Crunch time

I’m angry, restless, irritable. I picked up M____ in the car some time back and driving there I was thinking the end has to come soon. I have been so aware of being around her unable to think of anything to say, and today cleaning my room and counting down the time until I would have to pick her up I was so angry at the time I am wasting to her being around. Driving back too, she told me it would be a hard week because I would have to drop her off most mornings, including tomorrow, though she normally lets me off weekends (she is ill), and I thought about how that means that she won’t be working in the evenings and I will feel compelled to be with her, saying nothing and aware of my own failings, and that I will be unable to get down to anything productive.

Maybe it’s the Capryllic acid I’m taking at the moment. Maybe its ‘die off reactions’ but I feel awful, and can’t cope with this. I need my life back. This relationship is giving me so little compares to what it seems to take away. I have nothing to say to M____ and all I’m doing is forcing myself to be sociable so much. I can’t deal with it. I don’t want to let her down, but it shouldn’t be such a big deal. It’s only because she can’t cope on her own that I feel so guilty about thinking this.

But it’s late, and I have to be up in the morning!

29/08/07

I came back today a little knackered having ridden around all day on M____’s bike - I dropped off my car this morning with my Dad to give it the once over before having it MOTed. It was on then to a day servicing one of the old wagons with Colin. I had been enjoying this kind of work as a break from the old routine up until not long ago, but it is really beginning to drag now having become a routine itself and with my increasing realisation I am doing a job which wastes my intellect and in many ways doesn’t play on my strengths at all. And which, of course, pays abysmally. At almost thirty I’m still unfamiliar with the world, and even my own country, and should really be having far more experiences. A little extra cash would also go a long way. I am starting to feel the need to move on again. More

Being listened to

I was getting increasingly stressed and had the feeling I wasn’t coping at all in the weeks before I saw a dietician for the first time on the 6th of August. I was going in to work telling myself I must see the nurse, even making notes to self in my phone to do so and not getting round to it. I was having reveries of telling my boss to fuck off and stick his job and they seemed to be becoming increasingly regular or increasingly intrusive. I was angry all the time, and increasingly aware that I wasn’t taken seriously at work nor respected, and that things weren’t going so well outside of work. We had moved house, and I was doing all the cooking and trying to wort a few things out, buy things for the place and kit it out, and I wasn’t having time for writing at all. I was snappy and didn’t want to be around people.

It was a terrible bloody day.  I had been keeping a food diary for a couple of weeks, on paper, because we haven’t had the internet installed yet and my dietician would need a paper copy which I wouldn’t have got round to if I had first written it down on paper or onto my blog, and I had been counting up the days I hadn’t drank any alcohol, nor caffeine, and so on. Doing so made it very clear how important these things are for me, not drinking caffeine, and avoiding alcohol. I had slipped a couple of times with caffeine, and once with alcohol, having a pint at lunchtime at work with some people I rarely see, and both times it had really knocked me about for a couple of days. Suffice to say I hadn’t really drank much alcohol for a good few weeks, just a pint or a half here and there. And then we had a barbecue. It was my turn to be host - and it must be said that as anti-social as I am, I enjoy being a host, not exactly being the centre of attention but kind of setting the pace and keeping myself busy, especially with a barbecue. Predictably, I didn’t manage to stay off the alcohol, and convinced myself, once again, that vodka would be ok. In a way it was for a good while, until once everyone had gone (at least, I think I lasted that long) and it really all hit me at once.

M____’s mum was over. It was a barbecue for her, but also a housewarming. Only her Polish friends hadn’t come over, letting her down despite knowing a month in advance that her mum would be over.

In any case, the next day I had the worst possible hangover, and was barely able to move. I did little but look at page3.com and drive my boss about a couple of times all day. Except that lunchtime dietician’s appointment.

I turned up in the carpark, my car smelling of partly composted grass from the load of bags full of the stuff I had offered to take to the tip, and worried that I recognised the car in the corner as belonging to one of the women at work who I’ve had a few reveries about and had bitched about that day as being both condescending and hypersensitive - she, after all, has a number of food intolerances. It was one of these complexes with several anonymous buildings fenced off and notes on doors saying to use other door, door round corner etc.

I finally found the place and sat down trying to hold back the reveries about seeing supercilious medicos and finding they don’t listen at all, getting angry and walking out and the like. I picked Bleak House out of my bag but of course couldn’t read more than a sentence or two.

