Let me just say: You need a prescription to get gluten-free pasta?! Sheesh!

Yes and no. I don't need a prescription, in the sense of not being able to get it any other way. It isn't a controlled substance: I could just buy it with my own money if I really wanted to. However, I don't want to, because the brand in question costs an absurd amount – something like a factor of ten or twenty more than normal pasta. (It's made by a process of extracting the gluten from wheat, which is presumably hellishly fiddly and expensive.) So getting it on prescription essentially means the NHS subsidises most of the cost of that.

Alternatively, I could just go to the supermarket and buy any of a number of brands of more reasonably priced gluten-free pasta. That's what I ended up doing with flour. But the difference is that the sensibly priced flour is nice, and the sensibly priced pasta is horrible. So I go through the prescription rigmarole, and try to arrange to get as much as I can at a time when I do.

Ah, my faith in the British government is restored!