Got up at 6 again this morning, stepped outside and discovered something was deeply, deeply...right.
Of course over this last weekend, we've put our clocks back an hour, so the dreadful early morning darkness has been vanquished by the simple expedient of us all agreeing that the time it was this time last week, it simply isn't anymore. I stepped out this morning into lightening indigo, rather than depressing squid-ink. Personally, given the positivity this infused into my steps this morning, I think we should go further. How about putting the clocks back three hours, or five? Then my previously murderous 6AM walks would actually be nice brisk, bright 11AM walks and nobody would feel an urge to stick a stiletto through my head. On which subject, having learned from last week, I made sure to warn d of my intentions in sufficient time yesterday, and am both bruise-free and unscowled-at for my efforts. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?
Thinking about it, doesn't the whole Pavlov's Dogs experiment pretty much de-bunk that whole idea? Or am I only skim-reading his results? (Shrugs). Not that this matters in the least.
Another busy week, this one - got a magazine to get out, and a journal to proof, and no, before you ask, they're absolutely not the same thing, thankyouverymuch, and bad eyeball news to chase up - after my prodding last week, have had a stern letter from the doctors saying "Oh blimey, your eyes are crap, aren't they - call us. Call us now...there is absolutely nothing to worry about at this stage."And then of course there's Tuesday to think about too - except I'm not, and you can't make me, so nehh!
But all of this is somehow made rather better by that indigo sky - and by the fact that our Macs at work (hateful supermodel computers, the lot of them) hadn't worked out that we'd changed the time, and so lulled me into a false sense of urgency this morning, meaning when I just had a phone conversation with someone who insisted it was morning, I was doubly delighted to find out he was still, actually, right. Lighter skies, extra time to do all the mountains of stuff I have to do - this week could only really be improved by a mind-bogglingly positive result tomorrow.
No, I'm not promising one, just saying - that'd be extra cool. In fact, if that happened, I'd probably petition Parliament to put the clocks back an hour every week, to the point where every couple of weeks, we'd gain half a day. As long as these were always implemented on a Saturday morning, giving us two Friday nights for the price of one, I don't think anyone'd mind...would they?
Monday 31 October 2011
Sunday 30 October 2011
The Breakfast Hunter
"Ahhh, I love living in a third world metropolitan capital city..." d muttered.
It's a sentiment she's been known to express once or twice before - when, for example, a staple ingredient the world over is unavailable here, or when, for instance, we see signs that promise superstores open 24 hours, and then in the smaller print, giving opening times between 10-8.
This morning, after our regulation couple of hours of bed-gibber, it was all about breakfast. Luckily, we have a great little family-run tasty-omeletting portugese cafe a couple of hundred yards away from us. Unfortunately, they were closed.
"Let's have an Adventure," said d.
"Alrighty," I agreed, knowing that the main thing waiting for me back at home was work that I didn't manage to get done on Friday. We jumped on a bus and headed east, with nothing on our mind but finding another little family-run cafe. We ended up in Beckton, and wandered around East Ham Broadway.
"There's one," I said, spotting the word "cafe" down a side street. "Can't vouch for it though, looks a bit...erm...neon..."
"Oh, there's bound to be something up the road," she said.
"Yeah," I agreed, and we walked on.
Nada. Nothing but Halal butchers and closed shops. We walked about a mile, getting progressively more desperate.
"Let's have another Adventure," I said, hearing the mutuality of our stomach-growls. We got on another bus.
We were heading into the middle of not-exactly-nowhere, and we went past a Brewer's Fayre pub.
"Breakfast" it said.
We rang the bell.
"Way to go mom-and-pop," I muttered as we walked through the doors of the chain pub.
"Don't care," said d. "Breakfast,"
"Good point," I agreed.
"Good morning," said the cheery Eastern European girl. "Did you pre-book?"
"Noooo," we almost chortled, a little snobbishly, at the idea that anyone would bother.
"Ah. Well...there are only three minutes of breakfast service left," she said. "If you ask me..."
We hadn't. d turned and left, and I followed. d, ravenous by this time, kicked the door.
"What do you have to do in this town to get breakfast?" she muttered. "D'you have to stalk your own toast or something? Make your own sausages?"
I said nothing - it's a sore point - d wants a sausage-maker in the same sort of way as I want a publisher, having discovered that British sausage, as she eloquently puts it, has the consistency of 'boneless baby-fingers'.
"There's an ASDA over there" I said, shrugging.
"They might have a cafe!" she declared.
Clearly, we'd now abandoned any thought of mom-and-pop, of quality food, of giving a toss - the only reason we didn't just turn right round and come home, I think, was that we were on an Adventure, dammit!
We nodded, wordlessly, and struck out across the road. There were people clustering around the entrance.
"Oh wait," she said.
"It's a Sunday, isn't it?"
"Ohhhh sonofa..." I muttered. We were in the Dead Zone. In Britain, Breakfast stops serving at 10.30. Lunch doesn't start serving till 12. For some reason vaguely connected to licensing laws and not pissing off the churchgoers any more than it absolutely necessary, British supermarkets don't open to paying customers until 11.
I half expected it to start pissing down with rain at this point, just to put the clincher on our morning out.
Fortunately, as we approached, the crowd of bargain-hunters dispersed indoors. There's a cute little niche the supermarkets have cottoned on to - they can't legally sell anything till 11 o'clock - but they can let people in and get them filling up their baskets ahead of that, so they open their doors at 10.30 for "browsers".
Again, d's not wrong when she calls London a third world metropolitan capital city - it's this weird halfway house between sophistication and backwardness, opulence and austerity.
Anyway, they let us in, and fortunately, because their cafe is just a cafe, not a licensed retailer, we could head straight there, our stomachs by this time yawning with anticipation.
It's pretty much motorway-food you get at these places - by which I mean after a couple of mouthfuls, you want to wander out into traffic and beg people to hit you with a BMW. Tasteless chunks of yellow that are allegedly scrambled eggs, baked beans with a thicker skin than many Hollywood celebrities, sausages that, I will admit, had no particular texture to speak of and the flavours of pepper and wet cardboard, and positively anorexic toast. The guy at the counter also rather took against my girl when she asked for a double-portion of the nauseating eggs, and later checked with his colleague that we'd paid for them both.
"Are we done with the Adventure now?" I begged, dipping a piece of dry toast into her bean-juice.
"Next weekend, you're getting oatmeal," she muttered, darkly.
What else is to say today - I weighed early, and was pleased with my progress, but since then, have been relatively paranoid - not wanting to lose the progress in the space of the next thirty-six hours. Having said that, I've munched my way through a lot of my graze-mix today. I'm now working to ensure that I don't get paranoid and mental trying to work out how many caloriessworth of nuts and raisins and suchlike I've sucked down. This week I've been relatively unconcerned - hadn't weighed at all since Tuesday till, I think, a couple of days ago, and then again today, and I have to say, relative freedom from the insanity of numbers has been great. Not gonna submit to all that palaver at this point. But I have done my 500 caloriesworth of biking, and I'm planning to hit the road again tomorrow morning at Dawn o'clock, just to tip the balance a little in favour of maintaining progress.And no, before you ask, I haven't reached the four-stone mark, I'm just enjoying the sense of working and walking and pushing the damn numbers down again.
So on to tomorrow. Adventure-free, hopefully...
It's a sentiment she's been known to express once or twice before - when, for example, a staple ingredient the world over is unavailable here, or when, for instance, we see signs that promise superstores open 24 hours, and then in the smaller print, giving opening times between 10-8.
This morning, after our regulation couple of hours of bed-gibber, it was all about breakfast. Luckily, we have a great little family-run tasty-omeletting portugese cafe a couple of hundred yards away from us. Unfortunately, they were closed.
"Let's have an Adventure," said d.
"Alrighty," I agreed, knowing that the main thing waiting for me back at home was work that I didn't manage to get done on Friday. We jumped on a bus and headed east, with nothing on our mind but finding another little family-run cafe. We ended up in Beckton, and wandered around East Ham Broadway.
"There's one," I said, spotting the word "cafe" down a side street. "Can't vouch for it though, looks a bit...erm...neon..."
"Oh, there's bound to be something up the road," she said.
"Yeah," I agreed, and we walked on.
Nada. Nothing but Halal butchers and closed shops. We walked about a mile, getting progressively more desperate.
"Let's have another Adventure," I said, hearing the mutuality of our stomach-growls. We got on another bus.
We were heading into the middle of not-exactly-nowhere, and we went past a Brewer's Fayre pub.
"Breakfast" it said.
We rang the bell.
"Way to go mom-and-pop," I muttered as we walked through the doors of the chain pub.
"Don't care," said d. "Breakfast,"
"Good point," I agreed.
"Good morning," said the cheery Eastern European girl. "Did you pre-book?"
"Noooo," we almost chortled, a little snobbishly, at the idea that anyone would bother.
"Ah. Well...there are only three minutes of breakfast service left," she said. "If you ask me..."
We hadn't. d turned and left, and I followed. d, ravenous by this time, kicked the door.
"What do you have to do in this town to get breakfast?" she muttered. "D'you have to stalk your own toast or something? Make your own sausages?"
I said nothing - it's a sore point - d wants a sausage-maker in the same sort of way as I want a publisher, having discovered that British sausage, as she eloquently puts it, has the consistency of 'boneless baby-fingers'.
"There's an ASDA over there" I said, shrugging.
"They might have a cafe!" she declared.
Clearly, we'd now abandoned any thought of mom-and-pop, of quality food, of giving a toss - the only reason we didn't just turn right round and come home, I think, was that we were on an Adventure, dammit!
We nodded, wordlessly, and struck out across the road. There were people clustering around the entrance.
"Oh wait," she said.
"It's a Sunday, isn't it?"
"Ohhhh sonofa..." I muttered. We were in the Dead Zone. In Britain, Breakfast stops serving at 10.30. Lunch doesn't start serving till 12. For some reason vaguely connected to licensing laws and not pissing off the churchgoers any more than it absolutely necessary, British supermarkets don't open to paying customers until 11.
I half expected it to start pissing down with rain at this point, just to put the clincher on our morning out.
Fortunately, as we approached, the crowd of bargain-hunters dispersed indoors. There's a cute little niche the supermarkets have cottoned on to - they can't legally sell anything till 11 o'clock - but they can let people in and get them filling up their baskets ahead of that, so they open their doors at 10.30 for "browsers".
Again, d's not wrong when she calls London a third world metropolitan capital city - it's this weird halfway house between sophistication and backwardness, opulence and austerity.
Anyway, they let us in, and fortunately, because their cafe is just a cafe, not a licensed retailer, we could head straight there, our stomachs by this time yawning with anticipation.
It's pretty much motorway-food you get at these places - by which I mean after a couple of mouthfuls, you want to wander out into traffic and beg people to hit you with a BMW. Tasteless chunks of yellow that are allegedly scrambled eggs, baked beans with a thicker skin than many Hollywood celebrities, sausages that, I will admit, had no particular texture to speak of and the flavours of pepper and wet cardboard, and positively anorexic toast. The guy at the counter also rather took against my girl when she asked for a double-portion of the nauseating eggs, and later checked with his colleague that we'd paid for them both.
"Are we done with the Adventure now?" I begged, dipping a piece of dry toast into her bean-juice.
"Next weekend, you're getting oatmeal," she muttered, darkly.
What else is to say today - I weighed early, and was pleased with my progress, but since then, have been relatively paranoid - not wanting to lose the progress in the space of the next thirty-six hours. Having said that, I've munched my way through a lot of my graze-mix today. I'm now working to ensure that I don't get paranoid and mental trying to work out how many caloriessworth of nuts and raisins and suchlike I've sucked down. This week I've been relatively unconcerned - hadn't weighed at all since Tuesday till, I think, a couple of days ago, and then again today, and I have to say, relative freedom from the insanity of numbers has been great. Not gonna submit to all that palaver at this point. But I have done my 500 caloriesworth of biking, and I'm planning to hit the road again tomorrow morning at Dawn o'clock, just to tip the balance a little in favour of maintaining progress.And no, before you ask, I haven't reached the four-stone mark, I'm just enjoying the sense of working and walking and pushing the damn numbers down again.
So on to tomorrow. Adventure-free, hopefully...
Saturday 29 October 2011
Traipsing Down Corridors
Today, much like a week ago today, it's all been about Who, and my obsession with a TV show that's older than I am. d got me a ticket to the annual London convention - her willingness to indulge and empower my weirder hobbies (there are a few, in case you haven't been keeping up with the inscrutable minutiae of my existence - slackers, the lot of you!) is just another of the many reasons I love her. But it's like night and day - whereas last week, the energy of the Experience was young and funny, and family-broad, and run-aroundy, today is pretty much guaranteed to make you feel like you're a) too old for this shit, and b) like you take particular bits of your life waaaay too freakin' seriously. I'm writing this sitting in an auditorium with about fifty other blokes and three women, listening to a bloke who played a character in the show for four episodes back in the 1980s talking about everything he's been doing in the years inbetween...and, for some reason, Fulham Football Club.
Which is fine of course, that's what he's into, and we're all here bathing in his tangential connection to something about which we appear to care a whole hell of a lot. But still - while I love the fact that d got this for me, I have a feeling that my convention-going days may be coming to an end, as my enthusiasm doesn't exactly shift, but I think, shifts focus.
Understand, I'm not criticising these people for only-being-tangentially-involved with something about which I care. It's more that sitting in a room full of serious blokes on a Saturday afternoon, all of whom could tell you the way to reverse the polarity of a neutron flow at the drop of a hat, does rather hold up a big funfair-style mirror to your own neurosis.
The good thing from a Disappearing point of view about doing conventions here in the famous Riverside Studios in Hammersmith is that the sales and signing section is on the ground floor, and the listening-to-tangential-fucks-from-the-80s section is on what could be generously described as the fourth floor, so there's been a certain amount of upstairsing and downstairsing throughout the course of the day. The Whisper is whispering that this is good for me.
So that's what I'm doing today.Weird life, innit?
Which is fine of course, that's what he's into, and we're all here bathing in his tangential connection to something about which we appear to care a whole hell of a lot. But still - while I love the fact that d got this for me, I have a feeling that my convention-going days may be coming to an end, as my enthusiasm doesn't exactly shift, but I think, shifts focus.
Understand, I'm not criticising these people for only-being-tangentially-involved with something about which I care. It's more that sitting in a room full of serious blokes on a Saturday afternoon, all of whom could tell you the way to reverse the polarity of a neutron flow at the drop of a hat, does rather hold up a big funfair-style mirror to your own neurosis.
The good thing from a Disappearing point of view about doing conventions here in the famous Riverside Studios in Hammersmith is that the sales and signing section is on the ground floor, and the listening-to-tangential-fucks-from-the-80s section is on what could be generously described as the fourth floor, so there's been a certain amount of upstairsing and downstairsing throughout the course of the day. The Whisper is whispering that this is good for me.
So that's what I'm doing today.Weird life, innit?
Friday 28 October 2011
The Happy Couple
Here's a tip:
If your wife is really really sick and coughing up lungs, and hasn't read your blog about asking her if it's OK to wake up at 6AM and go walking on a day you're actually working from home and don't in fact have to get up until gone 8...
DON'T.
Just Don't, in any way shape or form wake her up at 6, get out, walk five miles and then get a tube back to your home, and grab breakfast at a local cafe, and not call her. Especially when she thinks you've gone walking and then gone into your office, and is calling you there fairly frantically, wondering if you're lying in a gutter somewhere, bleeding...
S'just...SUCH a bad idea.
Naturally, this is advice I pass on notsomuch as a master of emotional and couples therapy, but as a dumb fuck who woke up his wife at 6AM, walked five miles, got a tube back home, grabbed breakfast at a local cafe, and forgot to call d, because last night, she said she'd read my blog.
Turned out it was the day before's blog, rather than yesterday's. But I thought she knew the plan and was good with it, so when she called at about 11, going "Where the Hell are you?" and I said "Oh, I was back at Selmo's Cafe by 8.30 baby,"...erm...it was an interesting moment.
Very little else to tell you about today - sat here on my arse all day, doing the work I was worried about getting done yesterday. There's a bike in my short-term future of course.
"Damn straight there is," muttered d, "I'm gonna put thumb-tacks on your couch if you don't bike after getting me up at six o'clock when you were working at home, ya git!"
But even if d wasn't so...erm...chronically enthusiastic about seeing me sweat and suffer tonight, I'd be doing it anyway - feels good to be getting back to a routine of pain and suffering, and hopefully, it'll be worthwhile on Tuesday.
And yes, of course I feel bad about this morning...
But here's the evil thing.
You remember the whole "Woe is me, I'm an addict" schtick?
You remember the Facebook friend of mine who said she was now addicted to losing weight?
Did I ever mention that addiction is fundamentally fucking selfish? Tell you what, do an experiment - ask a junkie in need of a fix what happens to their conscience? Or a drying-out drunk whether they feel like having a touchy-feely moment?