Finally, she called me through.

She listened. I introduced myself and said that, though I have not been diagnosed, I consider that I satisfy all the diagnostic criteria of both ADD and Asperger’s syndrome. And she agreed with me that my psychiatrist is wrong to say that if I was ADD I would have been diagnosed at school.

I found I was talking quickly, just like I always do sat in front of my shrink.

She then talked me through an exclusion diet. I would be excluding a lot of things of course to confirm first of all that food affects my symptoms. It would be a restricted diet that could not in any way be recommended as a permanent solution. Following this, foods would be reintroduced one after another for a three day period in order to check whether they triggered any symptoms. If they did they would be rechecked after all the others had been checked or eliminated.

In addition to being gluten free and dairy free, I would not be allowed onions, potatoes, beans and pulses, nuts and corn.

I wondered about a couple of things. First of all the fact that I would be allowed any quantity of any kind of fresh fruit seemed to exclude this being a diet which could check for candida. Secondly, I had read that there are food families, and that should, say, potato be excluded then aubergine should as well.

Nonetheless, it seemed a positive thing. I would have a structured diet, and an incentive to follow it for a set period of time. I hoped, and I hope, that this will help me to better conform to those aspect of the diet that I was already trying, mainly unsuccessfully, to follow, and to those additional aspects of it.

Thus far I have not began the diet. I have indeed conformed to the no alcohol, no caffeine, no gluten nor dairy part of the deal, but in using up some old frozen meals and making a couple of things I had bought ingredients for, and indeed in conforming to this part of the diet to a fuller extent in transition to the exclusion diet, but have figured that I need a little more preparation yet to make the full switch.

Over the last few days, on my own in the new house with M____ flying back to Poland with her Mum, I have worried that though diet is a large contributory factor to my problems, however well I eat it will be no panacea. I have been eating pretty well, with perhaps medium-high GI dishes (lovely vegetable curries with gram flour pancakes, for example) but still finding that I’m having pretty intrusive and often angry reveries. More than once I have needed to go and do some vigorous exercise, some shadow boxing and the like to try and get it out of my system. In fact today or yesterday I started to worry, comparing myself to J D Salinger who I have always believed to have a temperament very similar to my own (granted every adolescent believes this, but I do tend to feel that carefull exegesis of certain passages in Catcher and elsewhere in his oevre demonstrates a tendency towards ADD and perhaps Asperger’s to a degree little less than the evidence Kay Redfield Jamison amasses in Touched with Fire demonstrates the bipolarity of the personalities she discusses). Salinger is of course a famous recluse, and in articles I will soon post elsewhere, I will discuss my own tendencies in this regard. He also is prone, according to some reports, to be attracted to many and varied methods of healing, many of which it is safe to say, have not been submitted to peer review. I have always been subject to crises of confidence regarding my diets, mainly perhaps due to the blank faces, scepticism and suspicion I meet when I describe my problems those few times I trust people enough to bother to do so at all, and this was one such.

Still, it is fantastic to have somebody simply listen.

On leaving, she even told me about a friend of hers who has been diagnosed as Aspergic in his late thirties. This guy had been very academic, getting a clutch of A-levels and the like and going into computers. Only his employers referred him to a counsellor for problems he was having at work. Bingo.

We chatted for a little while in fact before I left. All in all it was a good day. M____ rang to ask how it had went. I thnk she was glad finally to hear something positive, that something had gone well.

So, fingers crossed!

Correcting your mistakes/I love mustard

I’m not a big one for watching TV, but there are some shows I have a weakness for, and I must say that though I usually abhor any phenomenon that crops up, proves popular and becomes foil for coked-up commissioning editors to proliferate - like antiques shows, DIY shows and property shows - I am glad that cooking programmes have proven to have an enduring apeal. I watch Ready Steady Cook and can really wind down to it, something that is rare for me.

I was watching one such on Saturday while taking a break from Checkmate, a story I have had in mind for a good few years and which could form part of a collection, Labour in Vain which could predate Family Fortunes and introduce some of the characters, notably Hippie.

There was a chef on the programme, an ozzie fella I’ve seen before. I can’t remember too well what he was cooking, exept that I think it may have involved salsa verde, something I have seen in more than one such programme recently, and that he said something which struck me as very true.

