Addenbrookes appear to be nearly organised these days, IME, but the last few times I've dealt with my GP's surgery I have found phrases such as ‘piss-up’, ‘brewery’ and ‘wet paper bag’ unfailingly springing to my mind.

So I've recently been trying to get a repeat prescription for some gluten-free staple foods. This involved:

• going into town on Wednesday lunchtime and being startlingly unable to find the surgery.
• going in again on Thursday morning armed with better directions, finding the surgery's new premises, and dropping off the form.
• going in on Friday morning and finding I was a working day early: they take 48 hours to renew a prescription. I probably knew that once, but it's been a while and nobody thought to remind me.
• going in again this morning and finding they had declined to renew my prescription. Probably, they said, because it was overdue for review; but the receptionist couldn't find that out for sure, and in fact the doctors never confirmed the reason either. It didn't seem to me that much medical review ought to be necessary in this particular case, but I was willing to work with the bureaucratic requirement if I had to.
• arranging an appointment on short notice to rectify this.
• wandering around town for half an hour, coming back, and seeing a medical student who was supposed to be supervised by a GP, who was absent.
• talking to the medical student for twenty unproductive minutes before the supervising GP bothered to turn up and authorise him to prescribe anything.
• finding that the surgery thought they'd filled half my repeat prescription, but couldn't find it, and it might have been sent to Boots non-consensually. No indication of why they might have done one half but not the other half.
• receiving both halves of my prescription, with instructions to have the disputed half shredded if it turned out to have already been filled by Boots.
• going to Boots, who hadn't heard of it.
• getting to work over an hour late.

So, I now have some actual prescriptions in my back pocket, and will drop them in at a slightly more convenient Boots on the way home from work. The other copy of one of them is still unaccounted for; I predict that some completely random pharmacy will turn out to have got it by accident, and will send me a letter in a month's time asking if I can please come and pick up my stuff. That's what happened the last time I was prescribed anything (which is one of the reasons it's been so long since I had to go through this!).

On the plus side, they've shown me how to request repeat prescriptions over the web, but really I'll have to do a lot of those before the cumulative saving in hassle manages to outweigh this week's sheer confusion.

Also, during the half hour before my appointment I wandered around town doing some hasty shopping, and was rather scared by the queue outside Northern Rock. It reached most of the way down Sidney Street, and there was a guy who looked like a newspaper photographer snapping away at it with a camera the size of a trumpet.

I've mentioned getting gluten-free foods on prescription a number of times in this diary, and people often ask why I have to get them on prescription and can't just buy them.

This is a good question, and I've wondered it too; you can get a lot of GF stuff in supermarkets, but some products never seem to show up in shops and only seem to be available on prescription. Notably the Juvela products, which are made from wheat with the gluten cunningly removed, and which thereby taste (IMO) rather nicer than the shop-bought alternatives. I've never understood why these have to be prescription-only; it's not as if they contain any legally controlled drugs, for example. And I've often thought I'd prefer to just mail-order the stuff if it were possible, because the inconvenience of getting prescriptions is significant and I'd even tolerate a reasonable price increase to avoid it.

Well, I discovered today that you can buy Juvela products without having to go through the prescription rigmarole. But there's an excellent reason why you shouldn't, and why they don't appear in shops: they're gobsmackingly expensive.

My usual prescription load, for example, is 2kg of flour and 2kg of pasta. For that I pay two normal prescription charges, i.e. £13 or thereabouts, which a quick websearch suggests is about twice what I might expect to pay for the same amount of normal, glutinous flour and pasta. Well, it turns out that I could, if I so wished, order it commercially through a pharmacy – but if I did so, I'd pay a staggering £70.

So that's why nobody talks about that option much. My curiosity is amply satisfied. I had vastly underestimated the gratitude I should be displaying toward the NHS for paying that much of the cost of my staple foods; and that price difference more than justifies continuing to go through the hassle of the prescription mechanism so that they'll continue to do so!