I didn't know this was there till writing this entry, but while the real me, the civilised, thinking me knows it did a moderately accidental but still thoughtless thing this morning. But the whisper - that insidious little git of a whisper - is saying "Yeah, but that's probably an extra 500 calories today, burn baby, burn baby, burn burn buuuuuuuurn.
So now what? Addicted to Disappearing? Can someone else roll my eyes for me, I'm kinda busy smacking myself upside the head.
Oh wait...honey c'mere, I need a hand while I'm rolling my eyes...
If your wife is really really sick and coughing up lungs, and hasn't read your blog about asking her if it's OK to wake up at 6AM and go walking on a day you're actually working from home and don't in fact have to get up until gone 8...
DON'T.
Just Don't, in any way shape or form wake her up at 6, get out, walk five miles and then get a tube back to your home, and grab breakfast at a local cafe, and not call her. Especially when she thinks you've gone walking and then gone into your office, and is calling you there fairly frantically, wondering if you're lying in a gutter somewhere, bleeding...
S'just...SUCH a bad idea.
Naturally, this is advice I pass on notsomuch as a master of emotional and couples therapy, but as a dumb fuck who woke up his wife at 6AM, walked five miles, got a tube back home, grabbed breakfast at a local cafe, and forgot to call d, because last night, she said she'd read my blog.
Turned out it was the day before's blog, rather than yesterday's. But I thought she knew the plan and was good with it, so when she called at about 11, going "Where the Hell are you?" and I said "Oh, I was back at Selmo's Cafe by 8.30 baby,"...erm...it was an interesting moment.
Very little else to tell you about today - sat here on my arse all day, doing the work I was worried about getting done yesterday. There's a bike in my short-term future of course.
"Damn straight there is," muttered d, "I'm gonna put thumb-tacks on your couch if you don't bike after getting me up at six o'clock when you were working at home, ya git!"
But even if d wasn't so...erm...chronically enthusiastic about seeing me sweat and suffer tonight, I'd be doing it anyway - feels good to be getting back to a routine of pain and suffering, and hopefully, it'll be worthwhile on Tuesday.
And yes, of course I feel bad about this morning...
But here's the evil thing.
You remember the whole "Woe is me, I'm an addict" schtick?
You remember the Facebook friend of mine who said she was now addicted to losing weight?
Did I ever mention that addiction is fundamentally fucking selfish? Tell you what, do an experiment - ask a junkie in need of a fix what happens to their conscience? Or a drying-out drunk whether they feel like having a touchy-feely moment?
I didn't know this was there till writing this entry, but while the real me, the civilised, thinking me knows it did a moderately accidental but still thoughtless thing this morning. But the whisper - that insidious little git of a whisper - is saying "Yeah, but that's probably an extra 500 calories today, burn baby, burn baby, burn burn buuuuuuuurn.
So now what? Addicted to Disappearing? Can someone else roll my eyes for me, I'm kinda busy smacking myself upside the head.
Oh wait...honey c'mere, I need a hand while I'm rolling my eyes...
Thursday 27 October 2011
Back On the Road
Ahhhh...that feels good.
Up at 6 this morning, stumbling out into the dark by 6.45, walked five miles to Aldgate. Felt good, felt like me, felt like the way that things should be. Felt like no blisters, or broken toes, or trick ankles, or aching hips. Couldn't see a bloody thing of course, but that's October for you.
Of course it was only when I got to the office that d sent me a Ransom Note that rather highlighted the perils of getting up and about at Silly o'Clock -
"I have your phone," it said.
"You have my keys," it went on.
"Your move."
In my bleary state, I'd grabbed both sets of keys and no phone. Note to self - don't do that in future.
What it means of course is that I can't do any meaningful walking tonight - have to get my ass to a meet-up with d, so that my poor, still-lurgied girl can get in the house. On the upside of course, that means we should be home in plenty of time for me to do some proper biking tonight.
Tomorrow is another work-from-home day, and one on which I really have to push forward with a project with a Tuesday deadline. Hopefully though, I can also get some biking done. I'm wondering, sad as this is, whether d would baulk at me getting up at 6 again tomorrow, doing the walk I did this morning, and then coming back! Probably, I imagine - she's really not getting enough oxygen as it is at the moment, so sleep is at a premium...
Still, it's a thought...
Up at 6 this morning, stumbling out into the dark by 6.45, walked five miles to Aldgate. Felt good, felt like me, felt like the way that things should be. Felt like no blisters, or broken toes, or trick ankles, or aching hips. Couldn't see a bloody thing of course, but that's October for you.
Of course it was only when I got to the office that d sent me a Ransom Note that rather highlighted the perils of getting up and about at Silly o'Clock -
"I have your phone," it said.
"You have my keys," it went on.
"Your move."
In my bleary state, I'd grabbed both sets of keys and no phone. Note to self - don't do that in future.
What it means of course is that I can't do any meaningful walking tonight - have to get my ass to a meet-up with d, so that my poor, still-lurgied girl can get in the house. On the upside of course, that means we should be home in plenty of time for me to do some proper biking tonight.
Tomorrow is another work-from-home day, and one on which I really have to push forward with a project with a Tuesday deadline. Hopefully though, I can also get some biking done. I'm wondering, sad as this is, whether d would baulk at me getting up at 6 again tomorrow, doing the walk I did this morning, and then coming back! Probably, I imagine - she's really not getting enough oxygen as it is at the moment, so sleep is at a premium...
Still, it's a thought...
Wednesday 26 October 2011
The Maybe-Good
Blood was a high 5.9 this morning, but again, this makes perfectly good sense - had an Italian meal last night, did absolutely no walking this morning because damnit, it was raining, and no raindrop should ever touch my delicate, hair-bare head!
Today was a good-ish day, in a moderately Secret Squirrel way - inasmuch as something good happened, but I can't tell you what, because it only sort of happened, rather than officially happening yet, and it may not ever officially happen, and even though I don't believe in this kind of nonsense, I'm not about to jinx it by saying "Woohoo, look at me, this happened!!!" when to all intents and purposes, it only maybe-happened.
Whaddaya want from me - I understand Steven Moffatt's Doctor Who, sometimes the timey-wimeyness rubs off!
What I can tell you, as of now, is that the goodness and secretness and Schrodinger's Woohooness of the day resulted in me meeting d for dinner, rather than walking some nice chunky distance and having pauper's beans on toast for dinner. Which meant we stayed out late. Which means that a whole other day went by with no biking either.
Now, it's easy to mistake this for complacency or giving up, but really, it's neither of those things, it's that certain things must be done. These are certain things, and therefore I must do them. There are certain steaks a man just has to eat in his life, and eating one tonight was a kind of low-intensity nod to the potential really goodness of the day, without actually acknowledging its potential in any way, or, y'know, speaking the words out loud or anything showy like that.
My phone is already set for Christ o'clock tomorrow. The walking boots are in the living room, waiting with some degree of trepidation to be strapped on by cold, morning-darkened fingers. Tomorrow, dammit, we walk in the morning!
Oh and I went to make enquiries at the gym in Kensington last night. Sooooo not gonna be doing that. It wasn't even the £145 per month that really bugged me. It was the fact that a) I was right, there was nobody else in there who needed to be anywhere near the place, and b) when I asked for the rates, I couldn't just be told - they made me sit down first, and tell them where I worked, and gave me not the question of how long I wanted to do this for, but the ultimately most costly, twelve month option, right off the bat. In fact the whole place gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies...which, in my modest experience, is when you should ideally turn around and walk away, rather than getting out your plastic.
In fact, thinking about it, I've only ever been in one gym that made me feel comfortable and welcome, and that wasn't technically a gym, it was a leisure centre. It was also, now I think about it, run by a local authority, rather than a health and fitness company. And, as if this meant anything, it was also back home in Merthyr, and filled with - well, not filled, that would be an unkind slur, but it certainly had its fair proportion of - fat people. Maybe that's it - maybe, when it comes right down to it, I'm too fat, and too Welsh, and too downright socialist ever to feel comfortable in a so-completely-for-profit gym. Maybe I actually need that Merthyr leisure centre, with its regular, flump-shaped people, and it's gloriously cheap prices covering everything from gyms to saunas to a goddamned swimming pool (take that, Virgin Active, Kensington!)...
It'd be a bitch of a commute every night though...
Today was a good-ish day, in a moderately Secret Squirrel way - inasmuch as something good happened, but I can't tell you what, because it only sort of happened, rather than officially happening yet, and it may not ever officially happen, and even though I don't believe in this kind of nonsense, I'm not about to jinx it by saying "Woohoo, look at me, this happened!!!" when to all intents and purposes, it only maybe-happened.
Whaddaya want from me - I understand Steven Moffatt's Doctor Who, sometimes the timey-wimeyness rubs off!
What I can tell you, as of now, is that the goodness and secretness and Schrodinger's Woohooness of the day resulted in me meeting d for dinner, rather than walking some nice chunky distance and having pauper's beans on toast for dinner. Which meant we stayed out late. Which means that a whole other day went by with no biking either.
Now, it's easy to mistake this for complacency or giving up, but really, it's neither of those things, it's that certain things must be done. These are certain things, and therefore I must do them. There are certain steaks a man just has to eat in his life, and eating one tonight was a kind of low-intensity nod to the potential really goodness of the day, without actually acknowledging its potential in any way, or, y'know, speaking the words out loud or anything showy like that.
My phone is already set for Christ o'clock tomorrow. The walking boots are in the living room, waiting with some degree of trepidation to be strapped on by cold, morning-darkened fingers. Tomorrow, dammit, we walk in the morning!
Oh and I went to make enquiries at the gym in Kensington last night. Sooooo not gonna be doing that. It wasn't even the £145 per month that really bugged me. It was the fact that a) I was right, there was nobody else in there who needed to be anywhere near the place, and b) when I asked for the rates, I couldn't just be told - they made me sit down first, and tell them where I worked, and gave me not the question of how long I wanted to do this for, but the ultimately most costly, twelve month option, right off the bat. In fact the whole place gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies...which, in my modest experience, is when you should ideally turn around and walk away, rather than getting out your plastic.
In fact, thinking about it, I've only ever been in one gym that made me feel comfortable and welcome, and that wasn't technically a gym, it was a leisure centre. It was also, now I think about it, run by a local authority, rather than a health and fitness company. And, as if this meant anything, it was also back home in Merthyr, and filled with - well, not filled, that would be an unkind slur, but it certainly had its fair proportion of - fat people. Maybe that's it - maybe, when it comes right down to it, I'm too fat, and too Welsh, and too downright socialist ever to feel comfortable in a so-completely-for-profit gym. Maybe I actually need that Merthyr leisure centre, with its regular, flump-shaped people, and it's gloriously cheap prices covering everything from gyms to saunas to a goddamned swimming pool (take that, Virgin Active, Kensington!)...
It'd be a bitch of a commute every night though...
Tuesday 25 October 2011
Two Steps Back
Blood was 5.2 this morning, and the headline news is that if my body is a time-machine, I've just taken a quick trip two weeks into the past. Weigh-in today gave a result of 16 stone 12.5 pounds - up a pound and a half on last week. Sort of expected this - have had days on end with no biking, no walking to speak of, and a less fanatical approach to my calorie intake than I'm used to of late.
Previously of course, going back up a pound and a half would have been breast-beating territory, but as with last week, I haven't really got the time to bitch about it too much - the facts of the matter are I've slackened my exercise and my diet control while focusing on other things. The logical, understandable results are an increase in recorded weight. That's fine. After tomorrow (it's another Big Meeting Day in work), things should be clearer, and require less of my time to be devoted to other things. Definitely though it's time to break out the walking boots again once that's over with, and start overcoming the hideous morning darkness and walking again. Right now, I don't think there's much of another way to push on downward towards.
Except...just conceivably...
I'm wondering if the time is perhaps not right to try returning to the gym in some small, month-by-month way. While at home in Merthyr last weekend, I happened to be flicking through an Argos catalogue, and I landed on the pages of gym equipment. That got me thinking, because when I invested in the bike that's been the source of so much bitching, I had to pay huge top dollar for it, because it had to bear my weight, which was above the tolerance of most non-gym-quality equipment. Now, I'm far on the other side of those tolerances, so the money involved in getting different bits of kit to ensure I don't end up with the thighs of an Olympian and huge empty flaps of skin everywhere else, wouldn't be so bad at all.
Sadly, in our little flat, already nicknamed The Narrows by those of us who live in it(!), it's not money for gym equipment that's the issue, it's the fact that breathing in and out tends to require advanced planning and the co-operation, so the idea of bringing any more kit into the place is frankly laughable.
Also, I'm so done with leaving the office at five and not getting home till nearly eight, when, perversely, leaving the office at six....also gets me home at nearly eight, due to the congestion on the tubes. Maybe, if there was some constructive way of pissing away that hour, it wouldn't feel like such a waste of life and brain cells...
So...although it should be noted I'm not committing to this at this point, I am vaguely pondering the idea of re-joining the world of Popular, Organised Sweating. There's a gym just off Kensington Church Street, where I could potentially go, do some preliminary sweating, annoy the bejeesus out of people on the tube (always a bonus if you happen to be a brat), then come home and do my biking.
The only real thing about this plan that sticks in my craw (other than the idea of exercising with Kensingtonians, who most assuredly will not need to be there), is that is pretty much legitimises the idea of not getting in every night till nearly eight o'clock. I would say - this used to only be seven, but in recent weeks, I don't know what's happened, but it's as if another fairly major European city'sworth of people has been dumped into London, and you simply cannot get anywhere in the time you used to.
Hmm...something to think about, possibly. Over dinner, in all likelihood.
Previously of course, going back up a pound and a half would have been breast-beating territory, but as with last week, I haven't really got the time to bitch about it too much - the facts of the matter are I've slackened my exercise and my diet control while focusing on other things. The logical, understandable results are an increase in recorded weight. That's fine. After tomorrow (it's another Big Meeting Day in work), things should be clearer, and require less of my time to be devoted to other things. Definitely though it's time to break out the walking boots again once that's over with, and start overcoming the hideous morning darkness and walking again. Right now, I don't think there's much of another way to push on downward towards.
Except...just conceivably...
I'm wondering if the time is perhaps not right to try returning to the gym in some small, month-by-month way. While at home in Merthyr last weekend, I happened to be flicking through an Argos catalogue, and I landed on the pages of gym equipment. That got me thinking, because when I invested in the bike that's been the source of so much bitching, I had to pay huge top dollar for it, because it had to bear my weight, which was above the tolerance of most non-gym-quality equipment. Now, I'm far on the other side of those tolerances, so the money involved in getting different bits of kit to ensure I don't end up with the thighs of an Olympian and huge empty flaps of skin everywhere else, wouldn't be so bad at all.
Sadly, in our little flat, already nicknamed The Narrows by those of us who live in it(!), it's not money for gym equipment that's the issue, it's the fact that breathing in and out tends to require advanced planning and the co-operation, so the idea of bringing any more kit into the place is frankly laughable.
Also, I'm so done with leaving the office at five and not getting home till nearly eight, when, perversely, leaving the office at six....also gets me home at nearly eight, due to the congestion on the tubes. Maybe, if there was some constructive way of pissing away that hour, it wouldn't feel like such a waste of life and brain cells...
So...although it should be noted I'm not committing to this at this point, I am vaguely pondering the idea of re-joining the world of Popular, Organised Sweating. There's a gym just off Kensington Church Street, where I could potentially go, do some preliminary sweating, annoy the bejeesus out of people on the tube (always a bonus if you happen to be a brat), then come home and do my biking.
The only real thing about this plan that sticks in my craw (other than the idea of exercising with Kensingtonians, who most assuredly will not need to be there), is that is pretty much legitimises the idea of not getting in every night till nearly eight o'clock. I would say - this used to only be seven, but in recent weeks, I don't know what's happened, but it's as if another fairly major European city'sworth of people has been dumped into London, and you simply cannot get anywhere in the time you used to.
Hmm...something to think about, possibly. Over dinner, in all likelihood.
Monday 24 October 2011
1994
I had to pop to the doctors this morning, as I was running out of Xenical. Normally, before being given my next month's fix of these evil wonderdrugs, I have to be weighed by the nurse. But she wasn't available, so there was a locum doctor who stabbed me with a flu jab and did my weigh-in.
"Good grief," he said, looking at the numbers on his screen. "You're doing well, aren't you?"
"Well..." I said. I'd pre-weighed before going, and there was little movement from last week - in fact, there was a danger of addition tomorrow.
"1994..." he murmured.
"Pardon?"
"You haven't been this light...as far back as 1994," he explained.
I blinked.
I'd sort of thought as much, with all my regular talk about not having been this way for more than a decade, but it was a bit of a positive thunderbolt to hear it from a doctor. 1994...
The interesting thing is that even the 1994 reading of my weight was heavier than I am now. It's kind of 'since records began' really - I was diagnosed as diabetic in 1995. I can't remember at this distance why I would have been weighed in 1994 - maybe some initial check-up when I was simply 'feeling' diabetic, I'm not sure.
Seventeen years.
