Thursday 17 March 2016

The Trip part 2 - On 'baragens' and baguettes.

Upon arrival at Faro airport I was greeted with a blast of warm air as I went through the doors. I stopped for a second and lifted my head, considering just stopping there for the hour or so that I had until boarding. I was far from cold after the walk to the terminal, but there was something just comforting about heating and I had had a reasonably stressful morning so far. With two flights and a trip across London still to go that day, a bit of time soaking up the heat seemed fair...

Straight in front of me was a queue. This was difficult to miss as the construction work appeared to have turned the terminal into a giant cardboard box park. Every pillar was surrounded by a (probably plasterboard) box and more 'boxes' nestled against the edges and corners everywhere. Last time I had been in the airport, the departures area (Faro is not big enough to boast such a thing as multiple terminals) was a large hall in the form of an 'L'. This time an odd sort of claustrophobic bigness pervades the area as you can't see two feet in front of you, but all those corners and corridors must go somewhere...

Departures was empty apart from this queue, so I got on the end in the assumption that it must be for my flight. I have not flown by anyone but EasyJet for some time and was not at all sure what the procedure was for posh non-economy flights. I spent some time debating whether to put my Hello Kitty backpack in the hold or not, but I had a connection to make and no idea how that all works. Based on the fact that I was only staying one night and if they lost the bag, or transferred it to Timbuktu, I would be home again probably before they even found it, I decided to keep hold of it.




Soon I was through to the departure lounge. I had a window seat and was quite excited about being childfree and flying by day. I was on seat 21A and imagine my delight when I finally sat down to discover that I was staring out over the wing. My trip was therefore spent craning forward to see as much as possible in front of the wing, or twisting backward to look out of the window behind me. Another flight might not have been worth the effort but I always find flying over Portugal enthralling. As we left the ground I was struck, as always by the beauty and the character of my adopted homeland.

Faro is the biggest metropolitan area in the Algarve, and the administrational hub. It is the district capital of an area that covers 5000km² with over 450,000 inhabitants and 10 million tourists visiting every year. The population is 47,000, roughly equal to Inverness, Scotland. As I looked down upon it I was fooled for a second by the marina. The marina and the boats are a significant part of the town centre and it looks like it's quite a size before you remember that the boats in it are all fishing boats and dinghys. The marina is accessed by going under the railway line so only the small stuff can get in.



We were quite low as we flew over Olhão, another fair size town by Algarvean standards. The tiny white chips of houses cluster together, looking rather like God dropped the chalk when he was designing the land and it shattered, leaving crumbled debris and a smudge of chalk dust. Further up and further in the ripples start in the landscape. We don't have anything quite as grand as a real, rocky mountain down in the Algarve, the highest point is a mere 900m, just about poking through the southernmost clouds, but the land just kind of crumples up, culminating in a modest ridge across the northern border, separating us from the vast empty flatlands of the Alentejo. The picture that comes to my mind is of a silk scarf, carelessly dropped to the floor and falling in mini peaks and troughs until it flattens out at either end. The hills look smooth enough to stroke from my lofty vantage point.

Now we were high up and moving fast. I spent my time marveling at the 'baragens', the huge (by Portuguese standards, anyway) dams built across the rivers to water a growing population. My eye would follow a snake of blackish blue along until suddenly it got wider, as if a bit had got cut out when turning the page from one map to the next. The smooth ribbon becomes a monster with fingers probing and prodding the hills around it. Squat and wide, long and twisty, they sit over the landscape like a fungus, swallowing up roads and villages and making fan shapes like coral under a blue sea of sky. We finally made it to a snowy topped mountain range which research tells me was probably the French/Spanish border. After that the clouds took over and I saw no more until the Netherlands.



Wow, how different that was to the scruffy Iberian penisula. The land stretched uniformly to the sea with no natural boundaries in sight. Neat, straight roads ran to tidy towns. At the coast the land just ended in sea, making me wonder what makes the sea stop? In all that flatness it is hard to imagine that the river mouths and the ocean itself are more than 3 feet deep. The land looks somewhat like a cake baked in the oven, risen, leaving slight irregularities in height and shape, then carefully sliced just above the top of the tin to create a smooth plane on which to place the icing. I felt untidy just looking at it.

