Sores Gone*

The sores on the corners of my mouth have heeled up some time during my exclusion diet. Over the last couple of weeks I have supplemented friendly bacteria, even over the last few days, going so far as to make fermented cabbage juice which I have read contains beneficial bacteria. This is cabbage liquidised up with filtered or distilled water and left for a few days for the bacteria naturally present in the cabbage leaves to proliferate. It makes for pretty bad breath, and noticeably cabbagey farts but apparently does some good. I don’t know whether this, with my supplementation of caprylic acid every day has made a difference - I did once supplement with this for a period about six months ago and did experience both the “die-off reactions” that some writers speak about, and also soe benefits, so this may be connected. Whatever it is, it does demonstrate yet again that my problems must be linked to some nutritional deficiencies. My pharmacist in the village down the road from Black Herd Mews - who has apparently upped and left overnight since - told me that these sores were evidence of a lack of vitamin B. I bought some from him which I never then took because it did not say it did not contain yeast, but supplementation of vitamin B on its own never made a difference, something that would not surprise Patrick Halford and others at the Institute of Optimum Nutrition who highlight the interdependency of all vitamin systems, and the necessity of looking at any such deficits as a whole rather than singularly, but only now can I see how true it is that some of us may have imbalances which demonstrate an impaired ability to take on certain vitamins.

Insomnia: intelligence failures*

It was likely in 2001 when I was studying a module entitled The Vigilent State as part of my politics degree. “Spooks and Nukes” was what a different professor called it. It centered around the intelligence apparatus of the state. I still have a pile of books I would like to read from this module. One of the theories we looked at concerned the idea that intelligence failures are inevitable. It was, of course, a very topical theme, and so I thought about it a lot. It was also one of those hypotheses which fundamentally accorded with my own views. I was at the time constantly self-monitoring for signs of mania or depression, subjecting all my thoughts, observations and opinions to rigorous, distrusting scrutiny. It was no doubt in part for this reason that I believed that intelligence is inevitably flawed, either with too much weighting given to recent experience or with filters and skews, inclinations of interpretation always leaving open some blind side, some lacunae.

Take for instance the US intelligence service. We should (whilst holding it in our memory) set aside the more obvious facts such as that the politicisation of the service into a “consumer-led” institution will lead to errors of processing and interpretation if objectivity is what we are ultimately to judge it by and analyse not the recent, most conspicuous past of the intelligence apparatus but instead such things as the history of the service’s filters and biases not solely with regard to external threats, but also to the men and women who form the service. Ultimately we will see not only that the US has consistently chosen [] allies (I do not of course claim it is alone in this) but that it has also consistently found it necessary to enlist unsavoury characters for intelligence work - when one considers the type of work involved, and the necessity of maintaining an elaborate lie to family and friends, it becomes clear why this is so. The difficulty of choosing the right unsavoury charaters ie. those who are unsavoury in predictable, quantifiable, tolerable ways, untrustworthy only to those not involved in affairs of state, is perhaps the fundamental problem of intelligence to which much else will follow. I remember, just vaguely, how one character who had shown traits of cruelty to animals in his youth (or was it indeed bestiality?) had otherwise a seemingly clean sheet and was later recruited to the intelligence services, served in the Cold War and then defected. Of course, after this, signs of such cruelty (or bestiality, whichever it may have been) were taken as evidence of Communist tendencies and untrustworthiness. At other times (I here speculate entirely), it may have been homosexuality, a jewish background, affiliation to certain educational establishments, and so on and so forth. I would imagine that at precisely no time did the array of filters and biases reflect the array of factors which related at that time to that supremely incalculable human quality of untrustworthiness (which could scarcely be considered as a quality in the philosophical sense at all so little might each instance resemble another).

All of which brings us, tangentially, to Ginkgo Biloba, one of the few substances left to through me while I remain on this exclusion diet, and which I bought having written off Ginseng for keeping me awake, and have somehow allowed to slip into place as a latest magic potion to keep faux pas at work to a supportable minimum.

I had noted before that this stuff keeps me awake if I have it too late, as it has done today when I really needed to get some shut eye after getting up this morning to take M____ to work (and being locked out of the house as she left her keys in the door on the inside so I couldn’t get my keys out), and having promised to drop her off tomorrow. This is a problem, and contributes to my constant debate about the relationship as one week getting up just that little bit earlier had me too tired for days to do any writing, taking me back to the days of working at a hardware store and being constantly too tired to do anything, smoking and the rest of it.

