If medical conditions can be fashionable, this is undoubtedly the time to have hyperuricaemia ("gout" is such an ugly word). Cases in the UK have risen steeply in the last decade to 1.5% of the population - nearly a million sufferers. Greater reporting of the condition to GPs has resulted in a broadening of its demographic across the age and gender scales.
To earlier generations, gout afflicted only brandy-sodden old buffers. It put Tennyson through the agonies of the damned, and tormented Dickens's characters. In Them Thar Hills (1934), Oliver Hardy is prescribed a trip to the mountains to recuperate from what the doctor diagnoses as "too much high living".
Gout is caused when uric acid builds up in the bloodstream and crystallises on the joints. Diets high in purines (seafood, offal, beer) aggravate it, as does too much fructose. A recent North American survey linked it to overconsumption of sugary drinks, apples and oranges.
When I had my first outbreak of the condition five years ago, I had no idea that I was part of the avant-garde of a medical vogue. The first twinges in and around the big toe (where 70% of attacks occur) initially felt like some kind of muscle strain, then progressed to the sort of discomfort that prevented me from putting my weight on my foot, and arrived within 48 hours at a state of infernal excruciation for which "pain" was too modest a term.
Stumbling around on the affected foot, I delighted friends and colleagues with my impeccable Quasimodo after Charles Laughton. I am a food and wine writer, and thus became the tottering embodiment of the fact that the road of excess leads not to wisdom, but to silly walks.
To the non-sufferer, gout is at once comical and retributive. People, there is nothing funny about gout. Toothache is funnier. Paper cuts are funnier. There is no cure as such, but some relief can be had from eating cherries, and a lot more from taking ibuprofen, or the prescription drug naproxen.
One at least has the chill comfort of being in illustrious company. I asked Julie Burchill how she copes. "I take a very philosophical attitude to mine," she replied. "To quote the great Marc Almond, it's 'a battle scar of all the good times'." www.ukgoutsociety.org
