I don’t drink alcohol. It’s not a religious thing (anymore), I just don’t feel the need for alcohol in order to have a good time. I’m also not pedantic about it, and am able to have a drink if I want to - I think I had a glass of wine a year or two back. All this is to say that alcohol is a non-issue in my life - I can take it or leave it and usually choose to leave it.
It has, therefore, been a source of some mild amusement that my kidney condition has permanently swollen my stomach to the ‘six-month pregnant’ stage. Not that anyone would think that a seventy-year-old man was pregnant (I mention it only for the size comparison). But there is a certain irony in the fact that my body looks as if it might have spent a large part of its life supporting the bar at my local pub.
I have learned to live with the implied criticism occasioned by a distended stomach, and the unspoken disapproval of the athletically inclined. And so it was, with the sort of amusement only found on the far side of “you’re kidding, right?” that I learned that my painfully swollen foot was called “gout”. Yes, that gout - the disease of kings, and often the result of too much beer. Only in this case …
I wouldn’t mind wandering around bearing the marks of a profligate life, only I seem to have missed out on the profligate part. It’s one thing to pay the price for a misspent youth, it’s quite another to apparently pay for one you never had. Then, on the precipice of self-pity, I’m reminded that it is Easter - and that mine is such a tiny, tiny, cross.
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