Can you imagine if we had the power to regulate our actual age by virtue of what we did? If we could, much as I'm loving being 40, then right about now, I'd be 23 at most...but then I suppose, in that world, plastic surgery would be not only the most expensive, but the most genuinely valuable medical procedure in the history of humanity. Hmm - possible idea for a short story there....
The doc gave me an unheard-of two monthsworth of Xenical, as a reward for being so good. Ha. I maintain, I'm going to be heavier tomorrow than I was last Tuesday, but the kind of week that this has been means I'm not too bothered about this likelihood. Once Wednesday is out of the way, my life should return to some sort of normal routine, one way or another.
If that was the Yin of the day, the Yang is something I've known for a fortnight, but deliberately haven't mentioned till now. My eyeballs.
My eyeballs flick big fuck-off V's at the idea of being 23 again. Two weeks ago, I had a long-overdue eye test. My prescription had shifted to the point where, for the first time in my life, I need varifocals. So, having picked them up today, I appear to have a 23 year old body with, say, 45 year old eyes. Still, all in all, a good-ish day.
Oh, and for all those of you who've been asking - no, d had a crappy night...and pretty much a crappy most-of-today too. She's back to being mainly in control of her innards now, but, on cue, it looks like she's got a sinus issue flaring up this evening. It's rarely easy being my wife, bless her, but at least, on this occasion, it's not down to any of my neuroses or fuck-ups. Thanks for all the well-wishes for her though - she was touched by 'em all.
Weigh-in tomorrow. And we shall see what we shall see...
"Good grief," he said, looking at the numbers on his screen. "You're doing well, aren't you?"
"Well..." I said. I'd pre-weighed before going, and there was little movement from last week - in fact, there was a danger of addition tomorrow.
"1994..." he murmured.
"Pardon?"
"You haven't been this light...as far back as 1994," he explained.
I blinked.
I'd sort of thought as much, with all my regular talk about not having been this way for more than a decade, but it was a bit of a positive thunderbolt to hear it from a doctor. 1994...
The interesting thing is that even the 1994 reading of my weight was heavier than I am now. It's kind of 'since records began' really - I was diagnosed as diabetic in 1995. I can't remember at this distance why I would have been weighed in 1994 - maybe some initial check-up when I was simply 'feeling' diabetic, I'm not sure.
Seventeen years.
Can you imagine if we had the power to regulate our actual age by virtue of what we did? If we could, much as I'm loving being 40, then right about now, I'd be 23 at most...but then I suppose, in that world, plastic surgery would be not only the most expensive, but the most genuinely valuable medical procedure in the history of humanity. Hmm - possible idea for a short story there....
The doc gave me an unheard-of two monthsworth of Xenical, as a reward for being so good. Ha. I maintain, I'm going to be heavier tomorrow than I was last Tuesday, but the kind of week that this has been means I'm not too bothered about this likelihood. Once Wednesday is out of the way, my life should return to some sort of normal routine, one way or another.
If that was the Yin of the day, the Yang is something I've known for a fortnight, but deliberately haven't mentioned till now. My eyeballs.
My eyeballs flick big fuck-off V's at the idea of being 23 again. Two weeks ago, I had a long-overdue eye test. My prescription had shifted to the point where, for the first time in my life, I need varifocals. So, having picked them up today, I appear to have a 23 year old body with, say, 45 year old eyes. Still, all in all, a good-ish day.
Oh, and for all those of you who've been asking - no, d had a crappy night...and pretty much a crappy most-of-today too. She's back to being mainly in control of her innards now, but, on cue, it looks like she's got a sinus issue flaring up this evening. It's rarely easy being my wife, bless her, but at least, on this occasion, it's not down to any of my neuroses or fuck-ups. Thanks for all the well-wishes for her though - she was touched by 'em all.
Weigh-in tomorrow. And we shall see what we shall see...
Sunday 23 October 2011
Crazy, Crazy Nights
"Errm...how you feeling now?"
d looked at me, her face grey.
"OK, stupid question," I admitted.
The day had started so promisingly. I'd woken with the same feeling of self-assured fortyness as yesterday, no drop-off, no 'happiness hangover' - which I think we'd both secretly suspected I would have - and d and my mother had gone off, shopping: it's a fundamental law of the universe that d, on any visit to my mother, will be taken shopping. Actually, now I think of it, it's a fundamental law of the universe that d, on any visit to my mother, will be Taken Shopping - it's a phenomenon that deserves its inital capitals.
I, in the meantime, had a date with my mate Karen (Pulley), which was great. She drove us to a coffee house, we had coffee, I kind of tempted her into getting a Millionaire's Shortbread, and she offered me some.
"Can't," I said. "Haven't had a dessert in about...20 months now."
She blinked.
"Ohhh, I feel crap now, eating this," she said, and I laughed. I've watched Cake Boss, while d had tiramisu, and while I was sweating my ass off on a goddamned sonofabitch exercise bike, cursing every motion of my legs, every pixel on the screen, and the world as a whole. I figured I could endure the sight of one of my pals eating shortcake.
Karen's dead cool, one of what I feel it would be instinctively wrong to call my older friends, so let's call her one of my longest surviving friendships, and she (as I'm hoping she won't mind me disclosing), turned 40 herself recently. Girl's doing good, with two kids who, though I've never met them myself, knowing Karen, I'm fairly sure are pretty cool themselves, and are probably her whole world. We shot the shit out of the world for an hour or so, and it was kinda like it was when we were teenagers together, except now she drives a BMW.
A very, very cool note was struck as we drove away from the coffee house. If there's one song in the world that I can't hear without thinking of Karen, it's Crazy, Crazy Nights, by Kiss - It's an instinctive sense memory - Crazy, Crazy Nights=Pulley. This is because we spent many a Saturday night driving around in other people's cars (our slightly older friends' cars, I should explain, not strangers cars!), and it was always The Song, The Soundtrack of our cruising - think Wayne's World/Bohemian Rhapsody, only with Kiss. And more specifically still, there were nights at a local dive bar called The Brandy Bridge, and while all the popsters and modernistas would do their weird 80s dances, we - the Rockers - would sit around tables, drinking, talking, laughing, plotting (or maybe that was just me!), and bathing in the heady mixture of teenage hormones, potential, anticipation and - and I can't stress how important this was - cleverness. We were generally a fairly smart bunch - sorry, we just were - and the wit oiled the wheels of our conversations, along with phenomenal quantities of double entendre.
Then The Song would come on. You couldn't avoid knowing The Song had come on - the intro gives you no choice about it - and we'd all pile onto the dancefloor, grab each others' waists in a circle, and not exactly dance. We'd sing, we'd shout, we'd bang our heads or shake our incredible hair, but mainly, we'd be singing along, releasing all the stress of a teenaged week by shouting in tune and time with the incredibly uplifting, rebellious lyrics:
"They try to tell us that we don't belong,
But that's alright, we're millions strong.
You are my people, you are my crowd,
This is our music - WE LIKE IT LOUD!"
Ah...those were crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy nights, and we loved 'em.
If you happened to be a teenaged male in our Rocker crowd, you wanted to find yourself opposite one of the girls in our Kiss-huddle, because somehow, it was vaguely like you were singing it directly to each other then. You weren't of course, but it was often enough to get you through the night. And if there was one girl you especially wanted to be opposite in the huddle, it was Pulley. There were two reasons for that - firstly, Pulley, bless her, had developed early and in a manner that was guaranteed to make red-blooded but clueless Rocker dudes fall on their knees and praise whatever creative force they believed in for a job phenomenally well done. But secondly, more elevatedly, if you forgot about yourself for the tiniest fragment of a moment in that huddle, and looked at Pulley's face during that song, it was quite enough to take you to some higher level of consciousness. Most of us had what could best be described as "shit to deal with" in our teenage years. Pulley, I guarantee you, had more. Seeing her so fabulously carefree, swinging her mad 80s Rock Chick hair and shouting to all the gods and devils that SHE LIKED IT LOUD!!!...it made you feel that things would be OK for her after all. As indeed, it turns out, they are.
And so, today, as we drove out of the coffee house car park, it was entirely, unendurably inevitable that Crazy, Crazy Nights would "Whooh!" itself into production on her stero.
I'd love to be able to tell you that the two middle aged Rockers turned the dial up to ten and sang it out again, driving off into the short-term future...but we didn't, we were too busy talking about the entirely different shit that we both these days have to deal with. Although we did pause to appreciate and remember.
"Ahh, my feelgood song," she said. "Some things never change."
She's right. And I'm grateful they don't.
She dropped me off and we went about our respective business - I met back up with d at the house, and we had a traditional roast beef dinner. Then, essentially, time caught up with us, and before we knew where we were, we were on a train out of Merthyr to Cardiff.
Which, with a certain prophetic righteousness, was where the trouble started.
d grew less and less chatty as the Valley Line stations passed, and it turned out her insides were doing most of the talking for her. She was having the kind of reaction I have on Xenical...without, in fact, the benefit of Xenical. We looked around pointlessly for a bathroom - there isn't one on Valley Line Trains; it seems to be a tenet of their operation that 'you should have gone before you left'. So by the time we pulled into Cardiff Central, d was in serious need. She disappeared for the best part of twenty minutes. Then the best part of half an hour. We only had about thirty-six minutes between trains, and I'm a neurotic-in-training, so when the London train turned up and d hadn't, I was panicking.
She finally made her way down the platform, moving slowly, and we got into the train.
"That," she understated, "was not pretty."
We'd been sitting on the train for about five minutes, and it had just about pulled out, when d bolted again. She was gone until a couple of minutes before Newport. And gone again before we reached Bristol. And so it continued, off and on, all the way back to London. She tried to rehydrate, but it was like a signal for her body to go into spasm again. Before we pulled in to Paddington, she came back, looking grey.
"Errm...how you feeling now?"
d looked at me.
"OK, stupid question," I admitted. "Home with all speed then?" She nodded.
Home with all speed means we get a cab from Paddington to the nearest Central Line station, take the Central to Stratford, and get a cab from Stratford to our flat. We waited in line at the Paddington cab rank.
"Nearest Central Line station," I said when one arrived. "Lancaster Gate, I think."
"S'just up there mate!" said the Cabbie.
"Yyyeah, I don't know the way," I lied.
"You go up there, take the first left, it's about five minutes' walk!"
"Are you saying you won't take us?" I asked.
"Well, I've been queueing for about half an hour, for what's only gonna be a small fare - it's not worth it mate!" he said, and buggered off, leaving us gobsmacked at the side of the road.
Welcome fucking back, I thought.
By now, other cabs had filled up and the line of people had pushed us forward, essentially out of contention. Normally, d's not the kind of person to take this bullshit, but she didn't feel good and I wanted to get her to place of digestive safety.
"Number 27," I said, thinking of a familiar bus. "S'just up there, we'll nip back to Notting Hill and Central Line it from there..." Contingency travel planning, by the way, is a learned London instinct - anyone who was here for the IRA's occasional sprees, or for 7/7, just knows this shit. We went and stood at the 27 stop, d getting increasingly antsy with every minute that passed.
"Here's one," I said, trying to nurse her.
The packed-to-the-rafters 27 bus sped up as it approached us, and fucked right off into the night.
This was starting to feel personal.
We legged it across the road, trying to get a 23 to Liverpool Street - or at least to Marble Arch - only to see another, empty 27 coming the other way. So we ran (as best we could), back across the road, across its oncoming path, and finally got on it. A quickish stop at the Starbucks at Notting Hill Gate (they were keen to close up, but couldn't till my girl was done), and we were on the Central Line, then a much nicer Stratford Cabbie, and home.
d's back in the bathroom as I write this. In fact, she's been in there the whole time I've been writing this...Personally, given the timing, I think she's becoming allergic to London, and frankly, after the way it welcomed us back tonight, I'm not sure I'd be remotely surprised.
Erm...
I'm just going to go check my wife hasn't done an Elvis. You lot talk amongst your selves...
Or alternatively, click THIS and remember having hair...
d looked at me, her face grey.
"OK, stupid question," I admitted.
The day had started so promisingly. I'd woken with the same feeling of self-assured fortyness as yesterday, no drop-off, no 'happiness hangover' - which I think we'd both secretly suspected I would have - and d and my mother had gone off, shopping: it's a fundamental law of the universe that d, on any visit to my mother, will be taken shopping. Actually, now I think of it, it's a fundamental law of the universe that d, on any visit to my mother, will be Taken Shopping - it's a phenomenon that deserves its inital capitals.
I, in the meantime, had a date with my mate Karen (Pulley), which was great. She drove us to a coffee house, we had coffee, I kind of tempted her into getting a Millionaire's Shortbread, and she offered me some.
"Can't," I said. "Haven't had a dessert in about...20 months now."
She blinked.
"Ohhh, I feel crap now, eating this," she said, and I laughed. I've watched Cake Boss, while d had tiramisu, and while I was sweating my ass off on a goddamned sonofabitch exercise bike, cursing every motion of my legs, every pixel on the screen, and the world as a whole. I figured I could endure the sight of one of my pals eating shortcake.
Karen's dead cool, one of what I feel it would be instinctively wrong to call my older friends, so let's call her one of my longest surviving friendships, and she (as I'm hoping she won't mind me disclosing), turned 40 herself recently. Girl's doing good, with two kids who, though I've never met them myself, knowing Karen, I'm fairly sure are pretty cool themselves, and are probably her whole world. We shot the shit out of the world for an hour or so, and it was kinda like it was when we were teenagers together, except now she drives a BMW.
A very, very cool note was struck as we drove away from the coffee house. If there's one song in the world that I can't hear without thinking of Karen, it's Crazy, Crazy Nights, by Kiss - It's an instinctive sense memory - Crazy, Crazy Nights=Pulley. This is because we spent many a Saturday night driving around in other people's cars (our slightly older friends' cars, I should explain, not strangers cars!), and it was always The Song, The Soundtrack of our cruising - think Wayne's World/Bohemian Rhapsody, only with Kiss. And more specifically still, there were nights at a local dive bar called The Brandy Bridge, and while all the popsters and modernistas would do their weird 80s dances, we - the Rockers - would sit around tables, drinking, talking, laughing, plotting (or maybe that was just me!), and bathing in the heady mixture of teenage hormones, potential, anticipation and - and I can't stress how important this was - cleverness. We were generally a fairly smart bunch - sorry, we just were - and the wit oiled the wheels of our conversations, along with phenomenal quantities of double entendre.
Then The Song would come on. You couldn't avoid knowing The Song had come on - the intro gives you no choice about it - and we'd all pile onto the dancefloor, grab each others' waists in a circle, and not exactly dance. We'd sing, we'd shout, we'd bang our heads or shake our incredible hair, but mainly, we'd be singing along, releasing all the stress of a teenaged week by shouting in tune and time with the incredibly uplifting, rebellious lyrics:
"They try to tell us that we don't belong,
But that's alright, we're millions strong.
You are my people, you are my crowd,
This is our music - WE LIKE IT LOUD!"
Ah...those were crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy nights, and we loved 'em.
If you happened to be a teenaged male in our Rocker crowd, you wanted to find yourself opposite one of the girls in our Kiss-huddle, because somehow, it was vaguely like you were singing it directly to each other then. You weren't of course, but it was often enough to get you through the night. And if there was one girl you especially wanted to be opposite in the huddle, it was Pulley. There were two reasons for that - firstly, Pulley, bless her, had developed early and in a manner that was guaranteed to make red-blooded but clueless Rocker dudes fall on their knees and praise whatever creative force they believed in for a job phenomenally well done. But secondly, more elevatedly, if you forgot about yourself for the tiniest fragment of a moment in that huddle, and looked at Pulley's face during that song, it was quite enough to take you to some higher level of consciousness. Most of us had what could best be described as "shit to deal with" in our teenage years. Pulley, I guarantee you, had more. Seeing her so fabulously carefree, swinging her mad 80s Rock Chick hair and shouting to all the gods and devils that SHE LIKED IT LOUD!!!...it made you feel that things would be OK for her after all. As indeed, it turns out, they are.
And so, today, as we drove out of the coffee house car park, it was entirely, unendurably inevitable that Crazy, Crazy Nights would "Whooh!" itself into production on her stero.
I'd love to be able to tell you that the two middle aged Rockers turned the dial up to ten and sang it out again, driving off into the short-term future...but we didn't, we were too busy talking about the entirely different shit that we both these days have to deal with. Although we did pause to appreciate and remember.
"Ahh, my feelgood song," she said. "Some things never change."
She's right. And I'm grateful they don't.
She dropped me off and we went about our respective business - I met back up with d at the house, and we had a traditional roast beef dinner. Then, essentially, time caught up with us, and before we knew where we were, we were on a train out of Merthyr to Cardiff.
Which, with a certain prophetic righteousness, was where the trouble started.
d grew less and less chatty as the Valley Line stations passed, and it turned out her insides were doing most of the talking for her. She was having the kind of reaction I have on Xenical...without, in fact, the benefit of Xenical. We looked around pointlessly for a bathroom - there isn't one on Valley Line Trains; it seems to be a tenet of their operation that 'you should have gone before you left'. So by the time we pulled into Cardiff Central, d was in serious need. She disappeared for the best part of twenty minutes. Then the best part of half an hour. We only had about thirty-six minutes between trains, and I'm a neurotic-in-training, so when the London train turned up and d hadn't, I was panicking.
