This week I've got round to starting to arrange getting gluten-free foods on prescription.

This is really silly. I would have hoped that the sensible way to do this would be to issue me with some sort of coeliac certificate, which I could then display in some fashion to get a discount when buying whatever I happened to fancy that month from gluten-free-food companies. But no; instead it's done through the ordinary prescription mechanism, and each GF food product is individually prescribable. So I had to actually go and talk to my GP and make a specific request for each of the particular things I wanted.

It seems completely daft to me that I have to waste the time of a highly trained medical professional on business which could be handled just as well by a supermarket checkout clerk. She insisted that because it really was a form of medical treatment it was perfectly reasonable, but she can insist that all she wants and it won't shake my opinion that changing my mind about my preference in pizza bases is not a worthwhile use of a doctor's valuable time.

So yesterday I dropped my prescription off at Boots, and today I have to go back and collect the stuff (which they had to order in). This is silly.

What is it with Cambridge being in a perpetual state of being dug up and rebuilt? I've been noticeably inconvenienced by three different sets of roadworks in the past two days, just driving to and from work and going shopping in town. Before that there were others, and others still before that. Some months I get the strong feeling that it must have been ten years since my daily experience of Cambridge didn't involve any roadworks at all, and even that was only because I was a town-centre-based student who never had to go more than five minutes' walk in any direction from Trinity.

Are all cities like this, and I only notice it with Cambridge because I move around it a lot and so deal regularly with a large proportion of the potential roadwork sites? I suppose that's possible, but it doesn't seem likely to me. It feels much more as if Cambridge in particular is so flimsy that it has to be being perpetually repaired or it would fall apart completely.