“A lot of cooking is about learning to correct your mistakes.”

Me and M____ made a Goulash the other day from a recipe her mum sent her by text message. Quite aside from this it was also an example of too many cooks. It didn’t go well. We cooked it in our new pressure cooker and followed the recipe, but of course, it was nothing like her mother’s (she is an excellent cook). Indeed, it was pretty tasteless.

Still, we’d put decent beef in it and however appetising it was it seemed a shame to throw it away. So the other day I fried a few onions with finely chopped red pepper, mustard powder and paprika, with white wine vinegar and a little soy sauce, and added them to the goulash, heating it and reducing it a little to add the flavour. It worked!

I’ve still got plenty to learn, but there are days I can pull something off and still enjoy my food, and eat right too. And when it does, I really feel good. In fact, since recently I have gone running a couple of times before work, I am reminded of John Irving’s Garp, who writes, runs and cooks because when one isn’t going well another is. I’m getting to feel that way.

Oh, and I have discovered how much I love mustard, hence the second title of the post, to offset that negative post a while back about how I love cheese.

I haven’t posted for a while with moving to the new house and having no internet etc. I’ve had my ups and downs. I started having some really angry reveries, particularly after eating some sugary cereals, and couldn’t be around people after trying to reintroduce some yeast-free soda bread, but over the last few days I’ve been feeling great - caffein-free and alcohol-free for a good while now, and following the diet, with very little fruit. Dietician next week, and crossed fingers he won’t be another useless nincompoop!

I love cheese!

M_____’s working all day and so there’s not so much pressure of time. A friend rang a couple of hours ago seeing if I wanted to go out tonight. I don’t, really, I went out yesterday, haven’t written anything much aside from this damn blog for weeks, I’m going away for a week to camp in rain-drenched Britain with two of the most passive students, and tomorrow will be more shopping for the house. Still, I’ve quite a bit of time today otherwise, and certainly relative to the last few weeks it’s a bit of breathing space. Now, I hate shopping and resent any time spent doing it, and so I forever try to buy a big shop and plan for several dishes. The only problem with that is that whenever I cook something I cook for several days, which means that even if I wanted to - and most often I imagine I would not - I could not cook all of these dishes before the veg I buy goes off. Consequently while I’m still living with my parents they nag me constantly, and all my plans go to waste. I still end up with as much surplus veg as I do when I don’t plan anything at all and just grab whatever comes to mind when I go shopping - this is the story of my life, that attempts at organisation fail. In any case, I ended up with lots of tomatoes this time, having used up whatever veg I had left for various planned-for meals in a Chinese stir fry which went reasonably well yesterday (aside from the fact that as usual, I added too much corn-flour into the marinate and it all looked rather muddy). Consequently I decided to try and make something that M____’s mum makes all the time, that is, what she calls Lecho. This is essentially a sauce made from tomatoes and peppers reduced in their own juice with onions, cumin, and often salami, an egg added at the last moment and stirred in, and served with bread or potatoes. I chose to serve it with quinoa - I have decided recently that I have been eating far too much in terms of carbs, and need to monitor this, especially in terms of potatoes. Mum had gone into town or Mardy Hell or somewhere shopping and promised to pick up some salami. This was several hours before I began to cook but she had not yet appeared - she has done so now and says it was an absolute nightmare. Still, by this time not wanting to settle down to eat something so thin and short on protein and substance, I figured I would try the other item that has been sitting unused in my fridge since I bought it a few weeks ago, that is, Tofu. Now, as a rule I don’t use much soya. It is an immensely overesteemed product, nutritionally speaking, but reading the label and seeing that it recommended it not only for stir frys but also for soups, I took it out, prepared it as per instructions, and added it to the bubbling lecho.

What I was left with after perhaps an hour of chopping while listening to Gary Steyngard’s Absurdistan on my MP3 player, was perhaps nutritionally acceptable, but no feast for the palate.

I used to enjoy cooking and serving up my food, as I did almost every day for the students at work. Even the most demanding students enjoyed my food. It was rich and satisfying. Once or twice I didn’t quite pull it off but it was never bad. Now I have to relearn everything I learned at university pouring over recipe books and trying out different things. nd often I really don’t pull it off. The ingredients I have to work with just don’t seem so inspiring. That and I’m left drinking sparkling water at the pub.