She finally made her way down the platform, moving slowly, and we got into the train.
"That," she understated, "was not pretty."
We'd been sitting on the train for about five minutes, and it had just about pulled out, when d bolted again. She was gone until a couple of minutes before Newport. And gone again before we reached Bristol. And so it continued, off and on, all the way back to London. She tried to rehydrate, but it was like a signal for her body to go into spasm again. Before we pulled in to Paddington, she came back, looking grey.
"Errm...how you feeling now?"
d looked at me.
"OK, stupid question," I admitted. "Home with all speed then?" She nodded.
Home with all speed means we get a cab from Paddington to the nearest Central Line station, take the Central to Stratford, and get a cab from Stratford to our flat. We waited in line at the Paddington cab rank.
"Nearest Central Line station," I said when one arrived. "Lancaster Gate, I think."
"S'just up there mate!" said the Cabbie.
"Yyyeah, I don't know the way," I lied.
"You go up there, take the first left, it's about five minutes' walk!"
"Are you saying you won't take us?" I asked.
"Well, I've been queueing for about half an hour, for what's only gonna be a small fare - it's not worth it mate!" he said, and buggered off, leaving us gobsmacked at the side of the road.
Welcome fucking back, I thought.
By now, other cabs had filled up and the line of people had pushed us forward, essentially out of contention. Normally, d's not the kind of person to take this bullshit, but she didn't feel good and I wanted to get her to place of digestive safety.
"Number 27," I said, thinking of a familiar bus. "S'just up there, we'll nip back to Notting Hill and Central Line it from there..." Contingency travel planning, by the way, is a learned London instinct - anyone who was here for the IRA's occasional sprees, or for 7/7, just knows this shit. We went and stood at the 27 stop, d getting increasingly antsy with every minute that passed.
"Here's one," I said, trying to nurse her.
The packed-to-the-rafters 27 bus sped up as it approached us, and fucked right off into the night.
This was starting to feel personal.
We legged it across the road, trying to get a 23 to Liverpool Street - or at least to Marble Arch - only to see another, empty 27 coming the other way. So we ran (as best we could), back across the road, across its oncoming path, and finally got on it. A quickish stop at the Starbucks at Notting Hill Gate (they were keen to close up, but couldn't till my girl was done), and we were on the Central Line, then a much nicer Stratford Cabbie, and home.
d's back in the bathroom as I write this. In fact, she's been in there the whole time I've been writing this...Personally, given the timing, I think she's becoming allergic to London, and frankly, after the way it welcomed us back tonight, I'm not sure I'd be remotely surprised.
Erm...
I'm just going to go check my wife hasn't done an Elvis. You lot talk amongst your selves...
Or alternatively, click THIS and remember having hair...
Saturday 22 October 2011
Fantastic Day
I woke up fairly naturally this morning, having had an entirely non-Freudian, easily interprable dream. The Alps had been turned into restaurants, with diners eating at a big long table that extended the whole way up the mountains. BUT - and this was the cool thing - for a fee, you could turn your own specific gravity off, and 'swim' - or fly, clearly, direction being what it is - up the length of the table to the top of the mountain. I swam the height of an Alp, and only got one complaint when I accidentally stuck my palm in someone's ketchup to steady myself and stop myself from accidentally kicking him in the face.
You can't please some people.
I reached the top, my arms and legs aching with that satisfying pain of long exertion. d was already there, and said she wanted to walk up and down stairs for about an hour and a half. I decided to 'swim' home instead - at which point, for no terribly identifiable reason I can see (answers on an e-postcard please!), the setting changed, and I was in the sports block of my old high school - and "home" was a first floor classroom right at the other side of the building. So I swam-flew down the crowded corridors of my old school...
And woke up 40.
To be fair, I'd already woken up 40 a couple of times, when, bless her heart, d had rolled over, realised she was awake, and sung happy birthday to me. It was cute at 2...something-or-other. At 5-something-or-other I have a feeling I just rolled over and ignored her.
But I have to tell you, swim-flying up an Alp is a great way to wake up 40. Gives you a sense of enormous wellbeing, and a feeling of having finally arrived in the right body.
I opened cards in bed, and my suspicions of yesterday proved correct - normally, d and I take each other for dinner and a show for our respective birthdays, but a) the economy being what it is, and b) there not being a show I'd tear my eyes out to see until November (The Lion In Winter, since you didn't ask), we'd sort of semi-agreed that we'd go ans see something I would tear my eyes out to see - The Doctor Who Experience in Earl's Court. And so we did.
Our local breakfast cafe was unexpectedly closed this morning, so we schlepped to Earl's Court, and ate breakfast at a Gregg's Cafe there. Word to the wise - if you're diabetic, avoid their so-called "plain" porridge like the plain - not only is sugar its second ingredient, it's also laced with dried sucrose powder - it's about as plain as a chocolate eclair, frankly. When the bill arrived, d showed it to me, chuckling. You remember the world was supposed to end yesterday? (How are we all by the way? Still here?). Well, maybe it was just a day or so late, because the price of my birthday breakfast turned out to be £6.66. Yep - I had the Breakfast of the Beast. Given the palaver some believers in all this stuff make about bar-codes being The Mark, I think that's enough evidence of my diabolic nature, and am going to demand people start calling me Damien from now on...
Having finished breakfast, we got to Earl's Court, and I unpeeled a metaphor - it being October, and the weather having remembered it was October after an unseasonally warm beginning to the month, I was covered in a grey fleece and gloves, as befits a serious-minded 40-year-old journalist. Underneath though, I was wearing a T-shirt of the costume worn by the Sixth Doctor - an unremittingly ghastly car-accident of colours and patterns, which everybody in the world appears to hate - including the actor who originally had to wear it, Colin Baker. Everybody in the world, that is, except me. I think it's brilliant, and I'm quite happy with the fact that I'm in a minority of one on this. So I unzipped my grey, serious 40-year-old self, and let my inner 8-year-old free for a couple of hours. If you're looking for a review of the Experience, you'll have to wait, and you'll have to go somewhere else - I'll post a link in a couple of days, probably. If you're a fan of the show, you won't need me to tell you to go. If you're not a fan of the show or an 8-year-old, you probably don't need to go anyway. Me, I loved it. I flew the Tardis, got shot by a Cyberman, flinched as d was nearly touched by a 3D Weeping Angel, walked through a crack in space-time, waxed appallingly lyrical about cyber-heads from days gone by, waggled a Dalek's plunger (oo-er, missus!) and generally had the most fun of 2011.
Oh, I should say at this point - I did promise a birthday weigh-in, and indeed I did one. Now the dream of reaching my four-stone barrier at 16 stone 7.5 had of course long gone the way of the Dodo, but after the sort of week I've had, I actually expected to have put on significant numbers of pounds. But no - entirely static at 16 stone 11. Not the week's official weigh-in though - that still happens Tuesday - so check back with me then and we'll see if there's any movement whatsoever, or whether this has been a limbo week.
Anyhow, after spending a few hours with the Doctors, we headed for Paddington, and Wales. This is a weird admission, and not exactly apropos, but I've never regarded Wales as "Home". I mean, it's where I was born and raised, where my folks still live, and where at least a handful of my friends still live too - friends of course being the people I've accumulated along the path of the last forty years who have proved themselves to have qualities I admire, respect, occasionally out-and-out envy or love. But I've never thought of Wales - of Merthyr - as "Home". As a kid, I always thought of some nameless, probably English place as Home, because frankly, the kids I grew up with were pretty bloody horrible most of the time. As a teenager that changed, and I started building friendships that endure to this day, but still, the place didn't feel like "Home" - mainly because I'd been to visit London by then, and fallen head over heels in love with it. From that moment on, I was always a Londoner, however much I described myself - and I did, and still do - as a Welshman.
Recently though, there's been a sea-change. I'm finding that I still really love the idea of London, but that the actual, everyday, day-to-day slogging reality of it has become pretty freakin' miserable...and that the kids who were pretty bloody horrible to me in Wales when I was a child are still horrible today, only they didn't just come from Merthyr - they came from everywhere, including London. And that today's kids are notsomuch pretty bloody horrible as positively psychotic on occasion. I want out.
And coming to Wales today - which until last week, I absolutely, positively, definitely didn't want to do - I don't know what else to tell you, but something clicked. Something went Rubik, and made sense, and Merthyr felt like coming Home, for pretty much the first time.
Like I say, this is not in any way to imply I never liked it here - I love my folks, and I love my friends, and there are bits of Merthyr that were always really good to me. I just never belonged here.
Till today.
I turned 40 today, but in a very weird, what-the-Hell kind of way, I also, I think, turned Welsh for pretty much the first time. Buggered if I know what that's about, and buggered if I know if it'll last, but there ya go. I can only report the truth to you, and see what the Hell we all make of it.
Two other notes before I finish. There'll be people out there who think I spent my 40th birthday in a stupid childish way. Absolutely, and I had a fantastic time, thanks. But I didn't do the Who thing just for me. Matter of fact, I never do any Who thing just for me.
Of the handful of Best Gifts Merthyr ever gave me was a friend called Jon.He was sweet and vaguely clueless and highly intelligent and more than a little perverse and more than anything else, he was very good company.
I only got to meet him because he was a Who fan, and so was I.
In fact, oddly enough, I was introduced to him by a classmate of mine who would go on to burgle my house. And, weirdly, to steal, separately, from my biological dad. To be honest, I think he was bored to tears with all my Who-talk and thought if I had another Whovian to pester about it all, he wouldn't have to listen. He was right. Jon was the closest a developing atheist ever gets to a godsend - someone thrust into their life who makes everything he touches better. Oddly enough...well, oddly enough unless you knew him...he went on to be a doctor himself, and he was good at it.
We always kept in touch, though not with the regularity that we should have. I never seem to keep in touch with any of the people I really care about with the regularity I should, I'm basically crap. When the 8th Doctor had his one TV outing, Jon and I talked for about twice as long as the feature-length episode immediately after it ended, dissecting the thing in minute detail. We went to a couple of conventions together, and shared all sorts of other things.
But Jon never got to see the renaissance of Who, because, in a stunningly medical exercise, he killed himself with insulin about a decade ago. Every time I watch the show now, I think of him. I want to ask him what he thought of it, and where he thinks the arc is going, and to still dissect every last second of it with him. So today was partly for Jon...because I made it to 40, and didn't get to miss the storming return of our favourite show. And because he didn't, and did.
And, on a brighter side, tomorrow, I'm meeting one of my Karens for coffee. Longer-term readers will know I live in a world of Karens - a bizarre irony, since I haven't actually seen any of my Karens for a good long while. So it will be great to catch up with this Karen (the one I still, probably irritatingly, to this day think of as 'Pulley') over a coffee...oh and shorter term readers will understand when I say that tomorrow dammit, I'm fulfilling another ambition - tomorrow, in what I now actually feel is my Home Town, I'm gonna get the balls to ask for a decaff skinny latte, so nehh!
Forty feels right. I don't know how to explain it to you any better than d did to me, out of the blue, at Paddington today.
"It's like you've been waiting for this," she said. "You look so comfortable in your own skin suddenly, it's just...amazing."
She's right. I feel more like 'me' than I have done for about fifteen years.
No idea why that should be.
Just do.
You can't please some people.
I reached the top, my arms and legs aching with that satisfying pain of long exertion. d was already there, and said she wanted to walk up and down stairs for about an hour and a half. I decided to 'swim' home instead - at which point, for no terribly identifiable reason I can see (answers on an e-postcard please!), the setting changed, and I was in the sports block of my old high school - and "home" was a first floor classroom right at the other side of the building. So I swam-flew down the crowded corridors of my old school...
And woke up 40.
To be fair, I'd already woken up 40 a couple of times, when, bless her heart, d had rolled over, realised she was awake, and sung happy birthday to me. It was cute at 2...something-or-other. At 5-something-or-other I have a feeling I just rolled over and ignored her.
But I have to tell you, swim-flying up an Alp is a great way to wake up 40. Gives you a sense of enormous wellbeing, and a feeling of having finally arrived in the right body.
I opened cards in bed, and my suspicions of yesterday proved correct - normally, d and I take each other for dinner and a show for our respective birthdays, but a) the economy being what it is, and b) there not being a show I'd tear my eyes out to see until November (The Lion In Winter, since you didn't ask), we'd sort of semi-agreed that we'd go ans see something I would tear my eyes out to see - The Doctor Who Experience in Earl's Court. And so we did.
Our local breakfast cafe was unexpectedly closed this morning, so we schlepped to Earl's Court, and ate breakfast at a Gregg's Cafe there. Word to the wise - if you're diabetic, avoid their so-called "plain" porridge like the plain - not only is sugar its second ingredient, it's also laced with dried sucrose powder - it's about as plain as a chocolate eclair, frankly. When the bill arrived, d showed it to me, chuckling. You remember the world was supposed to end yesterday? (How are we all by the way? Still here?). Well, maybe it was just a day or so late, because the price of my birthday breakfast turned out to be £6.66. Yep - I had the Breakfast of the Beast. Given the palaver some believers in all this stuff make about bar-codes being The Mark, I think that's enough evidence of my diabolic nature, and am going to demand people start calling me Damien from now on...
Having finished breakfast, we got to Earl's Court, and I unpeeled a metaphor - it being October, and the weather having remembered it was October after an unseasonally warm beginning to the month, I was covered in a grey fleece and gloves, as befits a serious-minded 40-year-old journalist. Underneath though, I was wearing a T-shirt of the costume worn by the Sixth Doctor - an unremittingly ghastly car-accident of colours and patterns, which everybody in the world appears to hate - including the actor who originally had to wear it, Colin Baker. Everybody in the world, that is, except me. I think it's brilliant, and I'm quite happy with the fact that I'm in a minority of one on this. So I unzipped my grey, serious 40-year-old self, and let my inner 8-year-old free for a couple of hours. If you're looking for a review of the Experience, you'll have to wait, and you'll have to go somewhere else - I'll post a link in a couple of days, probably. If you're a fan of the show, you won't need me to tell you to go. If you're not a fan of the show or an 8-year-old, you probably don't need to go anyway. Me, I loved it. I flew the Tardis, got shot by a Cyberman, flinched as d was nearly touched by a 3D Weeping Angel, walked through a crack in space-time, waxed appallingly lyrical about cyber-heads from days gone by, waggled a Dalek's plunger (oo-er, missus!) and generally had the most fun of 2011.
Oh, I should say at this point - I did promise a birthday weigh-in, and indeed I did one. Now the dream of reaching my four-stone barrier at 16 stone 7.5 had of course long gone the way of the Dodo, but after the sort of week I've had, I actually expected to have put on significant numbers of pounds. But no - entirely static at 16 stone 11. Not the week's official weigh-in though - that still happens Tuesday - so check back with me then and we'll see if there's any movement whatsoever, or whether this has been a limbo week.
Anyhow, after spending a few hours with the Doctors, we headed for Paddington, and Wales. This is a weird admission, and not exactly apropos, but I've never regarded Wales as "Home". I mean, it's where I was born and raised, where my folks still live, and where at least a handful of my friends still live too - friends of course being the people I've accumulated along the path of the last forty years who have proved themselves to have qualities I admire, respect, occasionally out-and-out envy or love. But I've never thought of Wales - of Merthyr - as "Home". As a kid, I always thought of some nameless, probably English place as Home, because frankly, the kids I grew up with were pretty bloody horrible most of the time. As a teenager that changed, and I started building friendships that endure to this day, but still, the place didn't feel like "Home" - mainly because I'd been to visit London by then, and fallen head over heels in love with it. From that moment on, I was always a Londoner, however much I described myself - and I did, and still do - as a Welshman.
Recently though, there's been a sea-change. I'm finding that I still really love the idea of London, but that the actual, everyday, day-to-day slogging reality of it has become pretty freakin' miserable...and that the kids who were pretty bloody horrible to me in Wales when I was a child are still horrible today, only they didn't just come from Merthyr - they came from everywhere, including London. And that today's kids are notsomuch pretty bloody horrible as positively psychotic on occasion. I want out.
And coming to Wales today - which until last week, I absolutely, positively, definitely didn't want to do - I don't know what else to tell you, but something clicked. Something went Rubik, and made sense, and Merthyr felt like coming Home, for pretty much the first time.
Like I say, this is not in any way to imply I never liked it here - I love my folks, and I love my friends, and there are bits of Merthyr that were always really good to me. I just never belonged here.
Till today.
I turned 40 today, but in a very weird, what-the-Hell kind of way, I also, I think, turned Welsh for pretty much the first time. Buggered if I know what that's about, and buggered if I know if it'll last, but there ya go. I can only report the truth to you, and see what the Hell we all make of it.
Two other notes before I finish. There'll be people out there who think I spent my 40th birthday in a stupid childish way. Absolutely, and I had a fantastic time, thanks. But I didn't do the Who thing just for me. Matter of fact, I never do any Who thing just for me.
