Late update: Both of my local chemists are stating they cannot get supplies of Liquid Metformin which I have been prescribed.
As of this am, my GP knows nothing about this. It may be a glitch due to the current logictics issues. Luckily I have a month in hand I can eek out until things get back to normal.
For those who need to know. Non Prolonged release tablets may be split or crushed and ground down between two spoons to a powder and mixed with water or fruit juice as an alternative. A pill splitter / grinder is really good for that. The formulation of the PR versions contain a scummy residue that makes it gloop together when mixed with water so it a) defeates the purpose of the PR and b) really sucks when you try and drink it
For those of you who get really bad diarehoa with Metformin tablets (as did I); convince your GP to get you on liquid version for a while as a tral, I did and never looked back. And, here's the interesting part: for the record Liquid Metformin is no more expensive that the tablet formulations (according to my practice nurse) for the NHS to pay for.
I found out that the tablet forms have 50% of thier inactive ingredients that either promote or accelerate loose bowels (realy what a surprise). For those who want to do thier own research, go here:
https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/search?q=metformin and look at the one they get prescribed, list the Excipients (section 6.1) (these are inactive ingrendients) and then research those on the web to see the side effects. Its not a good read. One even has a component of anti freeze in it.