostly leaning to Italian as the family seems to be more of that than the Greek it seems.  I am slowly learning the names of the dishes my family made and I am trying to learn more traditional ways in making things, instead of doing weird things to the food like adding spices which makes it like some weird Middle Eastern hybrid that happens occasionally in the family!

The things I can name, that I make are…

Homemade ravioli, yes I can home make my own pasta, thank you very much!

Homemade pizzas unfortunately without a traditional pizza oven as of yet!  Yes the base and all, I can do that!  My dream is to have a dragon shaped pizza oven in the garden which puffs out smoke from the dragons nostrils whenever I bake pizza! 

I make focaccias and ciabatta and for the Jewish family I can make sourdough, or at least used to – lost the mother/starter, someone accidentally tipped it away thinking something went off in a bottle!

I do Bolognese or ragu whatever you wanna call it – I am easy going, I don’t care!  Lol

Chicken arribiata

Pesto

Of course people kill for my carbonara

They also kill for my ziti and macaroni and vegetarian ravioli and the pastichio and lasagne…

I make polenta but no one likes it no matter who makes it lol

I make vegetarian and gluten free Bolognese and ravioli!

Homemade meatballs

Now I don’t know where this is from but there is a big debate in my family about vegetable burger pates being Italian or not!  But I don’t know!

Eggs in purgatory!

Caprese

Cesar salad… which I discovered may actually not be an Italian invention lol

Gnocchi

And up until recently I found out a family pudding which we called Creamy chocolate fingers is actually Tiramisu only nobody in my family puts espresso in it. 

Still trying to work out what other dishes are in the family… we have homemade biscuits like digestive biscuits but we put in chopped glace cherries and other fruit jellies in it in tiny bits.

We make what we call bread pudding, which is wholemeal bread soaked in milk and drained semi dried with sugar, Christmas spices, eggs and raisins and bake it until crispy. 

We have chocolate pasta with large half melted chocolate chunk and vanilla ice-cream as a dessert!

Knickerbocker glory desserts!

But there are so many I don’t know the name of – most notably a thing we make which is almost identical to Slovakian goulash with dumplings, only it has lots of tomatoes, more spice, more mushrooms and lots of red wine and it served under mashed potato for some weird reason!  Or on some occasions we eat this with beef stuffed ravioli instead!  I call it an Italian goulash but everyone rightfully looks sideways at me! 

I am trying to sew up the holes of my heritage, I am trying! 

Thanks for reading!

British kids miss out

The UK hasn’t accepted Halloween or Trick or Treat as part of their culture for very long; In fact I remember as a child, the idea of Trick or Treat was largely an American idea, that most UK kids aspired to do, but their parents – afraid of demonic possession, mostly wouldn’t let their kids go out on Halloween night.

My mother was one of those parents who told Gina an honorary aunt that “if my girl comes home with a demon spirit inside her, you’ll be to blame”!  I was ten years old when I first went Trick or Treating and I only went twice in my life, because by and large most British folks are aggressive about people knocking on their doors.

I remember lots of people hurling abuse at me and the other kids, swearing at us, chasing us off with brooms or dogs!

Things have changed slightly since my Henry was born, he has managed to go Trick or Treating, but as soon as he was 10yrs old, people started getting mean – because here in the UK you can only go Trick or Treating if you so happen to be under the age of 11 or look it – or are accompanied by younger looking children with you.  If you don’t look young enough you are shooed away like some stray animal.

At least one in every four or five doors they either won’t open to you, or they will shout abuse at the kids.

It is becoming quite common in this area lately that at Halloween the local JWs start their rounds in the hope to turn people against their evil ways of encouraging their children to do “Trick or Treat activities”.

It’s so sad.

I remember when Henry was in his primary/junior school that they used to do a Halloween party for the kids every year, as soon as Henry goes to High school from the age of 11, it’s like everybody expects them not to be kids anymore – none of those fun things anymore.  No summer fetes, no Christmas fairs, no summer bouncy castles, no Halloween, Christmas or Easter parties, no Christmas card post box for your friends… I don’t get it.  Why 11?

I complained to other parents about the unfairness of the huge culture change from junior to high school, they all seem to think along the same lines as the authorities, it’s time to grow up now!

 But they’re only 11!

