I booked my first driving lesson today. Very chuffed!

Thing is, I now have just ten days to get rid of the latest attack of gout. Luckily, I think I know what caused this attack. It seems that wholemeal bread and mackerel are high in Purines, which exacerbate gout, so the four ham on wholemeal sandwiches I had on Wednesday won't have helped, neither will the baked mackerel I had last night.

D'oh!

I should avoid lentils, booze, liver, brains, sweetmeats, gravy, booze and yeast extract foods too.

It's not actually that bad because it's mostly stuff I don't like, apart from gravy and mackerel.

So anyway, I've been getting attacks of the shivers and feeling really bad every few hours and it's only a couple of hours ago I realised it wasn't a reaction to the pain, but withdrawal symptoms from the Keral tablets I've been double-dosing on. I knew there'd be a drawback to overdosing! So I've put myself back on a regular dose. Just hope it works.

Anyway, the driving lesson. As the regulars will know, I've named my car "The Beast", and for good reason. It's a 1.8l 17 year old Audi 80s which has 60,000 miles on the clock and has a petrol tank so big I could get to Glasgow without filling up. 80mph in The Beast feels like 50 in my sister's Rover 25. So it really is a bit of a beast. So I thought it might be an idea to request a big car to learn to drive in. Makes sense to me. My sister learned to drive 11 years ago in the prerequisite dual control Fiesta that I think everyone expects to learn in, but then when she stepped into the massive, powerful thing she bought herself after passing, she wouldn't drive it because it was too scary and powerful.

I know what she means. I've practised pulling away in The Beast, just running it forward twenty meters, then backing it up again outside the house and it scares the shit outta me, so even though it'll probably bore the crap outta me, I've booked a couple of introductory lessons in a 1.8l Ford Focus for a week on Monday. If I learn in a car as powerful as the one I actually own, I can face my fear before I get my "P" plates, and that can only be a good thing.

Now, if only my accelerator foot would stop being sheer agony...