A friend met me at a busy café wearing one shoe and one white, waffle hotel slipper. Not an easy look to style out but agony stopped her seeing the funny side. Gout seems to be everywhere. I know of half a dozen people hobbled with it and none looks like Henry VIII. It turns out that cases are rising, partly due to boozing, obesity and ageing. Yet two sufferers I know are in their twenties. Another is a light-drinking gym bunny. What’s going on? When it’s very bad they can’t even bear bedsheets touching their feet and the joke — “Doctor, I’ve got a sore foot.” “Gout!” “But I’ve only just walked in” — strangely gets no laughs at all.
“Imagine 50 hot needles being hammered into your toe,” complains a grimacing friend. His doctor says gout is largely misunderstood. Never mind port-quaffing rich-living: asparagus can trigger attacks. Cider vinegar apparently helps. If it truly was the disease of kings I suspect they’d have found a cure by now. One friend said gallstones are a breeze in comparison and last winter wore flip-flops for a fortnight.
Yet it is still one of those afflictions, like hangovers and the clap, that when you say you’ve got it, people snigger. Well I won’t; not any more. The English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu once said: “People wish their enemies dead — but I do not. I say give them the gout.” Maybe go with that.
Cheating parents
My daughter had to provide photo ID when sitting school entrance exams. I assumed it was so children found the right desk but maybe I’m naive. It transpires that some ghastly parents get cleverer siblings or cousins to sit their 11-plus. One Kent grammar school compared the handwriting of a struggling pupil with his test paper and found it was totally different.
I almost admire their audacity. Oh, except that it’s morally bankrupt, you’re stealing another child’s place and putting your own through probable years of hell when they can’t keep up, and doubtless giving them anxiety. So well done: you win!
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This was all foretold in fiction. In John O’Farrell’s 2005 comic novel about pushy parenthood, May Contain Nuts, a mother sat the exam at a London school disguised as her daughter in baseball cap and fake zits — and won a scholarship. I bet it’s where they got the idea.
Brits tease
I tend to zone out during sports news on the Today programme (don’t we have 5 Live for that?) but Nick Faldo made my ears prick up. The European Ryder Cup team gel better than the US one, he said, partly because the former poke fun at each other. It’s a very British trait, he said: “The more I like someone the more I tease them . . . it’s not an American thing.” So true. Insults often equal affection here. My friends call each other the sweariest names. But it’s a compliment when a friendship’s so solid you can use a four-letter noun endearingly. Where I live men routinely greet their friends with, “All right, bollocks?” and it’s common to hear, “He’s a lovely bastard.” Like sarcasm, this wouldn’t work so well across the pond.
I’m reminded of the time in a nice US restaurant when my friend cleared his plate. When the waiter asked how it was he indicated the empty bowl and said: “Dreadful”. The waiter offered to get the manager.
Merry crispmas
The annual search for the most desperate Christmas-themed products is upon us. Past contenders include festive bleach and mulled wine bog roll. But Iceland is going left-field with “Luxury Christmas tree-flavoured” crisps, containing “pine salt flavour seasoning” which is “unlike any other festive flavour”. Bizarre.
As they’re £1, obviously I had to buy some. Verdict: bland, slight medicinal after-taste but I’ve had worse (foulest crisps ever? Tesco’s goat’s cheese and chilli jam). It’s impossible to say though if they are as billed. For who among us has eaten a Christmas tree?