Henry has a lot of depression because of this, it seems to him that the whole world expects the fun to stop now and he is made to think about his career already.  When I was in school, they didn’t make me think about what career I wanted until I was 14 – now Henry is expected at 12 to have a firm grasp at what he wants from his life.

He is still dithering from cook, doctor, accountant, marathon runner or actor.

Despite the school pressurising him to grow up, he feels he has less freedom in high school than he did in junior school – in junior school he was a play leader for younger children, this school doesn’t have anything like that – instead they have prefects which are usually the most popular kids in the school as it is done by a voting system.

Henry was certainly the most popular child in primary and junior school, but since moving into high school, he has a small group of friends who are all considered over-achievers and are mostly bullied for it.

It’s so sad they make them grow up so fast here, a couple of my American friends on twitter can’t believe that the UK is so culturally backward as to be mean to children of a certain age at Halloween over a piece of candy.

One of my dreams since childhood was to leave the UK for America or Canada, but things didn’t turn out that way for me.  I always though, that although schools are not as secure as ours in regards to violence etc., they definitely do more for children and giving personal choices to children than UK schools do.  Because here in the UK, most children are educated like they are clothed in school, uniformly, no deviation from curriculum and certainly very limited choices if any and hardly any after school clubs ran at the school. 

Most high schools in the UK are expected to run from 8:30am to 4pm for five days a week, a 15 minute morning break and a 30 minute lunch break and that is all they get, well at my Henry’s school in any case.

I’ve never liked it, Paul and I did plan to move to Canada’s Prince Edward Island, when Henry was 3, but that fell through big time!

Anyway, happy reading!

Defining self update May 2021

Since 2012 I had been trying to learn how to define myself – why?  Because I had such a suppressed, isolated and abused life before that time that I had never developed my true personality, likes and dislikes etc; because I was never allowed to be nurtured as an individual.  I was literally born to become a facsimile of my mother’s dreams and wishes and because her dreams and wishes went against a lot of my own instinctive nature, both of us were very unhappy with the result and neither of us got exactly what we wanted from my existence.

Where it was my nature to sit quietly, drawing, cutting & pasting, playing Barbie dolls and watching cartoons, it was my mother’s nature to force me to listen to pop music, watch top of the pops, worry about fashion, gossip and EastEnders and to try and teach me to give certain people Hell on Earth. 

When I was bullied by other children, it was my nature to ignore them, but confide in my mother and hope that she would try and help to advise me or complain to the parents or head teacher on the rare occasions I went to school; but instead she responded with the concept that I had to play dirty and hit them back or I was considered weak and therefore would only get bullied continuously.  There was a situation with my mother’s close friend, where her two children bullied me and pushed me off my own swing in my own back garden, I ran indoors crying and both my mother and their mother dragged me outside with a broom and told me to hit those kids as hard as I could or else I would get it instead.

Looking back I still can’t believe how both my mother, her friend and her children would sit back and laugh in recollection of that day, especially as I chose not to hit the kids with the broom and instead scarper upstairs as fast as I could and bolted my bedroom door up with my bed to stop any punishment of my supposed cowardice.  I stayed in my bedroom for the rest of the day, because I knew once my dad came home my mum couldn’t continue her plans, as dad had a sweet nature and wouldn’t allow it.  A trick I had learned to use for most of my life – hide till dad gets home.

I had to learn to be partly how she wanted me to be, as long as it didn’t go against my personal morals within reason.  I am glad to say, I have a higher standard of morals than she does.

The amount of times she had tried to train me to be violent, it had worked in some cases, but in others it only taught me how to literally close my emotions off at dangerous situations.  I easily phase out when there is a dangerous violent person around me ranting and raving and throwing things around, I go blank, close down, and become almost robotic.  It is something I have been told I need to alert the doctor about, but I won’t because I feel that they might try to think it would be helpful to keep me switched on.  A lot of people state that switching myself off emotionally during these times can be very dangerous, a sign that I could become a dangerous person, but I am by my very nature, quite passive unless provoked too much!

I just want a quiet life where I am loved, that’s all.  I want happy people who dislike drama and just want to get on in life, not bored, arrogant people who thrive on bullying and drama.  That’s not for me.  I don’t want that kind of attention.  I just want love, peace, getting on with my art, games, gardening and pets.  That’s all.  Boring I guess to a lot of people, but I would be very happy.

