Oh well

Spent the morning flat out in bed.

Wait there.

If you like to imagine what follows is a glorious sustained essay on the joys of sexuality, stop reading. Take the fantasy with you, and elaborate the narrative in your head. Go happy.

If you are still here, you can have the truth.

Last night (conveniently after the doctor's appointment), corrosion, buckling and general chemical erosion hit the entire Grit edifice. The complete structure gave in. Steel nerves, brass neck, stone heart and thick skin. It all tumbled down, blasted by a wrecking-ball bug the size of Planet Jupiter. Actually, a knock-out blow from Planet Jupiter was just what it felt like. These days I have not much resistance. I could probably have been floored by a microbe a hundredth-size of the Higgs Boson particle.

I expect everything will be fine and I will spring up again, back to normal, within 24 hours. I haven't any other option. Dig is pimping in South America and the Junior Grits need dinner. 

And I am not surprised the stupid body fell ill. It is all a bag of bone. Anything can attack it. Thanks to the restricted diet I eat while I try and stop my even-stupider autoimmune system from attacking the body that offers it a home, I find out that I now weigh in at a weedy 7st 11lbs. Man, it hurts. There are some days I feel I can lift my glasses to my face and I'll knock myself out.

Well, at least the diet is progressing and working, slowly. It started from a luxurious base of around 8 rice crackers and a glass of water, before it became water only.

Introducing regular foods from a zero start, bit-by-bit, is the key, so I am told, to discovering the thresholds about your diet that can help you. In my case, stop my own throat from strangling me, and preventing my skin looking (and feeling) like the neighbour lost control of his blowtorch. But look on the bright side! Tomorrow I intend to experiment on myself with a Brazil Nut.

To get well as quickly as possible and arrive at the joyous point where I can eat, put on weight, and be normal, I am of course seeking supplementary and alternative forms of remedy. For a start, optimistically swallowing somewhere in the region of 980 vitamin tablets a day. No, of course 250mg of B6 in a camomile infusion might not work, and why don't you tell me the dosage gives me nerve damage. But I think I at least deserve a letter of congratulation from the Board of Trade or something, just for helping keep the international pseudo-science industry alive.

Because I am simply happy to try any dietary experiment I can by also introducing all irregular, faddish, get-well-quick food and drinks. Especially any substance that promises immediate good health, great well-being, and general nirvana. I exclude traditional Asian medicine like snake face and panda nose. I am still vegetarian and ecologically minded. (Although give it another few months and I might change my opinions.)

In this spirit, yesterday I tried the magic elixir called Beetroot Juice. The bottle carries a line which tells you that it colours urine pink, and do not worry, this is normal.

As I say, I always look on the bright side. Abandon the life you planned and accept the life you have. Yes, that saying might have originated in a fortune cookie, but it has served me well. I think of it now, as I lie in my bed, wondering how many years I have to drink Beetroot Juice and never taste a Burgundy again.

I planned a life of dissolute irresponsibility. Enjoyment, travelling to intriguing places around the world, dinner engagements, alcohol, spending other people's money, avoiding all work and eschewing serious enterprise at every opportunity, indulging in routine idling, and enjoying entire days in bed blissed out for all the right reasons.

I have managed none of them - or all of them for such a short time it now barely counts in my favour - but look on the bright side. I might manage what I could say is the finest achievement yet. Piss in pink.