The trouble is I can resign myself to having to work harder than most people, to having to make everything from scratch. I just wonder whether I’ll be consigned with food to an analogue of what I disgussed yesterday, to not making the grade despite all my efforts. Not making the grade of my own palette, and not making the grade in terms of cooking for others and satisfying them, which is a read pleasure - I like being the host.

Maybe those days only a year and a half ago, when I had not yet explored my own problems so much, when I was cooking with expensive organic produce for myself and others, grating blocks of cheese into the mash of a shepherd’s pie with organic baked beans or risotto made with home-made chicken stock, were the peak in terms of my relationship with food.

I hope not. I’ll keep on trying, but it is hard to motivate yourself. Especially when that need to cook for several days means you have to get through a backlog of unappetising schlop.

Already not coping

Close to tears. I’ve just come back from Mardy Hell, the huge shopping centre near here built on an old steel works. Ate in Burger King(!) having had little all day, and I’m on a real come-down from a social binge yesterday.

I had a lovely week in Poland with M____’s parents and lots of old friends. Drank a lot and had a good time. I daydreamed a lot, but not as much as I might have. I even started to think again, as in Italy, that perhaps much of my problems have gone away having taken a tablet a month or so, or more, back that time I was searching around for ADHD remedies on the internet. It was an anti-fungal preparation designed to eradicate thrush in women and their partners. Certainly, several times I slept better than I had after beer before, though I had some pretty unpleasant nightmares (one involved a doodlebug-style bomb flying overhead of me and a girl at work I am often most gauche and apergic with, its engine cutting out and then exploding nearby). I didn’t sleep after cheese (or wine, which coincided with eating the cheese and white-bread toast at the wine bar).

Back now I can’t deal with not having time for writing, and with the worry of now moving into this house so imminently where I will have so many more responsibilities, and so much less time for writing. I have also had too little sleep, and, having been invited for a few beers after work yesterday, and then drinking through to one in the morning, haven’t been following my diet well at all. Today I can’t concentrate. M_____ sat with me in Burger King and saw that I was down. I had been a little fractious, taking exception to something she said I believed to be wrong (that Temple Grandin is profoundly autistic as opposed to aspergic, and then drifting off into my own world. She asked me, as she sometimes does, to tell her something, and I couldn’t. I have been back a mere day and we have seen each other for a very short period of time and she said at one point that I already can’t stand to be with her.

I have had no time for myself today and already at one, two o’clock with a friend still here - a guy I call my best friend who I have seen so seldom since coming back from teaching in Poland - I was feeling the weekend slipping away.

Add to that the fact that this stupid blog is becoming another huge distraction in my life. So far zero readers and yet it is, like learning Polish before it, a huge inelastic demand on my time and energy (inelastic because, like Polish, writing it off would mean another completely failed project, something that would depress me hugely).

I will have a large garden in the new house, and I will have to cook in a lovely kitchen. I will have a room of one’s own, but no time to be in it.

I have just logged on to the computer to see my e-mails. An old friend has written to me on Facebook. I haven’t seen her for years, but I resent so much the demand on my time. It may depress me now that I am writing all this pointless crap - this food diary that is supposed to focus a little of my attention on food so that I may stabilise my life and write, but which is taking so much away from that very end, but as a travesty - but once people start writing and demanding my time I’m only going to feel the worse. That’s the paradox of relationships for people like me - and I count Kafka as one of them - we demand love, need love, to be loved and even to love, but feel so often, perhaps for the most part of the time but when we are feeling most wounded, that the best way of expressing this love is to be left alone, forgiven, yes, understood, yes, but left the hell alone.

Yesterday: lots of beer, a little fishpie, coffee with sugar

Morning: a pear, underripe, bananarice milkshake with spirulina, orange juice and water

early afternoon: corn bread with peanut butter

coffee x 2, strong, with sugar

Burger King “Angus meal” with chips and orange juice*

Reveries, impatient, depressed!

*interestingly, one of the house parents who is not usually into the nutritional side of things thinks that orange juice sets off one of his students who also is set off by milk and, as he remembered the other day while I was eating with him, gluten.

