If freelance writing for a living suffers any kind of a post-elections dip, I can always offer to moonlight as one of the maracas they place on tables for people to rattle along to the music.
For I have just worked out that I am regularly taking nine tablets of one kind or another. Seven of them are prescribed by doctors and most are swallowed on a daily basis. Turned upside down and shaken vigorously, I'd make a very good maraca.
The list of médicaments - don't worry, I'll spare most detail, though high blood pressure and cholesterol have some part to play - tells only part of the story. I am about to start a course of physiotherapy on badminton-damaged ankles, a condition that also requires me to have an ultrasound examination tomorrow.
Then there's next week's dental appointment and the need to see the chiropodist again before long (she is responsible for a further three treatments, two for my feet and the other for my shoes).
Not that long ago, I was fitted with a contraption to measure the heartbeat, the second such 24-hour testing device to be attached to my chest in the space of a few months, each relating to a different function. And I was packed off recently to a clinic just outside Toulon to undergo a brain scan.
So much seems to be going on that I have almost certainly overlooked something or other. I certainly almost forgot to add that one doctor also typed out a list of things I should try to avoid eating and drinking - from charcuterie, salmon and tuna to champagne and white wine.
When I read it with a gathering sense of gloom, I pointed out that he had just excluded my entire diet (the phsyio has just added milk and rosé wine to the banned items).
Yet I can honestly say that I have not felt better for years. I have lost a little weight, eat well (or, at any rate, did), get regular exercise in and out of water and, if only I can fix the dodgy ankles in time, hope to play in a tournament in St Tropez later this month.
Am I feeling bien dans ma peau because of this extraordinary cocktail of drugs and wide-ranging series of treatments and checks, or would I be perfectly OK without them?
Not for me to say. When I mention to doctors that I have never taken so many pills in my life, they just smile benignly as if to remind me that I am the quaint Englishman slowly learning French ways.
At the chemist, someone said the French feel cheated if they leave a doctor's surgery without a prescription for three or four capsules for this or that ailment.
But will France's astonishing love affair with medicines survive the Sarkozy revolution? Remember that for anyone who is part of the French syste, almost all the items I have listed are free or refunded, in full or to a large extent (the chiropodist complains bitterly about the exclusion of her specialisation).
I suspect that things will indeed change as the new president orders his ministers to balance the books a bit more effectively, and a proper assault is made on the health service deficit.
Philippe Douste-Blazy, when health minister, described the carte vitale , carried by all French people and covering - with a bit of help from private insurance - most medical needs, as the most generous credit card in the world but one that France could no longer afford as used at present.
But I am a responsible citizen and can surely take, so to speak, Sarko's medicine.
Whatever he may be planning by way of prescription and consultation charges is fine by me. Just as long as he gives me a chance to get better first, once I work out what's wrong with me.
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