Amsterdam loomed, neatly, on the horizon. My excitement grew as we neared landing. Soon I would be in the Netherlands! I zipped up my bag and expectantly waited for the doors to open. And waited. And waited some more. It had just got to the point where I was wondering if we had actually landed at the wrong airport and were simply driving over to the next one when we finally started slowing down. I disembarked without drama and arrived in the airside lounge at Amsterdam Schipol. I was pretty hungry by now and set out to find a sandwich.

Eventually I gave up. There were a lot of beautiful shops, all neatly named for what they were selling. There was a 'Toys' shop, a 'Souvenirs' shop, an 'Electronics' shop, you get the picture. For this country gal from the very end of the known world, it was a bit of a culture shock. I browsed the toy shop (a lot, no, a LOT, of Miffy in various guises) and the electronics shop, in which there were bargain bins full of carelessly chucked boxes with (I'm sorry, I have to say it) neat signage advertising 'two for €49!'. My idea of a bargain bin is the eight square acres or seemingly so that the local supermarket dedicates to crates stacked in huge islands flagged '1€', 2€', right up to 10€ in the far distance. What I could not find (apart from change from a twenty) was anything useful to eat.

You may remember that I am on a diet. Being that I was on my way to a convention revolving around this diet, I thought I had better make a fair shot at sticking to it whilst away. Unfortunately, apart from a food hall taking up the entire upper floor, there was nothing for me to eat. The 'Food' shop boasted racks of cheeses, shelves of caviar, fridges full of carapaccio cod, smoked eel and deli sausage slices. All looking rather delicious, but the few things that I could actually eat without regretting it were out of my price range. I had two extra rolls stashed in my case that I had bought at Faro and I had been hoping to find something to stick in them, but the best compromise that I could find between expense and fat content was beef jerky. I would have been quite pleased about this, only the packet appeared to have five potato chip sized slices in. For +3€. I almost made it to the till with it, when I decided that I could just get a sandwich upstairs. 

This is not the easy job you would think, as I need something with a low fat filling such as ham. No sausage, egg or cheese. No tuna, chicken or seafood as it will inevitably come swimming in mayonnaise. No butter. No wholemeal bread. As it happened, I didn't get as far as looking too hard, as the signs above the baguettes wanted +6€ for one and the meals at Burger King were all at least 8€. I can get dinner out for that at home. In the end, I was so fed up with it all that I decided I wasn't that hungry anyway and I would go do the crossword puzzle. An hour remained until I could board the next 'plane.



Independence

Claudia wants a watch so she 'knows how fast she has to walk to get to school'. She is promised one for her birthday in a few weeks. Until then:
"As long as you leave by 8:30, you will have plenty of time to play at school. If you leave after then, I will take you." (It's 8:10)
"Well go get dressed then!"
I get ready. It's now 8:25. I go and sit at the pc. In she comes.
"I want to be at school by 8:30. Hurry up or we'll be late!"
This was not the agreement, but I am dressed so I get up. I start looking for the keys. They are not is any of the usual places and retracing yesterday's steps does not help.
"Mummy, I am going to school. I can't wait for you!" She goes to the front gate. "You should be ready!"
"I am ready, I just can't find the keys! How was I supposed to know that I wouldn't be able to find the keys??"
"You went on the computer. You know you shouldn't go on the computer until you're COMPLETELY ready!" And off she goes.

Although I am unnecessarily dressed, she has walked to school on her own by her own choice. Without the watch. I consider this a win.



Tuesday 15 March 2016

The Trip, part 1 - On sandbars and sunrises.

Well, hello again from the Other Side.
He he, how dramatic am I? Actually not as much as it sounds. I have had an extremely full weekend, parts of which have exhausted me, made me feel very uncomfortable, relaxed me in ways I didn't know I needed and made me think about my whole life and realise that I have to face some choices in my immediate future.
For those who didn't know, I have been to the UK this weekend. I have attended a Patient Expert Advisory Meeting, so there. There is material for multiple entries flying about in my head, so I will start with the Travelling.


My weekend started on Friday afternoon, with me stuffing my daughter's Hello Kitty bag and a sleeping bag into the back of my Corsa at 4.40pm, only ten minutes after the scheduled time. I had let my son in the house upon his return from school and he was happily surfing the net, which would be where he would still be when my husband got home an hour or so later, in spite of me telling him in no uncertain terms that he was to load the dishwasher before then. My daughter would be walking home from school at 5.50pm for only the second time. A note had been written to my husband apologising for not managing to cook the dinner and pointing him at the correct recipe for the ingredients I had at least managed to buy for it.

