Gout? As in fucking *gout*?

I haven't posted for over a week. That's OK. I expected a bit of drop-off after my initial enthusiasm for this project, and as the shadow of drink shortens and frows faint, and the sunlight of sobriety burns brigher and higher in the sky, the immediate impulse to write about my progress grows less urgent.

It doesn't grow less important, though. I haven't been drinking. I smoked some weed but I've stopped doing that. I've read an interesting alcohol memoir, called Parched. Part of it was compelling for the usual reasons - the account of rock bottom, and the unflinching honesty. When the writer doesn't flinch, it makes the reader flinch. It's like a game of chicken. I'm always a-flinch when I read quiterature. Sometimes I have to look up from the book and wince audibly.

The other thing I have done recently, and which I hope to learn from, is have gout.

I always thought gout was a thing that fat red-faced Edwardian men got from drinking port and smoking cigars and celebrating the British empire. But I woke up early one morning with my toe in pain. And the pain got worse over the next few days. On Saturday I could barely drag the dog around the block. I was wincing and flinching to beat the band, shuffling and dragging myself like some kind of Benito Badoglio hauling his old carcase back from the Franco-Prussian war, or whatevs.

I bumped into my jolly chum Jean-Pierre, who is often to be found in a silk cravat guzzling rosé and smoking little cigars outside the Chapelier Fou. Jean-Pierre and his pal Pierre diagnosed my condition as 'la goutte' and when I expressed shock assured me that everybody gets it. It's a combination of age and charcuterie. J-P himself drinks rosé because white wine causes a flare-up in his gout. Pierre similarly assured me that a friend of his only has to cast his eye in the general direction of a lardon to be laid up for days.

I went back to the house feeling slightly aggrieved and ashamed. It feels a bit unfair that I should be getting gout when I am not drinking or smoking. But the pain was bad, and so undignified: the big toe is an unserious part of the body.

The following day I did not leave the sofa, even to walk the dog. The day after that, as I knew he would, the poor animal cowered and hid in shame because of the big crap he had left on the floor and it was all I could do to assure him it wasn't his fault.

Anyway I finally dragged myself, in the most literal sense possible since my sore foot was very reluctant to leave the building, to the doctor, who confirmed Jean-Pierre's diagnosis. He's not French but he shrugged in quite a French way when I asked what might have caused it given that I am not drinking. And apparently my history of drinking could have helped to cause it, and also apparently it is chronic. Anyway, the pain is dying down and I have a prescription for some drugs and the dog has recovered, so no great harm has been done.

I am used to feeling sad but wise about the years I wasted drinking, but now I have something concrete and very physically painful to remind me of them. Not feeling too grateful about that, to be perfectly honest, but I dunno, maybe it'll be useful.