FORGIVE me for not being my usual jovial self this week, but actually I’m feeling a bit dis-chuffed (to put it politely).

This is despite helping our daughter celebrate her 21st birthday, last week.

For the last eight of those 21 years she has been diabetic, and when she was diagnosed I told her it wasn’t a disaster, but it was a challenge. This turned out to be spot-on, but not always for the reasons we anticipated.

It is, of course, a huge, lifelong challenge to keep on top of a condition that, if you don’t respect it and meet it head-on, leads to amputation, blindness and premature death, and has the potential to rapidly kill you if you let your vigilance slip for even a matter of hours.

And if living under that cloud isn’t enough, or your only alternative, which is the rigmarole you have to go through every time you eat, then diabetics now have something else to contend with: ignorance.

It’s rife.

The main problem with the public perception of diabetes is an assumption that the two variations, Type 1 and Type 2, are, as their names suggest, very similar.

In reality, because they have radically different causes, symptoms, effects and treatments, and generally affect two completely different groups of people, they are the proverbial chalk and cheese.

While Type 1 often strikes in childhood, Type 2 is most often associated either with older people or those whose poor health may be related (but not necessarily) to poor lifestyle choices.

A little knowledge is a terrible thing and, armed with this vague notion that Type 2 is somehow self-inflicted, many people jump to simplistic conclusions, often encouraged by certain national tabloid newspapers (and you can guess the ones I’m talking about).

Recent front page headlines have suggested watching television gives you diabetes, but if you drink enough red wine, you’ll avoid it. Both these ideas are not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, particularly when applied to Type 1.

Some people even think you can get Type 1 diabetes by eating too many sweets.

When my daughter made some new friends at university, one of them joked – not realising she is diabetic – that: “I eat so much chocolate, I’m going to end up diabetic.”

For the record: sugar intake has no more bearing on whether you get Type 1 than the colour of your socks.

By the same token, most of the public is under the misapprehension that Type 1 diabetics have a severely restricted or regimented diet, which was true in previous times, but not now.

The last straw, for me, was a comment I heard, last week, from someone who was “infuriated” that diabetics get free prescriptions when asthmatics have to pay for inhalers, thus making diabetics scapegoats for unconnected failings in the NHS, and implying they should pay for prescriptions.

The implication was also that the treatment of diabetes is only about prescribing insulin, which is wrong again. If only it was that simple.

In fact, supplying insulin is a tiny part of a complex care package that also involves a wide range of mechanisms for managing the condition, and easy access to whole teams of experts.

What bothers me is this growing trivialisation of not just diabetes but many other chronic conditions, ironically including asthma. This is an inevitable result of ignorance and misinformation, and from downgrading people’s problems it’s only a short step to loss of compassion and then prejudice.

The saving grace is the NHS, which, in our experience as the parents of a diabetic child, provides first rate care, and we should be proud.

If only the doctors could also give the public a pill to treat ignorance.