I am learning that a lot of things I thought I loved when I lived with my mother are actually things I was taught to love because she liked them.  Since moving away, on every context of my life, I am unrecognisable.  I don’t hold myself the same way anymore and I certainly don’t have the same voice anymore, strange I know, but even my voice has changed a lot!

There are a few things I wanted to be, do and have, when I lived with my mother, that I still want to be, do or have now; but not much of it. 

I still want to be a writer that gets her books published, but I understand that for now, it is best not to get published before Autumn of 2022, for certain personal reasons.

I still regard myself as bisexual, something that I have never been open about to any member of my blood family, due to stigma, my mother has a problem with gay people – she wouldn’t hurt them, but she is ridiculously avoidant of them and I have heard the kinds of things she says behind their backs!  The rest of the family are kind of open to homosexuality, but they are very Catholic too, so it is a stiff subject to rise with them.  Some of those family members will now most definitely know, because I know they read this blog.

Despite being sick, I have always wanted a homestead or a smallholding.  But I have to be realistic with what I can physically do, but I am trying hard to find a way in keeping to this dream, but working around the disabilities too.  I don’t have a big enough property yet, to do it, but I am researching a lot about chickens and food forest permaculture style gardening and that sort of thing.

I used to regard almost shamefully how much of a gamer I am, but these days I am starting to feel a part of a proud community of gamer nerds.  It is becoming cool to be a gamer nerd these days and it is a huge boost to my confidence about admitting to people my love for PC games in particular.

I also used to feel slightly ashamed at being a reader, because in my mother’s side of the family in particular, to be a reader, was regarded as weird as you admitting that you are a lifestyle Klingon who actively understands the whole of the Klingon dictionary!  Actually I know some Klingon words, an ex-online long-distance boyfriend of mine was a lifestyle Klingon who moved to USA and became pretty famous for it… so there you go!

I have always wanted to be a larper too, which is something that Paul has always wanted to be too, so we might do that together someday.

But there is a whole host of other stuff I never knew I liked before recently.  Really strange things that are even starting to raise Paul’s eyebrows in confusion as to…. Why is this interesting?  But I honestly can say, I don’t know why I am finding life of bacteria, soil health and microbiology so fascinating lately; as well as the entire lifecycle and habits of bees.  I also read a lot of books on cosmology and physics and this is puzzling to Paul because I can’t do math, don’t understand any of the maths involved in all of this and therefore only understand the non-mathematical parts of the stuff I am learning.  I have dyscalculia, it is dyslexia for math, and it has been confirmed professionally by the OU.

I have been thinking about joining SkillShare to see if there are videos that would help someone like me learn math to as high as I possibly can despite this problem.  But I won’t be able to afford that for a while, until the debts have been bought down a bit.

I don’t know why I want to learn math, especially as I don’t really plan to do anything with it, other than learn stuff I don’t really need to learn because I won’t have a career in microbiology any time soon.  But it is fun stuff the bits I do understand.

I am very geeky, I admit it.  But there you go.

Another thing my family will not recognise is my eating habits.  I don’t eat like how I used to because of medical reasons.  I can’t eat lactose (dairy) at all unless it is vegan, because my stomach can process it anymore.  I shouldn’t eat gluten (wheat) because it irritates my skin and asthma, but I do slip that in more than I should and I should avoid eating more than 2 eggs a week.  Because all of this can aggravate my problems; my main diet looks like this – 70% vegetables and the rest meat or fruit.  I have less than half a plate of my usual dinner size meal per day, for the whole day.  This is regarding what my mother would expect.  When I lived with my mother it was normal to consume 4500 calories per day – since cutting out a lot of the allergen foods and because of my illness, I can barely manage 1500 calories most days.  I am on high doses of most vitamins and minerals because I can’t process a lot of them.

My mother would think I am starving to death if she saw me eating 1 chicken fillet with a Mediterranean style salad and 2 roast potato halves, which is my usual meal and often only meal of the day.  Because I just can’t physically cope with more than that anymore.  Weirdly, I am just not losing weight, but I am losing inches.