My filters and biases have got better and better. I really shouldn’t beat myself up about the failures. I know better than that, and besides, such an exercise does little that is constructive and a great deal that is corrosive of those things which are working well - look at the BBC now! I have had so few slips, and when I get round to writing the entry on The Payoff, which is to come before this, I shall explain how the diet has been working for me, confirming the ideas I had for so so long but was unable to live by for lack of steadfastness.

The mental side, in any case, becomes in this struggle something like a reflection of the immune system’s battle with foreign bodies, making its own mistakes, being overzealous at times and failing in others. Mistakes are a part of life, and can be learnt from, and even often times enjoyed (we can laugh at them sometimes almost more than anything else) and we ignore this fact at our peril.

Homeopathy, my experiences/ATA*

I can’t recall if I ever wrote about my experiences with the Study Support Unit at my university, but this is certainly relevant to my experiences since with homeopathy. More

03:36

Shallow sleep again. Constant mental flotsam and jetsam, from sexual fantasies to invidious snatches of songs heard throughout the day. For dinner I warmed up the very sharp remains of the curry I made on Friday with a little quinoa. I have read before that food that has been left out for a while becomes perfuse with yeast. Now this was left in the car over the weekend and then out yesterday on a sunny day. This is presumeably what comes of just warming something like that up. The curry was made with a coconut milk and tomato base, and I should try to avoid tomato on my exclusion diet, but I have never noticed a reaction before. (Whether I would have noticed such a reaction when not looking for one is a moot point, given as for a long time only a year or so ago I didn’t even write down cheese in my food diaries since I unconsciously regarded it as a neutral filler to keep hunger at bay!) More

03:36 am

Shallow sleep again. Constant mental flotsam and jetsam, from sexual fantasies to invidious snatches of songs heard throughout the day. For dinner I warmed up the very sharp remains of the curry I made on Friday with a little quinoa. I have read before that food that has been left out for a while becomes perfuse with yeast. Now this was left in the car over the weekend and then out yesterday on a sunny day. This is presumeably what comes of just warming something like that up. The curry was made with a coconut milk and tomato base, and I should try to avoid tomato on my exclusion diet, but I have never noticed a reaction before. (Whether I would have noticed such a reaction when not looking for one is a moot point, given as for a long time only a year or so ago I didn’t even write down cheese in my food diaries since I unconsciously regarded it as a neutral filler to keep hunger at bay!)

I did take a couple of capryllic acid tablets last night. Something I will probably be wary of revealing on my food diary, if I get to fill it in at all, since this would seem to write me off as someone trying to perform his own nutritional therapy rather than awaiting expert help.

The only other possible factor is hunger. I do remember going to bed with the subjective feeling of hunger. The curry was a thin veggie affair after all.

Anyway, the insomnia, at least is something I have avoided for the majority of the time I have been living here. M____ has observed over and over that I sleep like a log.

Most of the curry was left in the pressure cooker from Friday. I was cursing and swearing to open it and find it mouldy. Such a waste of time and food.

Dropping my guard

It’s time to come clean. To stop dissembling, and to start writing the truth. I haven’t been doing so until now. I have been transposing aspects of my life in ways which compromised the idea behind the site.

More

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

Exclusion diet, day in the life

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.

Immediately I cut up an apple into a bowl, spooned on some soya yoghurt and crashed on the sofa. Of course, I turned on the TV! I ate up quickly, enjoying every spoonful, and then of course convinced myself that I could watch just the start of Ready Steady Cook just to get a few more ideas.

Unusually, there was a guest with a few allergies, to wheat and cow’s milk, as well as having a strong disliking for tomato sauce, and so I watched a little longer. She, the woman from the Clothes Show, had brought along a bag containing prawns, spring onions, coconut cream and a mango. I sat glued to the TV for those twenty minutes and managed to take little in. The show is entertaining, but often time passes in a whirl of interviews and very rushed explanations of what is being made and how and so at times only an already proficient chef could really take it all in.

Anyway, the first section finished I got up, a little disgusted with myself for having wasted so much time (perhaps more so than usual having read the introduction of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything at work in which he states that the average human life consists of something like 650,000 hours, something which when written like that seems so short*) and went into the kitchen. When I had first got back I had realised that I hadn’t taken out any meat from the freezer and so I had taken out a pork chop. Of course it wasn’t defrosted, and wouldn’t be defrosted for a long time yet. And I don’t like nuking food from frozen. So, with my new exclusion diet it was a case of opening and slamming doors all over the kitchen in search of inspiration. I found some gluten-free, dairy-free pesto I’d got on the reduced trolley at Asdas the other day and so took that out, finely chopped some peppers (the remainder of a green I had had for lunch, half an orange and half a red), albeit on a chopping board I had bashed some chicken into at lunch time and left out rather than the one I had set out, and started lightly frying them in a saucepan with some finely chopped broccoli. I had some spinach on standby to throw in and give it all a little substance, though I was wondering how it would affect the taste. I then realised that pesto contains pine nuts (actually cashews in the recipe list!), and that my exclusion diet forbids them. I was rationalising this to myself semi-consciously (more or less as subconsciously as a hunter with a duck on his head is submerged, if that makes it any clearer), telling myself that I could right it down and explain it as that I had already started cooking before realising that the jar contained nuts, put I pulled myself back with a reflection of a passage of a book I had been reading the night before.