Of the handful of Best Gifts Merthyr ever gave me was a friend called Jon.He was sweet and vaguely clueless and highly intelligent and more than a little perverse and more than anything else, he was very good company.
I only got to meet him because he was a Who fan, and so was I.
In fact, oddly enough, I was introduced to him by a classmate of mine who would go on to burgle my house. And, weirdly, to steal, separately, from my biological dad. To be honest, I think he was bored to tears with all my Who-talk and thought if I had another Whovian to pester about it all, he wouldn't have to listen. He was right. Jon was the closest a developing atheist ever gets to a godsend - someone thrust into their life who makes everything he touches better. Oddly enough...well, oddly enough unless you knew him...he went on to be a doctor himself, and he was good at it.
We always kept in touch, though not with the regularity that we should have. I never seem to keep in touch with any of the people I really care about with the regularity I should, I'm basically crap. When the 8th Doctor had his one TV outing, Jon and I talked for about twice as long as the feature-length episode immediately after it ended, dissecting the thing in minute detail. We went to a couple of conventions together, and shared all sorts of other things.
But Jon never got to see the renaissance of Who, because, in a stunningly medical exercise, he killed himself with insulin about a decade ago. Every time I watch the show now, I think of him. I want to ask him what he thought of it, and where he thinks the arc is going, and to still dissect every last second of it with him. So today was partly for Jon...because I made it to 40, and didn't get to miss the storming return of our favourite show. And because he didn't, and did.
And, on a brighter side, tomorrow, I'm meeting one of my Karens for coffee. Longer-term readers will know I live in a world of Karens - a bizarre irony, since I haven't actually seen any of my Karens for a good long while. So it will be great to catch up with this Karen (the one I still, probably irritatingly, to this day think of as 'Pulley') over a coffee...oh and shorter term readers will understand when I say that tomorrow dammit, I'm fulfilling another ambition - tomorrow, in what I now actually feel is my Home Town, I'm gonna get the balls to ask for a decaff skinny latte, so nehh!
Forty feels right. I don't know how to explain it to you any better than d did to me, out of the blue, at Paddington today.
"It's like you've been waiting for this," she said. "You look so comfortable in your own skin suddenly, it's just...amazing."
She's right. I feel more like 'me' than I have done for about fifteen years.
No idea why that should be.
Just do.
Friday 21 October 2011
Having A Nice Doomsday
So – according to Harold Camping and his Apocalypse-junkies, the world ends today. Are we having fun yet?
Personally, I was up at the crack of urgghh (and so, by appalling default, was d – sorry honey!), schlepping to Nottingham for what it’s easiest simply to call ‘a work thing’.
My boss, Peter, picked me up in his car from Green Park station, just by the Ritz, and I managed to grab a bucketful of my decaff pointlessness of choice just before he arrived.
We stopped off for breakfast at a service station somewhere on the M1, and two slices of toast and a large decaff (yes, a second one) cost me over a fiver. How are we enjoying the Chronic Recession, by the way?
When it arrived, I almost baulked. I mean, I’m a large coffee drinker by nature and choice, but this thing needed two handles…which as far as I’m concerned makes it a bowl of coffee…Still…I occasionally like a challenge, so I downed it, and felt absolutely no different, except for the pressing need to pee.
When we got to Nottingham, Peter and I ended up trying to get into one of those hip new buildings that look like the love-child of a Lego set and a Rubik cube. The so-called ‘automatic’ doors clicked and clacked and did precisely buggerall. We waved at the Reception desk.
An enormous teddy in the shape of a polar bear was sitting behind the desk. Was this a Sign of the Apocalypse, we wondered?
Eventually, we hijacked a hapless wandering bloke by making kind, supplicating eyes at him through the sealed doors. He wandered in our direction, and waved his swipe card. The doors sprang open and nearly flattened us against the walls. I eyed the radically-sprung things nastily as we passed on through.
Once there, it was business as usual…or rather, business as is usual if you’ve been up since 5.30. I grunted here and there, and can only hope I didn’t snore during the presentations we were there to hear. I did yawn, coffily, in the face of an innovation award winner, but he seemed too excited by his win to take offence, thankfully. One of the guys who ran the event did tell me the story of a mutual friend though, who at the end of long and busy meetings orders a “decaff double espresso”.
Ahhhhhhh…somehow, it feels good to hear a story like that – presumably, pointlessness, like misery and exhaustion, loves company.
Schlepped back to London on a train on my own, as Peter, fairly sensibly, wanted nothing to do with London traffic, and as I write this, I’m sitting in Starbucks in Islington, with another large decaff latte, waiting to go our for dinner with d.
So – my doomsday tastes of froth and pointlessness, but has nevertheless been generally positive. How’s yours going? Moon turned to blood yet? Sun the colour of sackcloth and ashes? (Or is it the other way around…? Note to self: upload the Bible to the Kindle when I get home, just for a laugh). Are the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding yet?
Yes, really, there are five – War, Famine, Pestilence, Death and Domino’s Pizza. I’m…fairly sure. (Note to self: seriously, upload the Bible to the Kindle when I get home…)
Tomorrow of course, I turn forty (so I daresay lots of people would have welcomed the world ending the day before…but not me, I’m looking forward to forty; if nothing else it’ll be a license to start acting childishly). We’re doing something in the morning, which I think I know, but then, knowing my beloved, you can never be entirely sure. Either way, I intend to dress hugely inappropriately for my age, and run around like an 8-year-old, just to prove to the world in general and myself in particular that I still can.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that I can’t – like the time I went to see the movie Hostel, just to prove to myself that I could still watch horror movies like I did as a teenager…only to discover I really couldn’t, and get stopped and searched under Anti-Terrorism laws for ‘excessive blank-eyed dithering with no clear intention to proceed,’ as d rather excellently puts it.
But I’m gonna try, dammit! Gonna try to run around like an 8-year-old, I mean. I have a feeling my forties are gonna be a decade of relative fearlessness, of trying to do stuff, rather than thinking about all the reasons why doing stuff is impossible, or unlikely, or looks silly. I think it’s going to be the beginning (or a new beginning, more accurately) of my Purple Period (y’know the poem? “When I am old, I shall wear purple…”). Here’s to being mad and possible and blazing a demented, productive trail.
Assuming we all survive the night of course. Oh, on which subject, d’s just come in from the candy store next door. Apparently you can now get white chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
If that’s not a Sign of the Apocalypse, I don’t know what is…
Hmm...anyone fancy a coffee?
Thursday 20 October 2011
The Arisotelian Challenge
Blood was 6.0 this morning - much higher than I'm now used to. Probably explained by the complete absence of walking yesterday, and having gone out for an Italian meal last night.
Since d let me have my birthday Kindle early, I've been avidly reading on tubes again. And the first free book I've been reading is Aristotle's Ethics (and yes, I have his Politics to follow).
Turns out Aristotle had some views on living right that are something of a challenge for me to accept.
Without plunging you into the philosophical gubbins, Ethics is basically about Happiness - and how to achieve it. He claims - and indeed proves, to his own satisfaction at least - that...well, essentially that virtue is its own reward, and the path to true happiness. But as part of this, he puts forward the idea of...well, again, not to use a cliche, but it wasn't one when he wrote the book...Everything In Moderation - the right amount of activity, food, emotion, reaction, everything - not too much, not too little. A more thoroughly diabetic work of philosophy you'll probably never encounter.
One of the more startling things he talks about it "The Excellence of Self-Mastery" - essentially, the building up of habits of 'virtue' (or the right amount of things, including emotional reactions), and the denial of pleasure beyond what is "right" for the individual. In talking about this (and yes, I promise, there's a point coming. Listen hard and you can almost hear its distant whistle on the wind...), he says that complete abstinence from pleasures is just as wrong as over-indulgence, because it dulls and destroys your palette for pleasure altogether, and essentially makes you resent the pleasures and pleasure-taking of others.
Now, I think this is true, certainly - I've wanted to throw sharp objects through my own TV screen watching Cake Boss and Masterchef and Man V Food while pedalling my ass off on an exercise bike, and I think it's probably true to say that, for instance, sexually repressive religions tend to make their practitioners resent the sex that other people are having, particularly if it looks more fun than anything they could ever get. I don't think, for instance, that the Catholic clergy attracts people who were otherwise predisposed to paedophilia, but once you resign yourself to never getting any, and hearing the confessions of people who seem to be doing nothing else...I think it's fair to say it would turn you more than a little weird...
But here's the thing.
By Aristotle's logic, I shouldn't be entirely abstaining from sweets, and alcoholics shouldn't be entirely abstaining from alcohol. One day at a time is not a principle with which Aristotle would seem to have much truck. In fact, he seems to view complete abstinence as the coward's way of going about things, and Self-Mastery would involve training oneself to have a proper iron will - to occasionally indulge, but in moderation, and then, as it were, just...stop. Y'know, like a normal person.
I'd certainly agree that, for an addict, this is the look-at-me-I'm-a-dead-hard-bastard route to take. It clashes rather violently with the digital nature of my brain - the all-or-nothing urge to gorge or purge. I don't want one eclair - I think we've covered that ad nauseum - I want the entire cake shop. And in fact, at the moment of self-allowance, I need the whole cake shop. It's Cookie Monster Syndrome at its finest. The path of dead-hard bastardy looks, from here, like it would taste of ashes and mediocrity, conformity and beigeness and yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir bog-awful ordinariness. I think it's fair to say that anyone who actually followed the Aristotelian principle in all things would be the kind of smug bastard you just wanted to punch in the mouth...the kind of person you wanted desperately to see bad things happen to, just to take them down a peg or two from the lofty height of their perfect Self-Mastery...
But still...
Now he's put it out there, as it were - or rather, of course, now I've discovered it's been out there for thousands of years...
I'm not, of course, proposing to experiment with Aristotelianism while I'm Disappearing - that would seem to be an open door for failure and fuckwittery. But maybe...just maybe...when I reach my eventual goal, I'll give this hideous idea of Moderation In All Things a go for a while - just to prove I can do it. I don't think it works at all for those with an addictive personality, because he does, incidentally, up the ante, claiming that if you do it and don't love it, you haven't really done it (Is he serious??), and that to properly be Happy, you've got to love this so called "mean state", this neither-here-nor-thereness. Fairly sure on that basis, I'm doomed to Aristotelian failure.
Like I say though - might give it a go, just to stick it to the boring old dead git...
Since d let me have my birthday Kindle early, I've been avidly reading on tubes again. And the first free book I've been reading is Aristotle's Ethics (and yes, I have his Politics to follow).
Turns out Aristotle had some views on living right that are something of a challenge for me to accept.
Without plunging you into the philosophical gubbins, Ethics is basically about Happiness - and how to achieve it. He claims - and indeed proves, to his own satisfaction at least - that...well, essentially that virtue is its own reward, and the path to true happiness. But as part of this, he puts forward the idea of...well, again, not to use a cliche, but it wasn't one when he wrote the book...Everything In Moderation - the right amount of activity, food, emotion, reaction, everything - not too much, not too little. A more thoroughly diabetic work of philosophy you'll probably never encounter.
One of the more startling things he talks about it "The Excellence of Self-Mastery" - essentially, the building up of habits of 'virtue' (or the right amount of things, including emotional reactions), and the denial of pleasure beyond what is "right" for the individual. In talking about this (and yes, I promise, there's a point coming. Listen hard and you can almost hear its distant whistle on the wind...), he says that complete abstinence from pleasures is just as wrong as over-indulgence, because it dulls and destroys your palette for pleasure altogether, and essentially makes you resent the pleasures and pleasure-taking of others.
Now, I think this is true, certainly - I've wanted to throw sharp objects through my own TV screen watching Cake Boss and Masterchef and Man V Food while pedalling my ass off on an exercise bike, and I think it's probably true to say that, for instance, sexually repressive religions tend to make their practitioners resent the sex that other people are having, particularly if it looks more fun than anything they could ever get. I don't think, for instance, that the Catholic clergy attracts people who were otherwise predisposed to paedophilia, but once you resign yourself to never getting any, and hearing the confessions of people who seem to be doing nothing else...I think it's fair to say it would turn you more than a little weird...
But here's the thing.
By Aristotle's logic, I shouldn't be entirely abstaining from sweets, and alcoholics shouldn't be entirely abstaining from alcohol. One day at a time is not a principle with which Aristotle would seem to have much truck. In fact, he seems to view complete abstinence as the coward's way of going about things, and Self-Mastery would involve training oneself to have a proper iron will - to occasionally indulge, but in moderation, and then, as it were, just...stop. Y'know, like a normal person.
I'd certainly agree that, for an addict, this is the look-at-me-I'm-a-dead-hard-bastard route to take. It clashes rather violently with the digital nature of my brain - the all-or-nothing urge to gorge or purge. I don't want one eclair - I think we've covered that ad nauseum - I want the entire cake shop. And in fact, at the moment of self-allowance, I need the whole cake shop. It's Cookie Monster Syndrome at its finest. The path of dead-hard bastardy looks, from here, like it would taste of ashes and mediocrity, conformity and beigeness and yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir bog-awful ordinariness. I think it's fair to say that anyone who actually followed the Aristotelian principle in all things would be the kind of smug bastard you just wanted to punch in the mouth...the kind of person you wanted desperately to see bad things happen to, just to take them down a peg or two from the lofty height of their perfect Self-Mastery...
But still...
Now he's put it out there, as it were - or rather, of course, now I've discovered it's been out there for thousands of years...
I'm not, of course, proposing to experiment with Aristotelianism while I'm Disappearing - that would seem to be an open door for failure and fuckwittery. But maybe...just maybe...when I reach my eventual goal, I'll give this hideous idea of Moderation In All Things a go for a while - just to prove I can do it. I don't think it works at all for those with an addictive personality, because he does, incidentally, up the ante, claiming that if you do it and don't love it, you haven't really done it (Is he serious??), and that to properly be Happy, you've got to love this so called "mean state", this neither-here-nor-thereness. Fairly sure on that basis, I'm doomed to Aristotelian failure.
Like I say though - might give it a go, just to stick it to the boring old dead git...
Wednesday 19 October 2011
The Pre-Us Belt
Bwahahaaaa! Fear the power of the Master Suit! Bow down before its Awesome Stripy Glory! Gaze into the crimson of its lining and feel your puny will crumble!!
Erm...as you might be suspecting by now, my Big Meeting went rather well. So yay me and all things connected with me, even tangentially, including this blog. I rule all today and that's all there is to it.
Bit of a panic this morning though - the suit doesn't look entirely right without a belt, and bizarrely, we couldn't find one at something godawful like 6.30 this morning as we stumbled around in the dark, bumping into each other and cursing softly.
"Here you go," said d, finding a coil of leather and throwing it on the bed.
It was cracked all around the last conceivable hole at which it could possibly have done up.
"OK," I said, and - because this is the kind of thing that takes two at sparrowfart o'clock, we threaded the belt through its loops. I did it up without thinking on the second - uncracked - hole.
"Oh my God," said d, realising the Huge Significance of this. She can do this sort of thing before sun-up. I have no idea how.
"You know what this is?" she asked.
"It's early," I said.
"No," she said.
"Ohhh but it is," I said, not at that precise moment recalling the days earlier this year when I'd be springing out of bed at this time and walking five miles.
"It's a pre-us belt," she explained.
"A wha-huh?" I asked.
"It's a belt from the time before you and I existed - before we got together."
I blinked.
"That would explain what it was doing lurking at the back of the drawer," I admitted.
"And even then, you could only do it up on the last hole, by the looks of it."
"I'm 32," I teased. "At most."
"Wow," she said, before packing me off into the ludicrous winter dark.
Gratifyingly, a couple of people who haven't seen me in a while were due to be at the Big Meeting, and most of them commented about the weightloss, and how much better I was looking. Even my mate Sally-Anne, once I donned the Awesome Stripy Glory of the Master Suit, was struck by it.
"Oh. Blimey - yeah, I can see it now..." she said.
So all hail the Master Suit for its stripy slimmingness and ultimate power. A good day.
Erm...as you might be suspecting by now, my Big Meeting went rather well. So yay me and all things connected with me, even tangentially, including this blog. I rule all today and that's all there is to it.
Bit of a panic this morning though - the suit doesn't look entirely right without a belt, and bizarrely, we couldn't find one at something godawful like 6.30 this morning as we stumbled around in the dark, bumping into each other and cursing softly.
"Here you go," said d, finding a coil of leather and throwing it on the bed.
It was cracked all around the last conceivable hole at which it could possibly have done up.
"OK," I said, and - because this is the kind of thing that takes two at sparrowfart o'clock, we threaded the belt through its loops. I did it up without thinking on the second - uncracked - hole.
"Oh my God," said d, realising the Huge Significance of this. She can do this sort of thing before sun-up. I have no idea how.
"You know what this is?" she asked.
"It's early," I said.
"No," she said.
"Ohhh but it is," I said, not at that precise moment recalling the days earlier this year when I'd be springing out of bed at this time and walking five miles.
"It's a pre-us belt," she explained.
"A wha-huh?" I asked.
"It's a belt from the time before you and I existed - before we got together."
I blinked.