Funnily enough doctors aren’t too worried about this because according to blood tests, my iron is the best levels they’ve ever been my whole life, lately!  I used to have constant anaemia when I lived with my mother and even was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease called pernicious anaemia too.  I have problems with B vitamins or something, which is now worse because of the lack of gluten in my diet, bread is rich in vitamin B, but I can’t have normal bread.

The new me is becoming very different to how I imagined I would be.  A lot of the things I thought were my deepest desires are now considered things I no longer want.  I wanted a large family, but because the cosmos has contrived to make my family as tiny as possible I have gave up fighting for it and no longer want any more children.  I never wanted to live in a rural area, I always wanted to be a suburban homesteader, but now I want to be as rural as I can get, whilst maintaining at least an hours journey from a major British city, London or Manchester.

I never wanted to become vegan, but I have to say, that my body is doing better with a plant based diet than not – though I am not giving up meat anytime soon, just yet.  But I am surprised that my diet is literally 75% plants, whereas before, it was around 20%

I am having a problem with sugar lately and I am finding candies less enjoyable than berries and vegan vanilla ice-cream.

All these are in my opinion are major changes.

I had very little respect for certain types of art and music and now I love them and will even fight for them.

I am becoming so very, very different; it is both exciting and scary!

I am shocked at who I am becoming.

Thank you for reading.

Confessions and rants

I have a couple of horrible confessions to make! 

The reasons why I have not been producing new blog posts, especially during lock-down is because I find it hard to write at all when my son is home from school, because he is very demanding and unforgiving regarding my work.

Another reason is because I moved my computer again, because my old desk broke and I have a new one that is very uncomfortable and it took me ages to get used to typing again at different angles. 

My health has never fully recovered from the ‘supposed’ bronchitis I had at Christmas, which Paul and I suspects was probably one of the UK’s first ever Covid19 cases, because it was particularly bad and is still partly with me.

But ultimately, people have gone crazy during lock-down and I am finding it hard to be active on social media recently – the drama llamas, the ‘I am so much more special than everyone else and suffering more than anyone else in this lock-down fiasco’ attitude, I have virtually lived in lock-down all my life, so I find it very grating!  I am also very frustrated because of lock-down, because most of my life I have been forced into isolation and it has been only for the last five years I have been truly free to do whatever I want, only for fate to take over and decide that I am going into isolation again – the story of my fucking life!

Whoever created me is determined to make sure I don’t have a full and happy social life.

I keep getting the feeling it wants me to reside myself to that and I don’t want to.

Because I knew my posts would be mostly ranting about how hard done by I am regarding the fates, I haven’t posted until now.

Poor excuses I know and I have had writer friends email me on Facebook telling me that this is a prime opportunity for me to post on my blog as there is a wider community ready to read my stuff because of sheer lock-down boredom, I didn’t take the bait, but since lock-down is loosening in the UK and various British social media posts are becoming (if at all possible) a little saner I feel I can go back onto social media without losing my mind too.

But I have to say it – lock-down has been fantastic really, especially in the creative community.  The entertainment community has vastly improved in my opinion, the innovation that lock-down has caused has been amazing.  Also, people of my generation and younger are actually starting to care more about other people and are actually getting off their arses to learn how to fucking cook and sew, which is great and a skill everyone should have, not just because they’re bored!  I mean come on, for thousands of years women have cooked from scratch and made their families clothing, why is it that in the past fifty years it’s been different?  Laziness that’s why!  Don’t you dare attack me for these statement feminists, it’s great to be a feminist and all of that, but you got to know how to bake a fucking cake for Christ’s sake!

You have got to know how to feed and clothe your family if the system falls down – take a leaf from the scout’s book – ‘BE PREPARED’!  What good is it that your nails are nicely manicured and painted and you slag off men – if in the crux of a societal meltdown you’re burning your house down to feed your family and you’re dying of the nuclear winter because your sewing and/or creative skills are non-existent? 

Take a moment to think on that please.  I hope lock-down due to Covid-19 has shown people that nothing is permanent and everything can falter, hugely at any given moment, I think this is a valuable lesson to show people to not divert away from too much traditional housekeeping.  Remember, as a woman you should be proud of your heritage more than men, because ultimately you keep men going by feeding them, clothing them and keeping their families together!  That’s powerful and the feminists I know don’t see the power that women REALLY do have with the traditional aspects of our cultures.  It’s a shame many traditional skills are being lost because of this illusion that to know how to cook and sew means you’re not being valued as an equal member of society, it’s a stupid illusion and needs to fucking change!

