Footnotes

I was attacked in bed at 3am. It was unexpected, vicious and there were no witnesses.

The previous evening a friend had related an anecdote in which a colleague displayed a cool head in testing circumstances. When my friend said, “You stay very calm”, he responded “I do.....but I have a big fucking mortgage. And the other guy's a bell-end”

I have been described as having a “relaxed attitude to life.” That fact is, I don't. I'm just aware that there is a time and place to call someone a “bell-end”. Moreover, as I recently learned in a dog-grooming parlour, some self-censorship is necessary: banging on about arthritis does not make the listener want to shag you.

However, in the aftermath of my recent attack I felt like spewing out “bell-end” at everyone and saw the social value in describing pain. I felt like I had earned the right to bore the shit out of people. The pain made me feel like taking a coping saw to my big toe and working until I was blinded with bone dust. I was attacked by gout and I have discovered that it is “one of the best Antidotes against Stoical Opinions.”

There are those who argue that pain is the route to self-improvement. In 1777, after being hit by a runaway horse, the philanthropist John Brown wrote: "Do me good, oh God! By this painful affliction may I see the great uncertainty of health ease and comfort that all my Springs are in Thee."

There may be something in that. I certainly think that finding yourself in extreme pain can award you profound insight into the state of your relationship. I can also add that gout was literally my wake up call to take a long hard look in the mirrored door of the bathroom medical cabinet and ask myself “WHERE THE FUCKING HELL ARE THE PAINKILLERS?”

It took me half an hour to discover the house was a pill-free zone. The attack rendered me incapable of walking. I was reduced to crawling around my bedroom like an inchworm. I had carpet burns on my chin. The stairs? Fuck you, no: I'm not sharing that experience. Perhaps when we get to know each other better. Or you get gout.

I've yet to see a non-sufferer look sympathetic when you tell him that you have attacks of gout. I, too, was guilty of mockery. I would have delighted at the idea of a TV-show called “Bouts of Gout”,in which two sufferers are put in a pebbled arena and zombie-shuffle towards each other before going toe-to-toe.

The winner? Treat him to a soothing swing in a hammock and cover him with Labrador puppies. The loser? Send out a nicotine-starved stage-chimpanzee armed with a rubber dildo. Have him knuckle-dash towards the terror-stricken contestant. Watch, awe-struck, as he pounds the loser's toe with simian zest. Listen to the pan-hoot drown out the howls of pain. Applaud the naked ape. Buy the branded dildo. Accessorise it with sweetcorn.

The misfortunes of others are often borne with equanimity. Larkin put it brilliantly:

“Yours is the harder course I see; on the other hand, mine is happing to me.”

In the case of gout, the depth of the amusement is, partly, the legacy of class anxiety. If we delve back in history, to a time when the medical profession was still performing trepanning and other surgeries without anaesthetic, we find plenty of petite-bourgeoisie that were ecstatic when they could proclaim “I have gout”.

Folklore deemed gout a disease of the “better sort, a superiority tax, a celebrity complaint “fit for a man of quality.” Gout was the “distemper of a gentleman” whereas the rheumatism was the distemper of a hackney coachman.”

To say you had gout was to imply that you could afford an extravagant lifestyle and you hobbled through the corridors of power. It gained such an association with the indulgence of alcohol and rich rood that, now, if you tell someone you suffer from gout, they are likely to assume that you are a person of congenital idleness, rancid morals and general worthlessness.

It is true that you are more likely to have an attack if you are over forty, male, a heavy-drinker, overweight and idle. I'm two of those things, the ones that I can't address. (Technically, I could change one of the two but I don't fancy that assignment.) I don't have a six-pack but I'm not overweight. I drink, but not that heavily. I idle, but it's not, to my knowledge, a sobriquet.

Gout can just hit you if you have a build up of uric acid and it causes the kind of pain that, if I were of a certain age, might make me consider assisted death. (Given attitudes to gout, I would probably end up using “Indignitas” and find myself gently trundling down a cliff on a wheeled commode whilst watching my lover perform a “Look Ma, no hands!” sex act on her lover, all to the tune of “My Way.” )

Eighteen hours after the start of the attack, I had to call 111. The surges of pain made me my think my foot was going to explode and I was enfeebled to an extent that I couldn't perform my inchworm manoeuvre. I was prescribed painkillers and colchicine, a drug that gets rid of the uric acid but dumps you with diarrhoea before you have regained the ability to haul-ass at a functional rate. Yes, fuck you again, that is another anecdote involving stairs I'm not sharing.

Seven days later, I could stand. It made me want to dance. I couldn't, of course, but after a week in which I had sacrificed a social trip to London, a chance to meet friends whom I had not seen for many months and everyone's casual mobility provoked a desire to shout insults, unassisted standing nearly made me want to kiss “bell-ends.”