"That would explain what it was doing lurking at the back of the drawer," I admitted.
"And even then, you could only do it up on the last hole, by the looks of it."
"I'm 32," I teased. "At most."
"Wow," she said, before packing me off into the ludicrous winter dark.
Gratifyingly, a couple of people who haven't seen me in a while were due to be at the Big Meeting, and most of them commented about the weightloss, and how much better I was looking. Even my mate Sally-Anne, once I donned the Awesome Stripy Glory of the Master Suit, was struck by it.
"Oh. Blimey - yeah, I can see it now..." she said.
So all hail the Master Suit for its stripy slimmingness and ultimate power. A good day.
Tuesday 18 October 2011
Stuff To Do List
1. This
2. That
3. The Other
4. More of This that cropped up while I was doing That
5. More of That that piled up during the time I allotted to the Other
6. Completely random Stuff from Dimension Z that screamed in from the left and clonked me upside the head.
7. The occasional Alpaca, wandering in, quoting Proust and wandering out, just to mess with my head.
8. Even more This that accumulated while I was clearing up the Alpaca shit and pondering Proust's conclusions.
9. Oh...yeah, the weigh-in. 16 stone 11 pounds - 1.5 pounds down, so still moving in the right direction, and almost, though not quite, as much as I should have done.
10. A modest demonic uprising by a bunch of pitchfork-wielding no-hopers.
11. Planning for Tomorrow's Big Meeting
12. Occupying Pizza Hut as an act of rebellion against corporate greed, or somesuch.
13. Reading Aristotle...just Because...
2. That
3. The Other
4. More of This that cropped up while I was doing That
5. More of That that piled up during the time I allotted to the Other
6. Completely random Stuff from Dimension Z that screamed in from the left and clonked me upside the head.
7. The occasional Alpaca, wandering in, quoting Proust and wandering out, just to mess with my head.
8. Even more This that accumulated while I was clearing up the Alpaca shit and pondering Proust's conclusions.
9. Oh...yeah, the weigh-in. 16 stone 11 pounds - 1.5 pounds down, so still moving in the right direction, and almost, though not quite, as much as I should have done.
10. A modest demonic uprising by a bunch of pitchfork-wielding no-hopers.
11. Planning for Tomorrow's Big Meeting
12. Occupying Pizza Hut as an act of rebellion against corporate greed, or somesuch.
13. Reading Aristotle...just Because...
Monday 17 October 2011
Jumping The Domino
Errrr.....yyyyeah...so it's Monday. Pretty much...big deal at the moment. Been crazy all day on the day job, with not very much time to think about the whole Disappearing lark at all. This, in case you're wondering, is the Domino Effect - s'gonna be like this for at least most of this week. The weird thing is that caring about the weight and the eating and the exercise has pretty much been pushed into a corner of my brain and forgotten about for a bit - Will still do the normal 'good' things I've been doing, but in terms of neurosis and addiction and all that cobblers, at the moment, I just don't have the brain-space.
I could tell you all about all this, but I figure that's not really what you're here for. Tell you what though, I did spot myself indulging in the most ridiculous bit of male vanity this morning on the tube. I was standing up for quite a bit of the journey into work, and caught sight of my reflection in the window. Before I knew what I was doing, I turned a bit sideways. Then I breathed in. And then, just to crown the moment of testosterone-fuelled fuckwitteery, I clenched my butt. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was checking myself out in the window!
"Wow," I thought. "Look at that...I look almost normal..."
Now this of course is horse-shit, based on contextual information. I don't look "normal" to most casual observers at all. I still look like a bloke who's about 6.5 stone overweight (or 91 pounds overweight, if you're American). Clearly - much work remains to be done. But to me, in the context of having come from 20.5 stone, I look "normal" to myself - comfortable and lived in, certainly, but less ramshackle and condemnable.
I guess this is because I haven't been this light since records began, and so I feel almost entirely comfortable here. Of course, the danger of feeling comfortable and content, added to the fact of having no real time to obsess over the business of Disappearing, is that it almost convinces you that you're done. That you've done enough, and can 'get on' with the business of living now, thanks very much and see ya later.
I'm never normally one to worry about what other people think (you can't be, really, if you want to survive on a daily basis as a fat fuck), but it's at times like this that a healthy dose of 'other people's perspective' can be really useful. Because however comfortable I might feel, I am of course still about 6.5 stone over my 'ideal' weight - though I daresay there'll be more ranting about this idea of idealism at some point later in the process. And so, by remembering that other people still see a bloke significantly overweight, it sort of helps refocus the brain on the business of Disappearing. And I will of course - you probably know me well enough by now to understand that much about my bastard-stubbornness - but in the meantime, you'll have to excuse me - this is me, tap-dancing on a toppling domino, trying to judge exxxactly the right moment to jump to the next one...
Annnndddddd -
Uppppsaddaisy!
I could tell you all about all this, but I figure that's not really what you're here for. Tell you what though, I did spot myself indulging in the most ridiculous bit of male vanity this morning on the tube. I was standing up for quite a bit of the journey into work, and caught sight of my reflection in the window. Before I knew what I was doing, I turned a bit sideways. Then I breathed in. And then, just to crown the moment of testosterone-fuelled fuckwitteery, I clenched my butt. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was checking myself out in the window!
"Wow," I thought. "Look at that...I look almost normal..."
Now this of course is horse-shit, based on contextual information. I don't look "normal" to most casual observers at all. I still look like a bloke who's about 6.5 stone overweight (or 91 pounds overweight, if you're American). Clearly - much work remains to be done. But to me, in the context of having come from 20.5 stone, I look "normal" to myself - comfortable and lived in, certainly, but less ramshackle and condemnable.
I guess this is because I haven't been this light since records began, and so I feel almost entirely comfortable here. Of course, the danger of feeling comfortable and content, added to the fact of having no real time to obsess over the business of Disappearing, is that it almost convinces you that you're done. That you've done enough, and can 'get on' with the business of living now, thanks very much and see ya later.
I'm never normally one to worry about what other people think (you can't be, really, if you want to survive on a daily basis as a fat fuck), but it's at times like this that a healthy dose of 'other people's perspective' can be really useful. Because however comfortable I might feel, I am of course still about 6.5 stone over my 'ideal' weight - though I daresay there'll be more ranting about this idea of idealism at some point later in the process. And so, by remembering that other people still see a bloke significantly overweight, it sort of helps refocus the brain on the business of Disappearing. And I will of course - you probably know me well enough by now to understand that much about my bastard-stubbornness - but in the meantime, you'll have to excuse me - this is me, tap-dancing on a toppling domino, trying to judge exxxactly the right moment to jump to the next one...
Annnndddddd -
Uppppsaddaisy!
Sunday 16 October 2011
24 Week
Ah...so that's a 24-hour bug, then...
So where are we? Screaming towards Tuesday, massively, ridiculously busy week, for all sorts of reasons, having abandoned the hope of getting to the four-stone mark by the time I turn 40, and not hugely bothered.
Today, having felt better and better throughout the day, got back on the bike for the first time in three days - did a standard ten miles, or 500 calories, and then thought sod it.
Oddly, this week, Tuesday is not the big kahuna it normally is. This week, Wednesday is taking its place, mainly because there's a Big Meeting in work that I have to attend, and wear the Master Suit for. Then Friday, I'll be back in the Master Suit for buggering off to Nottingham (another work thing). Saturday is 40-day, and, breaking with tradition, I'll probably post an additional official weigh-in result on that day...and then, we've made a decision that earlier this year I would have fought with every breath in my body - we're going to Merthyr for the night of my birthday. Since I was born around 7PM, that means I'll probably be back in my home town for the technical anniversary-of-the-birth moment. I'll probably milk all the pseudo-mystical symbolism I can out of that, because we'll be on a train the next day heading back to London.
So really, this doesn't feel like a week. It feels like a domino-parade of 24-hour blocks.
Here's to a spirited finger-flick...
So where are we? Screaming towards Tuesday, massively, ridiculously busy week, for all sorts of reasons, having abandoned the hope of getting to the four-stone mark by the time I turn 40, and not hugely bothered.
Today, having felt better and better throughout the day, got back on the bike for the first time in three days - did a standard ten miles, or 500 calories, and then thought sod it.
Oddly, this week, Tuesday is not the big kahuna it normally is. This week, Wednesday is taking its place, mainly because there's a Big Meeting in work that I have to attend, and wear the Master Suit for. Then Friday, I'll be back in the Master Suit for buggering off to Nottingham (another work thing). Saturday is 40-day, and, breaking with tradition, I'll probably post an additional official weigh-in result on that day...and then, we've made a decision that earlier this year I would have fought with every breath in my body - we're going to Merthyr for the night of my birthday. Since I was born around 7PM, that means I'll probably be back in my home town for the technical anniversary-of-the-birth moment. I'll probably milk all the pseudo-mystical symbolism I can out of that, because we'll be on a train the next day heading back to London.
So really, this doesn't feel like a week. It feels like a domino-parade of 24-hour blocks.
Here's to a spirited finger-flick...
Saturday 15 October 2011
Lines From The Dark
Ugh.
Short one this. Woke up this morning, watched Wales get partially robbed, and partially forget how to kick field goals, then went for an adventure in the city with d. Came home feeling, I thought, diabetically discombobulated. Around 3.30, decided to go for a mid-afternoon nap. Just woke up, and going straight back, frankly. Feel lousy and in a world of wrongness - the light's too light, the heat's too hot, the cold's too cold, me joints are aching, me stomach's churning and me head feels like some joker's inflating a balloon inside me skull...
Just woke up, as I said, and was laying there going "Sod the lot of ya..." Except you wouldn't be sodded, wouldn't let me just turn over and get back to sleep. So here you are - a bad-tempered collection of lines, written in almost complete darkness because my eyeballs feel like they're going to pop any second. Now, if you'll excuse me, am buggering off back to me pit with a sleeping pill, and I'll see you tomorrow...
Short one this. Woke up this morning, watched Wales get partially robbed, and partially forget how to kick field goals, then went for an adventure in the city with d. Came home feeling, I thought, diabetically discombobulated. Around 3.30, decided to go for a mid-afternoon nap. Just woke up, and going straight back, frankly. Feel lousy and in a world of wrongness - the light's too light, the heat's too hot, the cold's too cold, me joints are aching, me stomach's churning and me head feels like some joker's inflating a balloon inside me skull...
Just woke up, as I said, and was laying there going "Sod the lot of ya..." Except you wouldn't be sodded, wouldn't let me just turn over and get back to sleep. So here you are - a bad-tempered collection of lines, written in almost complete darkness because my eyeballs feel like they're going to pop any second. Now, if you'll excuse me, am buggering off back to me pit with a sleeping pill, and I'll see you tomorrow...
Friday 14 October 2011
Kindle Day
Blood yesterday was 5.5, blood this morning, 5.1.
Quite a few things happened today. First of all, I wasn;'t in work today - I had an appointment at 10.15 to get my eyeballs prodded. This little ritual is an annual joyfest for the diabetics in your midst - every year, at least once a year, a hopefully-kindly optomotrist or ophthalmologist will invite you into a room and temporarily blind you with chemicals, and then ask you to read something you can in no way see, and then take pictures of the backs of your eyeballs...
This is exactly as much fun as it sounds, so yay.
Then, being as I had walked to the appointment and back, and couldn't see anything but colours and shapes, I went to Pizza Hut for lunch.
Pizza Hut has gone depressing, did you know that? All of their pizzas now come with calorie information on a per-slice and per-topping basis. Which allowed me to work out I'd eaten around half my daily intake of calories on what was both breakfast and lunch...
And yes, I worked out it would take 20 miles of biking to make my day lunch-neutral, and yes, I worked out that on any ordinary day, by the time I'm done with breakfast and lunch, I've eaten rrrround about a thousand calories. What? You didn't expect me to work this shit out while I was semi-blind and stuffing cheese and chicken into my system? Puh-lease, you must be new...
Spent most of the afternoon squinting at emails waiting for them to come into focus and failing, and intending to bike for 20 miles and failing. Went out with d to the Westfield centre for dinner, because she was itching to give me my birthday present scandalously early. (Six days early and counting, folks - at which point, by the way, it lookds fan-freaking-tastically unlikely that I'm going to meet my mini-race deadline of getting to the four-stone mark by my birthday. So we ate sausage sandwiches for dinner, shared a great evening, and came home. She gave me my present. Have a look at the title of this entry and see if you can work out what it was.
We'll wait...
Doobeedoodoo...doobeedoodoo...doobeedoodooo -dip! deeboobeedoobee
Yep! Got me a kickass Kindle, and I'm a happy boy...the reason tonight's entry comes to you screamingly tight under the wire is cos I've been writing lists of books to download and downloading some, and charging it up and planning the rest of my life's reading...
And nope, still haven't done my biking. Seems freakin' unlikely at this point, so what we have here is a day of pretty much relaxation - don't care much, because I have a feeling the system can stretch to accommodate days like this. Tomorrow - there will be biking...
Quite a few things happened today. First of all, I wasn;'t in work today - I had an appointment at 10.15 to get my eyeballs prodded. This little ritual is an annual joyfest for the diabetics in your midst - every year, at least once a year, a hopefully-kindly optomotrist or ophthalmologist will invite you into a room and temporarily blind you with chemicals, and then ask you to read something you can in no way see, and then take pictures of the backs of your eyeballs...
This is exactly as much fun as it sounds, so yay.
Then, being as I had walked to the appointment and back, and couldn't see anything but colours and shapes, I went to Pizza Hut for lunch.
Pizza Hut has gone depressing, did you know that? All of their pizzas now come with calorie information on a per-slice and per-topping basis. Which allowed me to work out I'd eaten around half my daily intake of calories on what was both breakfast and lunch...
And yes, I worked out it would take 20 miles of biking to make my day lunch-neutral, and yes, I worked out that on any ordinary day, by the time I'm done with breakfast and lunch, I've eaten rrrround about a thousand calories. What? You didn't expect me to work this shit out while I was semi-blind and stuffing cheese and chicken into my system? Puh-lease, you must be new...
Spent most of the afternoon squinting at emails waiting for them to come into focus and failing, and intending to bike for 20 miles and failing. Went out with d to the Westfield centre for dinner, because she was itching to give me my birthday present scandalously early. (Six days early and counting, folks - at which point, by the way, it lookds fan-freaking-tastically unlikely that I'm going to meet my mini-race deadline of getting to the four-stone mark by my birthday. So we ate sausage sandwiches for dinner, shared a great evening, and came home. She gave me my present. Have a look at the title of this entry and see if you can work out what it was.
We'll wait...
Doobeedoodoo...doobeedoodoo...doobeedoodooo -dip! deeboobeedoobee
Yep! Got me a kickass Kindle, and I'm a happy boy...the reason tonight's entry comes to you screamingly tight under the wire is cos I've been writing lists of books to download and downloading some, and charging it up and planning the rest of my life's reading...
And nope, still haven't done my biking. Seems freakin' unlikely at this point, so what we have here is a day of pretty much relaxation - don't care much, because I have a feeling the system can stretch to accommodate days like this. Tomorrow - there will be biking...
Thursday 13 October 2011
Solved?
Sooo...
Apparently, the Health Secretary has cracked this whole obesity epidemic thing wide open. Apparently, the key is...erm...eating less.
Gotta give it to him, he's an Ideas Man.
Apparently, the majority of us consume about 10% more calories than we need each day, so there are plans for the Government, town halls, and the food and drinks industry to work together to get us all thinner.
Let me repeat that: The central Government, local government, and the food and drinks industry - people who couldn't win outright against Gordon Brown, people who only win because only their families vote in the elections they stand in, and people who would happily inject high fructose corn syrup into toddlers' eyeballs if it would earn them a handful of pennies. This mob are going to be working together to get us all healthy.
Not because they particularly want us to be healthy, you understand, but because fat fucks are apparently expensive. We're the people having heart attacks and filling up diabetic clinics and bypassing our bypasses. Apparently in London alone, fat fucks cos the NHS around £890 million.
I have to say, I kinda think this is what the NHS is for - healing unhealthy people. And here, we come up against an underlying prejudice. You wouldn't get groundbreaking Government initiatives to stop old people being old, or people with disabilities to somehow stop having their conditions. But the assumption of course is that "you brought it on yourself" if you're overweight - it's a similar thing to the treatment smokers have been getting for years now, a kind of bully-mentality that entirely fails to look at the genuine situation because it's easier just to point and poke sticks.
There's an assumption that smokers, and addictive eaters, are just self-indulgent wuss-asses, who take everything they can get in an irresponsible orgy of self-harm because they want to!
Let me see...
Fat fucks are:
Stigmatised in the playground;
Overlooked and ignored on the dating scene;
Therefore less likely to find a partner, and
More likely to spend their life insecure, and frightened that any partner they get will leave them for someone 'prettier';
Considered less capable than their slimmer counterparts in the workplace;
Despised by 98% of the fashion and retail world, and so not allowed to wear 'cool' clothes;
Annnnnd THEN we get sick, and often die.
Now, you tell me - how likely d'you think it is that we actively choose this way of life?!
