Sprint into the abyss

I just looked out of the window to see an old, overweight and very unsporty-looking man hobbling along in a pair of bright white trainers.

Yesterday, I awoke before dawn thinking I had cold feet, but when I reached down to warm them up (yes, I can still just about reach) I found they were not cold, but just numb.

A little later, I told H.I. about the loss of feeling in my toes, and she just said, "Diabetes."

The look of horror on my face must have betrayed the anxiety which she dropped on me with that one word, because she immediately tried to reassure me by saying two more - "Don't worry."

DON'T WORRY?! She plants a seed like that in my head before I have had any coffee, and she expects me not to worry?

Later still, I furtively consulted some online doctors by typing the symptom into Google, and after a great deal of trawling through 'cures' which included amputation, I found that I could add this numbness to the already quite large list of symptoms typical of one who suffers from a congenital spine disorder such as A.S. My worry subsided a little.

By the laws of probability, I can discount the prospect of amputation or life-long medication for a while. The bent neck, the lumps on the tendons, the loss of feeling in certain parts of my right hand, the ribcage thing, the swollen knee, and now this. How progressive.

I have not grown so old that I no longer care about what I put on my feet just so long as they are comfortable, but - it seems -  I have started to become a bit boring about sharing my aliments with the rest of the world. It's just that any problems to do with the spinal column always add about 30 years onto the sufferer - or that's how it feels from the inside.

In any case, I bet I paid about six times more for my Crockett and Jones' than the old bloke paid for his Adidas'.