Valerian rage

morning: green tea, shepherd’s pie

Lunch: green tea sausages, mash

snack: 2 x flapjack!!

dinner: tagine with polenta

late supper: tagine with polenta, valerian

This is one of those reactions I have had before and forgotten about. I have had valerian before and remember only the good effects, but I’ve just had it and it is making me jumpy and angry. Tired, it has woke me up, making me spiked. I am still mentally exhausted, but angry, and physically it is having an effect on me I am finding hard to describe. When falling asleep I keep on having snatches in my leg that wake me, restless leg syndrome, but also elsewhere. It is as if I can’t get comfortable no matter what I do. I was really irritating M____ by snatching at this and that, tossing and turning.

I can’t take any more of this! I seem to be having reactions to everything right now. My morale is very low and I am consistently angry. I have been thinking about my novel again, too, and puzzling over the pros and cons of a multiple-narrator approach. I thought of away of taking this on today which made the novel pretty baroque. It was attractive though. I had been puzzling it over and unable to think of anything else or shut down. This may have been a factor in my taking valerian.

I have been reading up on the herb now. Nothing much, though I have found the following:
“One study found that valerian tends to sedate the agitated person and stimulate the fatigued person, bringing about a balancing effect on the system.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_%28herb%29

Blog rage

I am feeling furious and unfulfilled.

All day I have been absolutely exhausted. I got up late having eaten Weetabix last night and slept very shallowly. I have been feeling completely exhausted, like I do sometimes, with a heavy, tingly tiredness in my legs that feels like I have run a marathon. I get this sometimes. A feeling completely disproportionate to the amount of exercise I have been doing.

I have been able to do nothing since I got back from work. I read a little, but barely a chapter or so, and managed to write no more than a paragraph. I am angry with the amount of time I get for writing. I can’t deal with it. And now for the last hour or so I have been on the computer, writing a little of my blog, which is still consigned to Bebo. I have been trying to rectify that, by looking into why on earth a second domain has disappeared on my host, but I am completely lost in the system, unable to make head nor tale of the control panel system, and getting lost with submitted requests for help having disappeared in the system now irretrievable, and unanswered. I cannot install Wordpress on the second domain I hope to put my blog on with some drafts of short stories and the like. I have forgotten my password to one of the log-ins and it is none of my normal ones. That or it doesn’t tally with the log-in name I am using perhaps in error. This kind of problem should be easily rectified in the system but it isn’t.

Anyway, the main thing to report is my absolute bloody tiredness. I’m fed up with it.

Morning: green tea and Weetabix again, because I got up so late, having left my mobile phone downstairs last night (in part I think I wanted to do some writing,  though I can’t remember what I was doing, but then I got tied into some porn because I had been having many many sexual fantasies and thought it would contribute to my not sleeping. I was up for another half hour or so then finding porn and looking again for ADDerall.)

So, yes, my morale is pretty low and I know I will find little time for cooking. My priorities have cycled round again. I come back home to play guitar, and to write. And I am still dreading moving into this house. I Am feeling like I need complete freedom from everything right now. I need shot of all responsibilities.

Deja Vu

I’m getting more angry about my relationship to food. I seem to be doing so much but getting nowhere with it. I picked M____ up and was going through the whole squinting when someone speaks at me thing, which is never attractive or likely to endear you to anyone. Apparently I had left my phone in my coat or something and she had rang twice. Plus. I hadn’t written, and I hadn’t bid on a jumper she wants on e-bay for. So, altogether, not in her good books. She didn’t much talk to me on the way back. Our relationship is breaking down rapidly. I hardly see her and do a lot to avoid  spending time with her. I am very aspergic!

Of course she says well, I should never have had any sugar. I say I need to write down some evidence for this dietician when I see him, but of course I should have picked that up as a rationalisation when I was grabbing two flapjacks and a snickers at Tesco! I had to go for a brisk walk, listening to my MP3.

I feel terrible. There’s no way I will be able to sleep.

We were talking about some of the people at work earlier, me and Jaffa, and the mad diets they have. I didn’t want to be associated with the flakey types and didn’t say no to much of anything, not bread, not coffee, not shandy, later, when Jaffa said he normally doesn’t but that he fancied a Coke, and offered to buy me something. I felt I had got on ok down with him in the woodlands and didn’t want to lose any of that. And it’s so easy to. It sounds so pathetic but it is so true. It’s not peer pressure. Pressure I can stand up to, but it is true that people are not fair or rational or consistent in their judgements  about people and you have to cater for that. You want to come over as a normal person sometimes. I find it hard to explain.