I was off to Faro, around an hour away by car if you didn't use the motorway. My friend was in hospital there and I thought it would be very convenient if I went to visit her that evening and then kipped in the car. My flight was at 9.20am, which meant that I should be at the airport by 7.30am, which would have meant leaving the house at 6.30am. Inspired by my husband's boys night out the week before, where he had slept it off in the back of his great big 4x4 wagon before driving home the next day, it all seemed like a bit of an adventure, really. So that is what I did. My friend was pleased to see me and the fags that I brought with me, and after the hospital finally kicked me out, I went over to the shopping mall for some food and a wander round. Armed an hour later with some ham, rolls, Coca-Cola, gummy sweets and a bottle of water, I returned to the car.

Faro sits on the very bottom of Portugal, on a delta of the Rio Formoso. The airport is built rather optimistically at the edge of the river itself, where it starts its uneasy transformation into sea proper. The only thing past it is nature reserve consisting of a marshlandic fight between land and water and at the very edge, a sandbar stretching out along the outer edge of the coastline. This sandbar is accessed via a straight, flat, road lifted a foot or so out of the grassy war land culminating in a straight, flat, bridge over the last stretch of undeniable waterway before the beach itself. The sandbar is almost surreal in its holiday feel. It is basically a strip of sand with a narrower strip of concrete stretching along its centre. The concrete has a road cutting it in two lengthways and houses, bars and apartments crouching along the boundaries either side, half on the beach itself. The third class of man that Jesus apparently forgot to mention in his housebuilding lecture was the greedy man, a group comprised of the real estate agent and the tourist, so desperate for that proximity to paradise and the resulting riches that it seems a good idea to build half on rock, half on sand, out on the 400m wide first barrier between the Atlantic ocean in all it's glory and the flat marshy mainland.


I was headed for the car park, right as you come off the bridge. It is frequented by the Algarve's favourite tourist, the campervanner, and surrounded by restaurants and cafés. I parked under a streetlamp, ate my ham rolls and hopped over the seat to ensconce myself in the four season professional sleeping bag that we had bought some years back whilst living in a tent for a while. I set the alarm on my phone for 6.45am, just to be on the safe side, and snuggled down.


The next morning I awakened at 6.30am. I had forgotten that it's hard to sleep past a sunrise when in a car. I quickly donned a top and reluctantly undid the sleeping bag to let my legging clad legs out into the morning air. It was a little on the nippy side, I may be in Portugal, but it is only March and I'm on the coast. I reach over to grab the keys, and in one fluid motion, exit the bag, step over into the front and slide down the driver's seat whilst putting the key in the ignition and turning it. Nothing happened. Perplexed, I turned the key again before my eye fell on the lightswitch. I had left the headlights on last night and now the battery was as dead as the proverbial dodo. 'O bother,' I thought. 'That's inconvenient.' I looked around at the closed campervans and the deserted cafés. 6.30am on a Saturday out of season is not a good time for muscle-clad Mediterranean men bearing jump leads. My phone had run out of battery in the night for some inexplicable reason and who was I going to be calling anyway? I still had to be at the airport in less than an hour and no-one that I knew was going to be getting to me before that. I stepped out of the car and regarded the mainland. I could just about make out the air control tower and I knew that it was walkable. I just didn't know how long it would take. I went round to the other side of the car and pulled the bag out. As it came I noticed a pair of old trainers under the seat. The sole had worn through and they had been replaced but, I thought, they were still an improvement on the high heels I was currently sporting. I changed into them and hefted the bag onto my back. At least I was only away for one night and had packed accordingly.

Before I left, I stood on the beach, staring out across the sea to the south. The sun had just risen and the sky was pink. The sea was the colour of white under a UV lamp in a nightclub and, still as glass with just the occasional swish of a wave hitting the beach, it shone brighter than the sky. For that second, I felt connected to the earth through the sand that I could feel in too much detail through the thin soles of my red shoes. I turned, and after a last check that all the doors were locked on my unfortunate little car, I started out for the mainland. As I walked along the road, across the bridge and towards the odd coastal forests that abound in that part of the world, with sandy floors and trees with ball-like leaf formations on the branches, the rising sun was in front of me and to the right. Its reflection shone up from the water and the island beach seemed to float on the pale surface. There were no sounds, no traffic, no people, and slightly unnervingly, no 'planes. For a moment I was looking in the face of God and He was looking back, gifting me this time of communion with Him and with the the world that He gave us. This was the calm before the storm and I held on to the feeling a few times in the next couple of days.


