— What sort of pizzas does Good King Wenceslas like?
— Deep pan, crisp and even.
Some words have magic attached to them. Take “gout”.
In French (admittedly with a circumflex hovering over the u), it means “taste”, and is a rather mysterious word. Le goût du terroir, the taste of the earth, is a mystical quality not just attached to, but actually giving rise to, the individual character of a wine or an olive oil or a cheese, and very probably to an Eric Cantona or a Thierry Henri too. The land explains the quality, is the message.
But I digress. Our gout is nothing much to do with the French goût. Our gout is an affliction suffered by (particularly) blokes in their forties. I’m a bloke in his forties.
Here’s more detail than you need:
Recurrent acute arthritis of peripheral joints caused by the accumulation of monosodium urate crytals. Often presents as pain and swelling confined to one joint. The big toe joint is commonly affected. The arthritis occurs secondary to an inherited abnormality of purine metabolism, resulting in the deposition of uric acid crystals (sodium urate) within the joint space and articular cartilage. Usually due to overproduction of uric acid but may be a result of under excretion. The problems partly arise because neutrophils release lysosomal enzymes as a result of damage to the phagosome membrane by ingested crystals. Suggested treatment: colchicine acts to reduce the attack by inhibiting lysosome phagosome fusion.
My version of this is:
Sore toe.
The magic comes in because you have only to mention the word to some people and they collapse with laughter, making jokes about imbibing too much vintage port. It’s all… very… amusing. Yes, gout has an image problem.
I get it a couple of times a year. Every time it happens, people ask me how I can run with this problem. The answer is that I can’t. Not when it’s bad – but it’s usually bad only for a day or two. Usually. This time its intermittent presence has been felt for ten days now, and it’s getting a bit boring.
When it does happen, I’m reminded that it was one of the reasons I started running in the first place. I read somewhere that exercise would help the problem as it would improve circulation — and it certainly has.
The outcome of all this gout-chatter is the news that I’ve run only once since last Sunday, when I had my surprisingly good 8.3 miles. If it hadn’t been Christmas Day I probably wouldn’t have done even that, but I couldn’t fail to get out there early on Christmas morning. It’s one of the purest runs of the year. Almost no traffic and very few pedestrians. The people you do see are unusually cheerful. They peer out from very new looking scarves, and wave at you with very new looking gloves. “Don’t panic”, I reassure myself. “They’ll be back to normal tomorrow.”
Tomorrow I’m supposed to be doing the Cliveden 6 mile cross country. It was always going to be a struggle to get through this notoriously tough race, but a painful toe, virtually no preparation, and several days of over-eating haven’t made it any easier. Will I do it? I don’t know. I’ll prod the toe and my conscientiousness on what I suspect will be a cold morning tomorrow. Tonight the moon shines brightly, and the frost is cruel. But Christmas, mercifully, is over for another year, and perhaps I should give thanks by limping up and down a murderously steep, frozen hill. Three bloody times.