Anyway, I feel terrible, I’m in the doghouse, and there’s no sympathy for me. Quite the opposite. And tomorrow I will want nothing else but to write.

Oh, yes, and when she accused me today of not writing - texting - I heartily agreed and began to talk at cross purposes about how I  have no time to write. That’s the only thing on my mind, ever. I am very aspergic. And she hears it all the time. She’s finding it hard here, and she’s telling me, and all I say is…

I’m not good for her.

And here’s me, visiting the house today after work and trying to be enthusiastic. Dad’s made an amazing effort on the house. And I don’t want it. I don’t know what I would rather have, but…

I’m impossible. But what can I do? I remember at uni, and perhaps before and after, thinking about suicide, and thinking how all the hurt I am causing people, with my behaviour, with my being so brittle, being so lacking in social skills, so stubborn, so lost, so intelligent but so incapable, so depressed, so out of control, is all awful, but worse than that is knowing that it is what I can achieve when I strain day after day at the height of my powers. Knowing that I have to put my shoulder to the wheel to acheive solecisms that burned themselves into my soul, embarrassment that ached through me and had a half life so much longer than the time between such fuck ups as most can achieve only once in their lives. I hurt others by trying so hard and to them it looks like I’m not trying at all, that I’m not thinking of others at all. But the only alternative would be suicide. They don’t know that, but its true. Because this is the best I can do.

And that’s why I’m fucked off with it all at the moment. Food. Struggling and being employed and not writing and moving forward towards family, almost, when I’m not sure I want it. To home owning, when I never wanted it at all, but just ignored things as they went on around me, were organised for me.

I can do my fire act and forget about things for a while. Forget about the world. I can even teach it and enjoy that contact with people but I ca’t deal with my life right now. I’m constantly trying as hard as i can, and constantly on the edge. It’s not the food, it’s the fact it has to be the number one priority every single day, and I can’t do that, because I need my writing, and because I can’t be that consistent in anything. I need to take some time off.

Eat. home-made salad in chain eaterie.

We took the train out to Brum today to do so shopping. Horrible horrible weather! Saw N____ on the way and tried to make conversation with him. Not always easy. He probably thinks I have been ignoring him since I’ve come back from Prague. Probably doesn’t know I’ve been ignoring most people. He seems to have come over a little bitter again, but he was as chatty as he gets.

Anyway, it being horrible outside I couldn’t just grab my lunch - a home-made salad rustled up before we took the train in - as I usually would outside somewhere. We went to Eat., around the corner from Selfridges, which my brother informs me, incidentally, when I texted him to tell him one of our students, one of the best high wire artists we’ve had, had been seen climbing up the outside of it, was designed by the Czech architect that has now designed the Octopus, a radical design for a new library in the otherwise conservative city. Anyway, I said I would ask if I could eat my own food there, since I had food intolerances and was buying food for my girlfriend and both of us were having drinks, and eventually, on finding one of the staff who wasn’t rushing around, I did so. He thoughts for a second and said, ok, so long as I didn’t make it too obvious.

Ok, so this may not be any great epiphany for many who would no doubt routinely ask, but many people might not think to do so, and I am perhaps not always up for asking such things, and I was quite impressed by the way it was handled by the guy behind the till, who didn’t ask anything else and quickly aquiesced though he hadn’t heard of the food intolerances I mentioned.

I sat there eating, and enjoying my quinoa salad, and wasn’t remotely selfconscious despite the pair of us speaking Czech and the probability that people were looking over thinking that we were thrifty Poles.

I had a couple of reveries of persuading staff at various establishments that I should be able to eat, or helping out others who happen to be asking the same question. Pointing out that with my drink I would be taking up a place anyway, and that I cannot eat the food they sell, and would be happy to do so would they only introduce a range, pointing out that the food is home made, and not branded, and offering to put a token amount in a charity tin, which might be similar to their mark-up on food.

In any case, it was far more pleasant than hiding away somewhere in the Bull Ring with people rushing all around and eating it off my knees.

I would encourage anybody with food intolerances to try this. It is an entirely reasonable request if you are having a drink or with others who are eating, and it raises consciousness of the issue, and points out a vacuum in the market companies should be only too glad to fill.