It took me about 35 minutes to walk back up the road to the airport. The road is, as said before, straight, with only a few gentle curves to accommodate the end of the runway. After I reached the land proper, I could make out a trail along the edge of the tarmac and I knew that this was a well travelled route by foot and that I would be fine. I eventually came up to the roundabout that marks the entry road to the terminal. I dashed across the main road, ignoring the cyclists' bridge with it's eight shallow ramps leading up and down either side, which I'm fairly certain would have doubled my journey, and trudged across the car parks before finally finding the entrance amongst the fencing and boarded off areas of the reconstruction that has been going on for years. I was ready to fly.


Friday 11 March 2016

Mornings

8:30am: I stride across the living room in my silk negligée(!), holding my furry cowprint dressing gown over my head like a sail, singing "it's time to go to school now" to the Muppet Show theme tune.
Claudia sings back "then why aren't you dressed?"
I stop and stare at her. "Can't I go like this?" I enquire.
She looks at me for a long moment, trying to decide where to go with this. She knows that the wrong thing might actually make me take her as I am.
In the end she goes for "Do you want to go like that?" in a very grown up tone.
I laugh and go into my bedroom.
Well played, Cláudia, well played.



Thursday 10 March 2016

Escaping the fug - On adventure and unpaid bills.

Gosh, where does the time go? I was aiming to post every five days or so, and it's been weeks. Rest assured that the blog is not the only thing suffering though, I went to update my food diary the other day to discover I had to remember over a week's worth of meals and snacks.

On Saturday I am going on an adventure. A pharmaceutical company has invited me and some of my fellow sufferers to a meeting to discuss, well, everything, I think. I will be flying to London and staying over one night, without husband or children. I am really much more excited than is reasonable. Funnily enough, I decided to go on this diet stint just before I received the invitation. It couldn't have come at a better time, as I now have some detailed information and theories to share with them all.



I can't help but feel a bit of a fraud sometimes, as I really don't seem to 'suffer' in the same way as many of these lovely people I am going to meet. Did you know that there actually exists a gene therapy for our condition? It is, however, quite expensive to administer and therefore only available to those who find themselves frequently hospitalised by pancreatitis. Not me then. The last time I ended up in hospital with a LPLD related problem, other than after a miscarriage a few years ago, was when I was two and they were still working out what I had wrong. I gradually fell further and further away from the diet limits until I ate no differently to a regular person. Admittedly a health conscious fat avoiding on a vague scale person, but put it this way, I never ticked the 'special dietary requirements' box on any invites.



I was discussing this with my girlfriends this week over a tosta. I had been very good the day before and again the next day, so I splashed out on a toasted ham and cheese sandwich for my lunch out with friends. One friend exclaims at the amount of butter that the bread has on it. Why, she wants to know, have I not just asked for it without? I explain that I would rather eat cardboard than a dry toasted sandwich, as it would be cheaper and pretty much the same in taste. I also point out that just by eating the ham (2g of fat) the bread (2g of fat) and the cheese (6g of fat) I have reached half of my daily allowance and have limited myself to a fat free option for dinner, so I might as well add the 8 odd grams of fat that the butter has and actually enjoy one meal in the day. When your daily allowance is 70g, the low fat option is still usually more than my daily allowance.  No-one seems to be able to grasp the LOW low fat concept. I find it easier to just order the lowest fat thing I can find and only eat half if it comes to it.



I have noticed in this last month of dieting, graphs, data entry and occasional relapses, that I do have more symptoms than I had realised. In the same way that you don't notice the weight of your long hair until you get it all cut off, I hadn't realised that I was just in the middle of all the symptoms all the time. The tiredness, which was the key factor in my decision to diet, has more or less gone. I will never be able to stay up until midnight every night, it's just not who I am, but after about a week or so, I haven't had to take a nap during the day. And I am a lot less familiar with the bathroom. This in itself has probably helped the tiredness, as I used to be up multiple times in the night for a bathroom visit.