Update 13th January 2018

Hardly any writing done for anything has been done this week due to the fact that I’ve had a very painful and persistent ear infection again and a slight cold.  I found out in more depths what is wrong with me, what is wrong with my immune system though I am still being investigated for suspected two or three other things that are more severe, I won’t know the outcome of these tests for another three months at least.  But part of the parcel of why my immune system is weak is because of the pernicious anaemia I’ve had since I was a young teenager (nobody really bothered to explain to me what that is, I presumed (like my mother) that is was just chronic anaemia, but it is more than that).  Pernicious anaemia can cause deficiencies in the body and can affect the lining of the stomach and the whole digestive system if left untreated, triggering irritable bowel syndrome eventually.

Because my mother never really bothered to pay attention to doctors or ask them questions we just made our presumptions and this has developed into reflux and irritable bowel syndrome causing me to have intolerances these days that are so severe I have to completely avoid lactose and egg, though I can nibble a little at gluten without too much problems now I have solicited a fodmap diet to eliminate IBS triggers and I am getting a little bit better for it.  I can eat a small amount of gluten twice a week, but I do try and stay away from it as much as possible so not to trigger a bigger reaction like I used to have.  The other suspicions are still suspicions regarding the spleen, chrohns disease and inflammatory bowel disease which is entirely different to IBS.  Fodmap diet means I have to eliminate foods that I think would not be harmful to IBS; I have found it astounding the types of food to avoid because it triggers a response in the digestive system to play up.  Foods such as apples all high fructose foods and cruciferous vegetables, which is a shame as red apples and broccoli form part of my staple.

On a positive note I have heard rumors from a lot of people that if I have a very tightly regimented fodmap diet high in blueberries and soya and probiotics then I could effectively cure my IBS within a few months.

My husband is very supportive about this new diet change and has even adopted a household approach to eating healthier and lowering everybody’s risk of developing a digestive disorder, though he hasn’t cut out lactose and gluten for him and Henry as they don’t need to.  We are now eating more fish, chicken and rice than we used to and we ate more of that than an average British family before this anyway!  Our diet now resembles more Mediterranean meets the Caribbean, which makes me happier anyway, never did have the British palate.

Now instead of potatoes with bland steamed vegetables and sausages, we now only have that rarely say once every couple of months and now our more usual diet is rice mixed with tomatoes, sweetcorn, peas and basil with salmon and a small Greek salad (no cheese or olives due to triggers).  Our idea of a Greek salad is rocket, spinach, red onion, sweetcorn, red peppers, and cucumbers, tomatoes, on average with the occasional chopped avocado or beetroot (but that is a sparse addition).  Our usual puddings after dinner is now coconut & raspberry jam gluten free cake with custard or skip it until an hour later where we have popcorn or honey nuts.

Our most British dinner is the chicken Sunday roast with gluten free alternatives for Yorkshire puddings, stuffing and gravy.

Our most likely weekend breakfast is kippers with tomatoes and gluten free bread, weekday breakfast porridge alternating with fruits on it, cinnamon or various flavours of jam.

Usual snacks need to be amended because I go for nuts and salt and vinegar crisps, which vinegar is a trigger, but it is hard to find gluten free and lactose free snacks that are off the fodmap.  So I tend to go hungry a lot of the time these days, particularly as I never feel hungry at breakfast or lunch so often skip those dinners and I don’t have a large one at the end of the day anymore because I simply can’t eat big anymore, my stomach just can’t cope with anything bigger than a large jacket potato with tuna in regards to meal size.

I am losing a lot of weight since going on the FodMap diet; I have lost almost a stone in weight in 10 days and I don’t recommend how you can do it, because for a lot of the time I am starving hungry, but have no room in the stomach for anything else it is strange.

So that’s an update on little ol me.

British Landscapes

Willows lining the rivers, poplar lining the fields
A dream of British landscapes
A joy that overfills
Long and winding roads
And undulating fields and hills
Brings peace to mankind
And many summer thrills
When evening comes to settle
See the sunset in the sky
Dreaming of British landscapes
The beauty makes us sigh