So yeah, we're a burden on the Health Service. But sooner or later, so the fuck is everyone - it's just a case of when, and what we get. At least, with the fat fucks, we tend to get our health problems out of the way earlier, and then we die, and we're not a burden any more. It's the thin fucks who jog till they're seventy and break hips, and then draw out their deterioration who are the long-term burden. But hey, let's focus on the short-term, and treat the fatness itself as the problem, rather than the reasons people neeeeeeeeeed to eat this way. You wanna tackle obesity, 1) normalise the fashion industry, to defuse the expectations of, for instance, young girls who want to be fashionable, and realise the stick figures on the runways are never going to be them, because that flips them into hiding under layers and needing comfort.
2) Defuse societal pressure to conform to notions of film-star figures, and action-star abs.
3) Promote images for boys and girls that make them feel alright with being themselves. That way, you defuse the playground and the dating game.
Do these three things, and you take the impetus for panic away. You promote the notion of a wider spectrum of 'normality', and you stop people needing to hide, to control, to fall into the endless, exhausting cycle of addiction, of binging and purging, of what, in trendier blogs and books than this, people call 'an unhealthy relationship with food'.
And let's not forget, I came into this thing all bravado and bullshit - I've always taken responsibility for my own fat fuckery. But that's me. It's not everyone, and even I know that some of the underlying reasons I've always done what I've done are emotional, not just physical. Yes, the physical ABCs of the thing is basically down to eating fewer calories, and doing more exercise. That, if you'll excuse the obvious example, we can pretty much do for ourselves - though undoubtedly the pills help!
But assuming that fat is just a physical issue is pretty much like assuming schizophrenia is just about acting weird, or depression's just about being a weakling. Tackling the obesity epidemic by focusing only on the physical just reveals that it's money, not people, that's the driving force of your actions.
Apparently, the Health Secretary has cracked this whole obesity epidemic thing wide open. Apparently, the key is...erm...eating less.
Gotta give it to him, he's an Ideas Man.
Apparently, the majority of us consume about 10% more calories than we need each day, so there are plans for the Government, town halls, and the food and drinks industry to work together to get us all thinner.
Let me repeat that: The central Government, local government, and the food and drinks industry - people who couldn't win outright against Gordon Brown, people who only win because only their families vote in the elections they stand in, and people who would happily inject high fructose corn syrup into toddlers' eyeballs if it would earn them a handful of pennies. This mob are going to be working together to get us all healthy.
Not because they particularly want us to be healthy, you understand, but because fat fucks are apparently expensive. We're the people having heart attacks and filling up diabetic clinics and bypassing our bypasses. Apparently in London alone, fat fucks cos the NHS around £890 million.
I have to say, I kinda think this is what the NHS is for - healing unhealthy people. And here, we come up against an underlying prejudice. You wouldn't get groundbreaking Government initiatives to stop old people being old, or people with disabilities to somehow stop having their conditions. But the assumption of course is that "you brought it on yourself" if you're overweight - it's a similar thing to the treatment smokers have been getting for years now, a kind of bully-mentality that entirely fails to look at the genuine situation because it's easier just to point and poke sticks.
There's an assumption that smokers, and addictive eaters, are just self-indulgent wuss-asses, who take everything they can get in an irresponsible orgy of self-harm because they want to!
Let me see...
Fat fucks are:
Stigmatised in the playground;
Overlooked and ignored on the dating scene;
Therefore less likely to find a partner, and
More likely to spend their life insecure, and frightened that any partner they get will leave them for someone 'prettier';
Considered less capable than their slimmer counterparts in the workplace;
Despised by 98% of the fashion and retail world, and so not allowed to wear 'cool' clothes;
Annnnnd THEN we get sick, and often die.
Now, you tell me - how likely d'you think it is that we actively choose this way of life?!
So yeah, we're a burden on the Health Service. But sooner or later, so the fuck is everyone - it's just a case of when, and what we get. At least, with the fat fucks, we tend to get our health problems out of the way earlier, and then we die, and we're not a burden any more. It's the thin fucks who jog till they're seventy and break hips, and then draw out their deterioration who are the long-term burden. But hey, let's focus on the short-term, and treat the fatness itself as the problem, rather than the reasons people neeeeeeeeeed to eat this way. You wanna tackle obesity, 1) normalise the fashion industry, to defuse the expectations of, for instance, young girls who want to be fashionable, and realise the stick figures on the runways are never going to be them, because that flips them into hiding under layers and needing comfort.
2) Defuse societal pressure to conform to notions of film-star figures, and action-star abs.
3) Promote images for boys and girls that make them feel alright with being themselves. That way, you defuse the playground and the dating game.
Do these three things, and you take the impetus for panic away. You promote the notion of a wider spectrum of 'normality', and you stop people needing to hide, to control, to fall into the endless, exhausting cycle of addiction, of binging and purging, of what, in trendier blogs and books than this, people call 'an unhealthy relationship with food'.
And let's not forget, I came into this thing all bravado and bullshit - I've always taken responsibility for my own fat fuckery. But that's me. It's not everyone, and even I know that some of the underlying reasons I've always done what I've done are emotional, not just physical. Yes, the physical ABCs of the thing is basically down to eating fewer calories, and doing more exercise. That, if you'll excuse the obvious example, we can pretty much do for ourselves - though undoubtedly the pills help!
But assuming that fat is just a physical issue is pretty much like assuming schizophrenia is just about acting weird, or depression's just about being a weakling. Tackling the obesity epidemic by focusing only on the physical just reveals that it's money, not people, that's the driving force of your actions.
Wednesday 12 October 2011
Our Daily Bread
"What...erm...love you sweetie...but...erm...what the Hell ya doin'?"
I was breathing. Slowly.
"I'm breathing...slowly," I said, doing a slow-motion bicep-curl.
"Are you...erm...finding the curls difficult honey?" she said, eyeing my tiny 1.5 pound dumb-bells with a combination of Disney-cute compassion and held-in-check contempt.
"Nono," I said. "The instructions said to do them slowly, and not to rush them," I said, breathing out dramatically, like the Karate Kid. Hey man, I was In The Zone.
d giggled, hiding the height of her humour behind her hand.
"Oh sweetie," she said. "They mean don't go mad and injure your elbows or pull anything. But you can pump them out...one, two, three, four..." she said, showing me the rhythm.
"Ohhhh," I said, blinking. "Really?"
"Really," she promised, and blew me a kiss before she buggered off to work. I pumped them out, and utterly refused to do the sit-ups, on the significantly wuss-ass justification that my left ass-cheek was really bitching, and d had done me the faour of mentioning sciatica, so I felt like I had a note to excuse me.
Got to Kensington, and the lines at both the places I could have gone to get some breakfast were insane, so I ignored them both and walked up the High Street, breakfastless.
It's really at lunch today that the story kicks off. I had soup and bread. Came home tonight and had beans...on toast. Yesterday for dinner, I also had beans on toast, but for breakfast, I had...erm...soup and bread.
It's at this point that the advice I got a few weeks ago from my pal Sally-Anne resonates round my brain - "With blokes, it tends to be all about the bread - you cut out the bread and you're likely to lose..."
Thing is....I love bread. White bread, brown bread, bread with bits in. If you don't fuck it up trying to make it too damned interesting, you really can't go wrong offering me a bit of bread. It occurs to me that Sally-Anne, and indeed d, who said pretty much the same thing when I got home tonight, is absolutely right, but here's the thing - there's been an unending parade of things that I don't do any more (had the weirdest craving on the way home for what I would traditionally have thought of as 'a proper bowl of cereal' - something the size of an eight-year-old's haircut, filled to the brim and beyond with assorted cereals). Bread, I suppose, is probably the next thing to go, but while I feel I can, I'm enjoying the yeasty wonder of my daily bread.
Bottom line, I'm working on the principle that doing the walking, and the curling, and the biking, reduces the calories that 'count' in the day, whether they come from proteins or carbs, and eating less overall - like today's accidental "two meals instead of three" shenanigan, reduces the number of likely calories going into my system in the first place...sooooo bite me!
Nevertheless, after all this thought about bread, it's wonder and it's potential drag-anchoring, I think I might pop onto the scales in the morning, just to see what's what...
I was breathing. Slowly.
"I'm breathing...slowly," I said, doing a slow-motion bicep-curl.
"Are you...erm...finding the curls difficult honey?" she said, eyeing my tiny 1.5 pound dumb-bells with a combination of Disney-cute compassion and held-in-check contempt.
"Nono," I said. "The instructions said to do them slowly, and not to rush them," I said, breathing out dramatically, like the Karate Kid. Hey man, I was In The Zone.
d giggled, hiding the height of her humour behind her hand.
"Oh sweetie," she said. "They mean don't go mad and injure your elbows or pull anything. But you can pump them out...one, two, three, four..." she said, showing me the rhythm.
"Ohhhh," I said, blinking. "Really?"
"Really," she promised, and blew me a kiss before she buggered off to work. I pumped them out, and utterly refused to do the sit-ups, on the significantly wuss-ass justification that my left ass-cheek was really bitching, and d had done me the faour of mentioning sciatica, so I felt like I had a note to excuse me.
Got to Kensington, and the lines at both the places I could have gone to get some breakfast were insane, so I ignored them both and walked up the High Street, breakfastless.
It's really at lunch today that the story kicks off. I had soup and bread. Came home tonight and had beans...on toast. Yesterday for dinner, I also had beans on toast, but for breakfast, I had...erm...soup and bread.
It's at this point that the advice I got a few weeks ago from my pal Sally-Anne resonates round my brain - "With blokes, it tends to be all about the bread - you cut out the bread and you're likely to lose..."
Thing is....I love bread. White bread, brown bread, bread with bits in. If you don't fuck it up trying to make it too damned interesting, you really can't go wrong offering me a bit of bread. It occurs to me that Sally-Anne, and indeed d, who said pretty much the same thing when I got home tonight, is absolutely right, but here's the thing - there's been an unending parade of things that I don't do any more (had the weirdest craving on the way home for what I would traditionally have thought of as 'a proper bowl of cereal' - something the size of an eight-year-old's haircut, filled to the brim and beyond with assorted cereals). Bread, I suppose, is probably the next thing to go, but while I feel I can, I'm enjoying the yeasty wonder of my daily bread.
Bottom line, I'm working on the principle that doing the walking, and the curling, and the biking, reduces the calories that 'count' in the day, whether they come from proteins or carbs, and eating less overall - like today's accidental "two meals instead of three" shenanigan, reduces the number of likely calories going into my system in the first place...sooooo bite me!
Nevertheless, after all this thought about bread, it's wonder and it's potential drag-anchoring, I think I might pop onto the scales in the morning, just to see what's what...
Tuesday 11 October 2011
Pretending To Be Dead
"Hnnnnuuuuuurghhh!"
"Push harder baby!"
"Fnnnnninnnnnnn!"
"Bend your legs for me."
"Arrrrgllllllllllle!"
"Erm...not to be critical, but you're supposed to lock your hands behind your head."
It would be wrong to say I gave d A Look. It would also, just for the record, be wrong to say I threw something sharp and pointy at her head. But only because I couldn't reach anything, and anyway, in this position, I didn't have the strength to pluck a buttercup.
"Hey, don't look at me like that, you told me to go all military on your ass. Now give me fifty!"
"Don't take this wrong dear, but go fuck yourself!"
"Haven't got time dear, I need to get to work. Push!"
I pushed, mainly to stop her telling me to push. I gave her ten sloppy, deeply non-regulation sit-ups, and then lay panting on the floor, pretending to be dead.
"You can't sleep there," she said, bending down to kiss me before disappearing through the door. "Get up ya lazy git," she added with affection.
I pretended even harder to be dead. It came quite naturally to me at the time.
Eventually, after the passing of a few cool aeons, and after I'd noticed things under the couch that I'd lost a couple of years ago, I crawled painfully to my feet. The thing about this 'sit-ups before work' lark is that, as far as my body's concerned, for this particular type of exercise, it's still March 2011. Whereas, blisters notwithstanding, my stamina for walking has increased exponentially since then, as far as ab-crunching, or come to that bicep-curling's concerned, I'm still a big fat flabby fuck that they can kick around cos I'm playing entirely on their court. They hurt! Not massively, not for long, not 'oh crap, I've snapped something' hurt, just in-the-moment kill-me-now-please-it'll-be-quicker hurt.
Still...
I haven't forgotten it's Tuesday, so here you go - results for the day:
"Push harder baby!"
"Fnnnnninnnnnnn!"
"Bend your legs for me."
"Arrrrgllllllllllle!"
"Erm...not to be critical, but you're supposed to lock your hands behind your head."
It would be wrong to say I gave d A Look. It would also, just for the record, be wrong to say I threw something sharp and pointy at her head. But only because I couldn't reach anything, and anyway, in this position, I didn't have the strength to pluck a buttercup.
"Hey, don't look at me like that, you told me to go all military on your ass. Now give me fifty!"
"Don't take this wrong dear, but go fuck yourself!"
"Haven't got time dear, I need to get to work. Push!"
I pushed, mainly to stop her telling me to push. I gave her ten sloppy, deeply non-regulation sit-ups, and then lay panting on the floor, pretending to be dead.
"You can't sleep there," she said, bending down to kiss me before disappearing through the door. "Get up ya lazy git," she added with affection.
I pretended even harder to be dead. It came quite naturally to me at the time.
Eventually, after the passing of a few cool aeons, and after I'd noticed things under the couch that I'd lost a couple of years ago, I crawled painfully to my feet. The thing about this 'sit-ups before work' lark is that, as far as my body's concerned, for this particular type of exercise, it's still March 2011. Whereas, blisters notwithstanding, my stamina for walking has increased exponentially since then, as far as ab-crunching, or come to that bicep-curling's concerned, I'm still a big fat flabby fuck that they can kick around cos I'm playing entirely on their court. They hurt! Not massively, not for long, not 'oh crap, I've snapped something' hurt, just in-the-moment kill-me-now-please-it'll-be-quicker hurt.
Still...
I haven't forgotten it's Tuesday, so here you go - results for the day:
16 stone, 12.5!!!
Scuse me, I have some deeply undignified dancing around to do...
Doobeedoobedoodoodoo...shakalakkalakkaboom, shakkalakkalakka...
Ahhh...Sooo, yeah - smashed through the 3.5 stone barrier, for the Brits, now lost 50.5 pounds, for the Americans, or 23 kg, for the Metric-friendly Europeans and others. Happy happy boy, ab-crunch shenanigans notwithstanding. True, had I been sticking to my plan, losing two pounds a week, I should now have lost 64 pounds - a whole extra stone, but still, given one thing and another, I'm pleased with the way that things are going, and that they're still going at all by this point.
Oddly enough, the 'next boundary to cross' in my head automatically clicked over, from 17 stone to 15 stone (buggered if I know what happened to 16 stone in the reckoning, and trust me when I say I'm not ignoring the potential bastardy of getting to 16 stone - it's just that's what happened in my head).
I sort of have a mini-project now. A mini-race, if you like. It's now October 11th. I turn 40 on October 22nd. That's 11 days, for the numerically-challenged among us. My four-stone marker is 16 stone, 7.5 - or five pounds away. I would love to be able to say I'd hit the four-stone mark on my 40th birthday - partly for the sheer numerical symmetry of the thing, partly because I genuinely don't remember the last time I was 16 stone 7.5, and partly to give me a real upsurge of positivity on the day in terms of 'what a stubborn bastard can do when he puts his mind to it'...erm...ness.
d was funny this morning, saying I'd be 'catching her up' soon. This is patently ludicrous, she's waaaaay below me, and only about an inch shorter, if that. I think there's some sort of message here, that I touched upon way back in the very first entry in this blog. Everybody thinks they're fat these days -we're bombarded with that message everywhere we go, while also shown the images to which we should allegedly aspire. But whoever you are, take a freakin' chill pill. The likelihood is - you're not as fat as you think you are The likelihood is I'm still waaaaay fatter than you, and I'm a happy happy boy today, dancin' about the place on a wave of nauseating self-congratulation for an achievement that is, when all's said and done, the result of exchanging one addiction for what is probably another.
Keep calm, be happy, and have a jammie dodger...
And please excuse me if I bite your face off to try and get at it. I'd kill for a jammie dodger right about now...
Monday 10 October 2011
SAD
Nope.
Woke up this morning at 6ish, when d, knowing my desire to get back on the early-morning-walking kick, prodded me gently into life.
"Hey," she said.
"Oh God," I muttered.
"Ah-huh," she agreed, going two-thirds of the way to a reasonable Elvis impression.
"Oh God," I muttered again.
"It's six o'clock...ish," she said, pulling the blankets up over her shoulder.
"I need to pee," I said, apropos of nothing. I'm not sure where this habit of ours came from - the announcement of bodily needs and functions. I mean, we're fully grown adults, not five-year-olds that need an escort to the bathroom. But still, it's what we do. As if to give me permission, d gave a blanketty mumble.
I got up, padded down to the bathroom. That's when it hit me - it was dark. Still completely dark. As I peed, I looked out of the bathroom window.