I fell off the wagon spectacularly last week at a friend's birthday party. We were at a traditional Portuguese local haunt, not a tourist salad in sight and I knew there was nothing I could eat on the menu. On that basis, I ordered my favourite thing, belly pork. It took 24 hours, but I then paid for that meal for three days. When I came to put it in my graphs I calculated I had eaten around 150g of fat that day. Right, I thought, I need to never go that far over in one go again! I guess, because I had so much at once, it just went straight through. Monday was my birthday and there was cake. I won't bore you with the details, but it added up to about 60 g of fat. That, apparently, does not exact a bathroom related price, but for the next couple of days I was so tired I had to nap again. I guess when I overdo it, but not by so much, my body actually attempts to do something with it, resulting in a traffic jam and a general shut down of systems until the streets are cleared again.



I can't wait to talk to the other 'sufferers'. I want to know how they get around the energy intake thing. I want to know if they have any good recipes around the 10g fat mark. I want to know if they take supplements and what they eat for snacks. I want to know if any of them are as terrified of getting diabetes as I am. And how they eat on a budget. The company have given us some questions to think about, most of which I have been covering in this blog. The one that has caught my eye is to write a letter to my LPLD telling it everything I want to say. Well, that should give me something to do on the 'plane. I wonder how that will turn out.......
Stay tuned.

Monday 7 March 2016

In the top ten experiences of my life:

When I picked my 8yr old up from school today she asked whether we could go to a store please.
"What store? Why?" I ask.
"I just want to get a little something."
"Ok, I suppose we could walk round to the Chinese store (kinda like a £ store) when we get back."
Once at the store, Claudia pretends to wander around looking at stuff. Everything I pick up and comment on as we walk round she pounces on as I put down and checks out how much it is. I make a point of noticing 3 or 4 things that I particularly like. After a while I ask her if she's found anything she wants.
"How much can I spend?" She asks.
"Well, it depends what you're getting and why." I answer.
She looks pained. I am trying not to laugh by this point. After a few minutes I say, offhand, that 10 euros seems like it would be the most she should spend, but she could spend less. The important thing is how much a thing is liked, not how much it cost.
"Hum. It's so difficult to decide!"
"I know. I really liked those scarves, but can't decide which colour. And I liked those tops, but you didn't seem into them. But we both really liked those leggings, didn't we?"
More agonized indecision.
"Claudia, can I give you the 10 euros and go and sit outside and wait for you? Do you mind?"
Sunshine breaks across her face. Yes, that's a great idea. I go outside and window shop for a few minutes. Eventually she comes out with a carrier bag. She gives me the change. We walk home without comment.
When we get home, she theatrically gives me the bag.
"Happy birthday, Mummy!"
Lo and behold, she has bought the leggings.
I look at her and laugh. "Thank you, darling." I say. "Your father really is useless, isn't he?"



Sunday 6 March 2016

Not always eye to eye. But always heart to heart.

What can I say about Mothering Sunday?
A pair of swallows are busy building a nest under my porch and as they flit by I try to think of something meaningful about nesting and protectiveness. Nope.
My usual research sources are piping on about pagan festivals on the one hand and on the other, something convoluted about gaining freedom through the Mother Church. Nope.


Being a mother is not something I wish to celebrate just once a year. Having a mother is also not a once a year type of thing. I understand the origins of coming home to one’s mother church once a year and seeing family, but nowadays we have birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, bank and school holidays. Not to mention the good old internet. Even the great mother figures of Christianity have their own saint days. Nope.
So what should Mothering Sunday be? I would rather spend 5 minutes of every day, or even 30 minutes a week, telling my mother I love her. I prize the tea made for me when I was ill or the way my daughter always lets me have her orange smarties far more than the card Daddy made them draw under threat of no TV the night before. I read today about one company offering hug-a-grams for those kids who can’t make it home. I know what a stranger turning up at my door and trying to hug me would get. And it’s not a cup of tea.
What I’m trying to say, is don’t do it for the sake of it. Think about your relationship. If you must join the circus, then be pro-active. Use today as an opportunity to schedule a visit or a call. Maybe, if those rascals don’t call you enough, take the initiative and call them. Or maybe, if you’re in my camp, take a moment to think that the symbolism of special days can be very important to some people and that your mum might be one of them. And get her some flowers!