Last Xmas M______ bought me a Polish book that could be translated as We Children of Zoo Station. It is a non-fiction account of the lives of a number of young people but particularly a young girl who in her early teens wound up selling herself at Zoo Station on the Berlin underground to fund her addiction to Heroin. I have been reading it on and off, as my priorities waxed and waned as they always do, ever since. Yesterday I was reading it aloud, as I often do when reading Polish, trying to improve my pronunciation, when M_____ rang from upstairs having gone to bed. She told me the telly was on too loud and she couldn’t sleep. It was me, declaiming the drugs experiences of a young girl, in Polish. This particular passage concerned Christiana when just before her fifteenth birthday she wound up in a Scientology detox unit and when, having gone cold turkey for a few days and starting to see off the worst of the effects (which she knew well having gone cold turkey twice before, both times seeing it out apparently until the end of the physical dependence), she found herself a punter in an unfamiliar part of town, and scored some heroin. Having put some heroin on her dying cat’s food, and the needle hovering over her arm, she realised what she was doing. This was one of the points I lost the plot, my Polish not quite up to the question of whether she had actually managed to stop herself in time or merely thought about the significance of the act, unable to summon the will power when she had the ability to defeat any bad feelings; and this is a book where the reader is so powerfully empathising with the protagonist, angry with her, crying out to influence her though they know they can’t. She did go on to inject, and once again on entering the unit. I had cried at her thoughout the book, and yet I continue to eat foods I know to be bad for me, from flapjacks to chocolate, to coffee, and even to smoke. And now, on the exclusion diet I could defeat all excuses for me to do so, by demolishing, more or less, the doubt that surrounds the types of food which are bad for me. For a while I was unrepentant, determined to use the Pesto sauce, to have something differant from the roast veg I have been having, but then I pulled myself back. I added some paprika and basil leaves to the sauce, throwing some vegetable pasta into the veg stock left from where I steamed some broccoli, beans and carrots at lunchtime, seasoned, and then thickened it up with rice flour. The reason I used riceflour, incidentally, was because on Ready Steady Cook they had been talking about arrowroot, which is something I have picked up on the programme in the last week or so. One chef had used it because of the woman with an allergy towards wheat, and this they emphasised a couple of times, you can use arrowroot if you have an allergy to wheat and cannot use cornflour. That sent me out to my cupboards and got me thinking, since I had always used cornflour assuming it be flour from corn, but then there is buckwheat which has nothing in common with wheat, and cornflour could conceivably be from wheat could it not. I checked the box: “ingredients: cornflour. Allergy information: contains sulfites[].” I was rather puzzled by this. Now I’m sure it must be ok. Aside from my exclusion diet of course. Indeed, I just saw the sheet for the reintroduction phase of the diet and can see “Corn: test cornflour or corn on the cob.” but it is so easy to get so confused over things like this, becoming suspect of all kinds of foods.

In any case, the news flash. I served up the dish with a little canned tuna - organic, dolphin-friendly. It tasted great and I really enjoyed it. I can now barely move. It was a massive rush of high GI food for the system perhaps, but it did restore my faith on being able to make something edible, even enjoyable, from the least promising ingredients on the most restrictive diet. It also restored my faith in my own cooking, which has been seriously knocked of late. Most importantly perhaps, there were none of these g/f d/f concoctions of imitation foods. No dairy-free soya-based parmasan.

 *This was a fact which once led me, in Venice, into an almost classically Aspergic argument with an ex of mine. Something I really should write about elsewhere.

Attack of the zombies

I have several years’ experience of taking slow-release vitamin B supplements and I have come to observe numerous times that if I take it late at night, I don’t sleep, and indeed have a very similar experience to when I have caffeine, and similar to those times I don’t sleep after beer. This was in the back of my mind yesterday when I took such a slow-release multi-vitamin with vitamin B late yesterday. Worse, perhaps, I swilled it down with Spirulina, which I have not been taking recently but which I found to have a real beneficial effect when I first tried it around the same time as I started taking vitamin B those years ago.

I had been sleeping well in my new bed. With no students around I was at home all the time, of course, and the double bed  they had left was an improvement on the fold-out sofa bed we had been sleeping on at my folks. In fact, in however many weeks we have been there - two, I think - this was my first poor night’s sleep.

I was spiked, like I am after coffee, that is, alert, and yet very tired. My thoughts weren’t racing, and I drifted in and out of sleep, but it was shallow sleep.

Often in this condition I remember my dreams better than usual. This time I did so as much from getting up to go to the toilet as anything else, but my sleeping pattern was definitely disrupted, and I have been feeling the effects since around three o’clock when I’ve been feeling zombified.

I suspect it is a kind of lucid dreaming. I have felt that many times, that I am aware of myself dreaming. This time I was in a recording studio listening to the producer, who I could not see through the widow, talking to the black hip hop-style performer as I was setting up equipment or some such. They were talking about children, family, a fairly deep, mature conversation, and then a little more polite perhaps, the singer talking about how he didn’t know so many producers in America since there are so few of them, more in Britain. I don’t now remember it well.

It was years ago I first started taking vitamin B and though it made my piss resemble a cantonese duck marinade, and abslutely stink (I am pretty paranoid about the smell, which is what I imagine urine might smell like were you to reduce it in a pan for a while, wiping my old man countless times while at home, and shaking and squeezing the fella at urinals), it seemed to make me concentrate better. At least, I felt so at the time - it gave me extra confidence.

Back then I was working in a hardware store, and doing a pretty cackhanded job of it, invariably forgetting several items of a short list of jobs to do given by the infinitely genial and forgiving boss everyday. Often, in giving me verbal instructions, he would report that I had assumed my glassy-eyed look. This was a look that came over me involuntarily when I wasn’t interested, and however much I wanted this time to just see out those few instructions, it wouldn’t happen. Fortunately, there was another guy there who was similarly afflicted, who would himself muddle up the simplest things, and we became a right double act. He wasn’t ADD, though he was dyslexic and says this affected his memory, but he was the kind of character who can really make a place worthwhile, and when I had come back to the Black Country after uni, when I had gone to uni to escape this place, he was somebody who helped me cope with the place. He was the first person, really, I opened up to about my writing when before, it had been a guilty secret tangled up with my illness.

For a while I had been worried about the exclusion diet and whether I would be able to continue taking multivitamins, before from the leaflet I was given it wasn’t all too clear. I don’t want to be quite so laissez faire with fruit as it says, since I do think fruit can be a trigger itself - the amount of bananas I have eaten over the years has always been excessive, for a start, and then there’s the smoothies and dried fruits and the rest of it. It may be that I would not get enough vitamins and minerals on the diet to compensate for a deficiency in my processing of vitamins - one that the sores in the corners of my mouth, for instance, would seem to indicate. If this were the case, then presumeably, I wouldn’t necessarily see any benefit in symptoms from the exclusion and the diet would not be as useful as it should be. But from fretting about the vitamins, I begain to wonder whether the supplementation regimen I have settled upon bares any relation to what I need. How would I know? I mean, presumeably, it is possible that I might feel some extra security from these pills, and gain some confidence as I did those years ago, without actually seeing any real benefit. I decided for that reason to cease some of the supplements yesterday. I didn’t take anything in the morning, and certainly didn’t feel bad for it, indeed I found I could concentrate better than I often can (though it is always difficult to judge, and it is true that I was listening to audiobooks rather than trying to read for most of the morning, and this may make a difference). But I didn’t hold my nerve. Later, I started to drift a little. I wasn’t concentrating and it was my last day off, and my last day without interruption and without M____, so that’s when I took a multivitamin and washed it down with spirulina.

I some kind of a build up in my head. Now, I was working on a pretty tough passage, trying to introduce Darren, and I was getting into real philosophy, with Godwin’s Treatise on Political Justice in front of me, but this was something other than mental strain. It was a kind of build up I had to wait to pass.

So the question is still unsettled. I will have to exclude vitamin supplements sometime, but there is as much a problem in weaning myself off them than there is even with alcohol and cheese because of the security blanket phenomenon. It’s clear that vitamins can have their negative effects, stopping me from sleeping and the positive effects are more or less presumed for much of the time.

That’s something I will have to tackle some more before further taking on this diet. Once I have had a good night’s sleep, of course.

Oh, and the first real slip since the transition phase of this new diet ( though the only real thing now I haven’t excluded to be on the diet for real is lemon juice): I had a cup of black decaf coffee around three o’clock, because that can’t hurt, can it!

Sprouts and veg

I’m very much playing catch up with my experiences over the past few weeks having been busy moving house and the like. One new development has been my attempts to grow sprouts. More