"Black," I muttered, pretty much to my own penis.
I padded back to the bedroom, and saw two paths ahead of me. One led to socks and shoes and trudging through the streets of morning London...in the dark.
The other path was warm and snuggly for another whole hour.
The warm and snuggly path won.
See, I'd thought ahead for that great British contingency - rain - and decided that, on days when it was pissing down, I wouldn't be stupid about it. But I'd never considered the possibility of Seasonal Affective Disappearing...the sheer crappiness of walking in darkness when your brain says it really shouldn't be dark.
I slept for another whole gorgeous snoring hour, and then did something I've been promising to do - I got out the weights, and did ten pathetic little curls per hand with the lightest, almost baby-weights, and ten little sit-ups. Have to tell you, these were the first proper sit-ups I've done in about a decade, and I sat up and begged for there to be no such thing as sit-ups left in the world, frankly. But then I buggered off into the day. Annnnd now onto the bike, though muscles and brain are both kinda telling me "Look, it's dark again, go to sleeeeeep".
Bike, bike, bike dammit...
Blood was 4.8 this morning, incidentally - maybe there's a place, in these darkening days, for pre-work sitting-up and curling.
Woke up this morning at 6ish, when d, knowing my desire to get back on the early-morning-walking kick, prodded me gently into life.
"Hey," she said.
"Oh God," I muttered.
"Ah-huh," she agreed, going two-thirds of the way to a reasonable Elvis impression.
"Oh God," I muttered again.
"It's six o'clock...ish," she said, pulling the blankets up over her shoulder.
"I need to pee," I said, apropos of nothing. I'm not sure where this habit of ours came from - the announcement of bodily needs and functions. I mean, we're fully grown adults, not five-year-olds that need an escort to the bathroom. But still, it's what we do. As if to give me permission, d gave a blanketty mumble.
I got up, padded down to the bathroom. That's when it hit me - it was dark. Still completely dark. As I peed, I looked out of the bathroom window.
"Black," I muttered, pretty much to my own penis.
I padded back to the bedroom, and saw two paths ahead of me. One led to socks and shoes and trudging through the streets of morning London...in the dark.
The other path was warm and snuggly for another whole hour.
The warm and snuggly path won.
See, I'd thought ahead for that great British contingency - rain - and decided that, on days when it was pissing down, I wouldn't be stupid about it. But I'd never considered the possibility of Seasonal Affective Disappearing...the sheer crappiness of walking in darkness when your brain says it really shouldn't be dark.
I slept for another whole gorgeous snoring hour, and then did something I've been promising to do - I got out the weights, and did ten pathetic little curls per hand with the lightest, almost baby-weights, and ten little sit-ups. Have to tell you, these were the first proper sit-ups I've done in about a decade, and I sat up and begged for there to be no such thing as sit-ups left in the world, frankly. But then I buggered off into the day. Annnnd now onto the bike, though muscles and brain are both kinda telling me "Look, it's dark again, go to sleeeeeep".
Bike, bike, bike dammit...
Blood was 4.8 this morning, incidentally - maybe there's a place, in these darkening days, for pre-work sitting-up and curling.
Sunday 9 October 2011
One Sweet At A Time?
I've had an interesting weekend. Couple of reactions to the Culinary Lemming Syndrome post on addiction. One from a Facebook friend, who said she knew the feeling, and that she was now addicted to feeling thin.
I have a nasty slick sickening feeling that I might come to know what she means - I certainly don't want to, but I guess now, in some respects, there's an element of truth in it - If I'm not eating madly, and I'm not doing this, I really don't know what the alternative would be, now or ever. That's pretty much because I've only ever done one or the other, so it's got a black-and-white quality to it.
Also, d didn't get to read that one till the following day. I was pedalling my ass off at the time she read it, and she came sort of bashfully grinning in from the kitchen and kissed me.
"I don't think you'll never be able to have nice things," she said. "I really don't. Mind you, I don't know what addiction's really like."
"'s'like being a racehorse, honey," I told her, "with no control over where you go and what you do, and some shouty, whip-happy fuck riding on your back from start to ultimate finish..."
"Well...I still hope you'l be able to have nice things," she said, giving me a hug - which in itself was tricky, cos I was sweating like...well, like a racehorse, now I think about it, on the bike.
I hope she's right of course, but I don't at this point hold out a huge amount of hope for that. Perhaps, if I get down to the ideal weight, and maybe into the 'porn window' I'm trying to get (the porn window, for anyone who doesn;'t know, is an extra half-stone I figured I'd try and lose precisely to let myself have a week-long dessert orgy - see, even then, I wasn't talking in terms of rational behaviour or restraint, it's like talking to the Cookie Monster!), I might experiment with desserts...
One sweet at a time, Sweet Jesus...
Like I say, knowing me, I'm not sure that would work at all, but maybe, when I get down there, it'll be something to experiment with, and if it looks like I'm hurtling back out of control, I can (hopefully) resurrect my perspex walls double quick and wrestle myself back under control. The good thing of course is that now I know what a stubborn bastard I can be, it might be possible. Guess we'll see.
Rest of the weekend has been good, but too fast. I've managed a couple of twenty mile biking stints, which always helps one feel virtuous going into a week Hoping, once again, to start back on my morning walking tomorrow. Who knows, maybe the 'addictive' part of this whole process, and the hope of maybe breaking the 3.5 stone barrier, or even seeing my first 16 on Tuesday, will drag my ass out of bed tomorrow in time to do something productive...
Or perhaps this particular 'racehorse' will stay under his blanket till it's time to run. Don't say I never give you a decent cliffhanger...
I have a nasty slick sickening feeling that I might come to know what she means - I certainly don't want to, but I guess now, in some respects, there's an element of truth in it - If I'm not eating madly, and I'm not doing this, I really don't know what the alternative would be, now or ever. That's pretty much because I've only ever done one or the other, so it's got a black-and-white quality to it.
Also, d didn't get to read that one till the following day. I was pedalling my ass off at the time she read it, and she came sort of bashfully grinning in from the kitchen and kissed me.
"I don't think you'll never be able to have nice things," she said. "I really don't. Mind you, I don't know what addiction's really like."
"'s'like being a racehorse, honey," I told her, "with no control over where you go and what you do, and some shouty, whip-happy fuck riding on your back from start to ultimate finish..."
"Well...I still hope you'l be able to have nice things," she said, giving me a hug - which in itself was tricky, cos I was sweating like...well, like a racehorse, now I think about it, on the bike.
I hope she's right of course, but I don't at this point hold out a huge amount of hope for that. Perhaps, if I get down to the ideal weight, and maybe into the 'porn window' I'm trying to get (the porn window, for anyone who doesn;'t know, is an extra half-stone I figured I'd try and lose precisely to let myself have a week-long dessert orgy - see, even then, I wasn't talking in terms of rational behaviour or restraint, it's like talking to the Cookie Monster!), I might experiment with desserts...
One sweet at a time, Sweet Jesus...
Like I say, knowing me, I'm not sure that would work at all, but maybe, when I get down there, it'll be something to experiment with, and if it looks like I'm hurtling back out of control, I can (hopefully) resurrect my perspex walls double quick and wrestle myself back under control. The good thing of course is that now I know what a stubborn bastard I can be, it might be possible. Guess we'll see.
Rest of the weekend has been good, but too fast. I've managed a couple of twenty mile biking stints, which always helps one feel virtuous going into a week Hoping, once again, to start back on my morning walking tomorrow. Who knows, maybe the 'addictive' part of this whole process, and the hope of maybe breaking the 3.5 stone barrier, or even seeing my first 16 on Tuesday, will drag my ass out of bed tomorrow in time to do something productive...
Or perhaps this particular 'racehorse' will stay under his blanket till it's time to run. Don't say I never give you a decent cliffhanger...
Saturday 8 October 2011
Despatches From The Gibberish Kingdom
"What's that?"
It's not a line you necessarily want to hear when laying in bed with your wife, but fortunately, on this occasion I knew the answer.
"That would be my knee, dear"
d squeezed.
"Really?" she said. "You sure?"
"Yes dear," I mumbled. "I aced knee recognition in school. Specially when using my own..."
"Hmm..." said d. "OK..."
"So it's not your belly then?"
I blinked.
"No, really dear, it's my knee." I flexed it to prove I knew what I was talking about.
"OK...s'just your belly's not even these days...easy mistake to make..."
"Ah..."
I rolled onto my back and had a look.
"Ohhhh yeah," I said. "Huh...who'dathunkit...my left belly's significantly lower than my right belly..."
"Yeah," said d.
"That means that, when it happens, the first of my genitals I get to see without bending will be my left bollock..."
She considered this information.
"That's how NASA reacquired Apollo 13, isn't it?"
"Yeah, think I remember that...they had to line up the Moon with their left bollocks out the porthole window..."
"Well, two of them lined it up with their left bollocks...I think Jim Lovell lined it up with his knee..."
I rolled my eyes.
"Lovell would..."
I rolled over. "C'mere, let me squeeze your...knees, missus!" I grinned.
d hit me with a pillow.
"I have to pee," she said, while I chewed foam and feathers. And off she went, taking her knees out of my range.
This is what we called Waking Up this morning. Any questions about why I love this woman?
It's not a line you necessarily want to hear when laying in bed with your wife, but fortunately, on this occasion I knew the answer.
"That would be my knee, dear"
d squeezed.
"Really?" she said. "You sure?"
"Yes dear," I mumbled. "I aced knee recognition in school. Specially when using my own..."
"Hmm..." said d. "OK..."
"So it's not your belly then?"
I blinked.
"No, really dear, it's my knee." I flexed it to prove I knew what I was talking about.
"OK...s'just your belly's not even these days...easy mistake to make..."
"Ah..."
I rolled onto my back and had a look.
"Ohhhh yeah," I said. "Huh...who'dathunkit...my left belly's significantly lower than my right belly..."
"Yeah," said d.
"That means that, when it happens, the first of my genitals I get to see without bending will be my left bollock..."
She considered this information.
"That's how NASA reacquired Apollo 13, isn't it?"
"Yeah, think I remember that...they had to line up the Moon with their left bollocks out the porthole window..."
"Well, two of them lined it up with their left bollocks...I think Jim Lovell lined it up with his knee..."
I rolled my eyes.
"Lovell would..."
I rolled over. "C'mere, let me squeeze your...knees, missus!" I grinned.
d hit me with a pillow.
"I have to pee," she said, while I chewed foam and feathers. And off she went, taking her knees out of my range.
This is what we called Waking Up this morning. Any questions about why I love this woman?
Friday 7 October 2011
Culinary Lemming Syndrome
Blood was 4.6 again this morning.
Also, slept late, so notsomuch with the major-league return to walking form I was planning.
Made a fairly major realisation today.
It's all Craig Ferguson's fault.
Craig Ferguson will be familiar to any Americans reading as host of the Late Show, and in his previous incarnation as "English Guy from the Drew Carey Show". It takes a serious comedy addiction to recognise him over here in the UK, as either "Lister's Confidence" from an early episode of sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, or as Craig Ferguson, hysterically funny, pretty edgy Scottish stand-up from The Ferguson Theory. That's where I know him from, because, let's face facts here, I am that geek. He kinda dropped off the UK's radar, and mine, for a couple of decades, then popped up in the States, causing anyone who remembered his work in the UK to go "Is that the Craig Ferguson? Ohhhh yeah, it is...oh, cool..."
Ferguson's latest reason for being on the radar is that he's just become an American citizen, and written his autobiography based around that fact. It's called American On Purpose, and it's really with that book that today's problems begin.
I'm listening to it on audiobook at the moment, and what I didn't realise until recently was that the reason he dropped off the UK's radar for a while was that he'd dropped off his own life's radar for a while too, as a seriously dedicated alcoholic and sometime drug user.
Relating his experience of "becoming" an active alcoholic, Ferguson, this morning, said some words into my ears that stopped me dead fucking cold.
"What people don't realise," he said, "is it's not about how much you drink, it's about the effect the drink has on the drinker. What they also don't realise is that if I could drink like a normal person right now, I would. But if I could drink like a normal person, I'd have absolutely no interest in it at all..."
I recognise that feeling. I think a lot of fat fucks do. And, to be fair, I don't know why the words had such an effect on me today - after all, waaaaay back at the start of this thing, I told you all that "my brain works differently" to most people's, that I don't understand people who say no to pleasure, or just have enough to be satisfied. It's not like the writing of this wasn't clear enough on the walls of my 'perspex box principle', by which I've been living since I started this schtick. So why it should have come as a shock to me today, to hear the experiences of an addict and think "Oh....that's me!", I don't really know, but it did.
Every fat fuck is different of course, but if you understand any of this, you'll know, deep down, what it is that the food does to you. In my case, it has always done several things - it's made me abundantly safe from the murky waters of levels of social interaction that frightened me, cos no woman fancies the guy with bigger tits than they have. It's stopped me thinking, and god knows I need that more often than I can possibly explain to you. It's made me momentarily forgetful of the impact of previous binges, and it's been a thing I (laughably) have thought I could control, a thing that I could do to myself that no-one would think of as mental. You become an alcoholic, people notice. You start cutting yourself, people hold an intervention. You eat - nobody says a fucking word. It's wonderful and sneaky and pushes you safely out of their gaze, because somehow, nothing's quite as embarrasing, as untackled, as unpitied, as a fat fuck. And above all, I think above all the other things I've used food for over the years, I have used it as a cliff edge. A marvellous, enjoyable, sugar-high headlong plunge into oblivion, into spectacular self-harm, and ultimately into an early grave. And I've done that knowingly.
What that says about the state of my psyche on some level...I think we can all take a fairly accurate guess at, and the thing is, it happens irrespective of how well your life seems to be going. People around an addict often break their hearts in two, thinking that they're not enough, that they didn't do enough. Parents of an addict think they did something wrong, and chastise themselves endlessly about what it might have been. The truth is, it was nothing. Nobody around an addict does the wrong thing, because there very often isn't a right thing. There's no Holy Grail to find, no amount of love that can be poured on them that somehow is enough to make it stop. That's another thing people don't understand - addiction doesn't give a fuck about the circumstances of your life. Happy? Rich? Loved by all you see? Using hundred dollar bills as condoms seven times a day? Nothing matters, not to the addiction. It's a patient little fucker, cancerous and whispering, and it can wait. All it has to do is stay alive, and it knows, whatever the object of the addiction is, you will feed it. And the more you do, the more it wins, and when it wins completely, when you let go of resistance, it can tear your world to shreds around you, happy as you might be...and the honest, heartbreaking thing is that more often than not, you won't care when it does.
Unless...
Unless you break it. Unless you starve it. One...fucking...day...at a goddamn...time...
"If I could drink like a normal person right now, I would. But if I could drink like a normal person, I'd have absolutely no interest in it at all..."
He's right. If you put a chocolate eclair in front of me now - just the one - I'd eat it. But there's no way it would be enough. You've all heard me rant, ad nauseum, about what it is I really want - and without fail, it's an orgy of excess - to dive into not one cake, but three, or four, or five, and onward till I couldn't eat any more, and then on that little bit further for the safety feeling, the full feeling, the 'guaranteed heart attack' feeling that - not unlike alcohol, actually - would make me warm and happy and everybody's friend, and then later, would leave me cold and empty and wretched and so fucking needy it beggars belief, and self-disgusted but always, always, always needing more...I don't crave 'just enough' of something - who, in their right or wrong minds, craves 'just enough' of anything? - I crave excess, even now, and the effects it brings to me.
I'd just about realised that, properly, fully, when the next bombshell hit me.
That means this isn't what I thought it was.
I can't just do all this, and get healthy, and then eat what I like. Not even a little of what I like - because a little is never enough. This godawful culinary 'wagon' I'm on...is gonna have to be for life.
The exercise, presumably, doesn't entail any similar eternity - I'm not, oddly enough, addicted to sloth. But the logic of all this, of understanding and feeling and knowing all this, would seem to suggest I've eaten my last cream cake...ever. My last ice cream cone...ever. My last chocolate bar...
I was wondering, earlier, what to call this addiction I'm admitting to. Overeating doesn't come close - it's only certain things that seem to trigger the addictive cascade. Compulsive eating? Yeah...maybe, because one is certainly compelled to do these things, against one's conscious, daylight, sunshine-smiley will...Sucraholic? Hmm...speaks to the trigger, but, if we're honest, sounds far too twee and flowery and New Age for the visceral sensations of this thing...Personally, I think I'm a Culinary Lemming - seems to speak to the ultimate goal, and allows any trigger that you stick in your mouth and swallow. Yeah, that's it - I have Culinary Lemming Syndrome.
And the only way to survive, as a Culinary Lemming, is to stay on the top of the cliff. To not take the single mad step into whirling, delicious oblivion.
Ever.
I want it on record, right now, that this is not what I signed on for. I signed on for a year, an evil-bastard year of getting healthy, losing weight, escaping the need and the qualification for having half my stomach sliced out of me - AND THAT WAS ALL.
This...this is a whole different ball game.
Thanks a lot, Craig...ya bastard...
Also, slept late, so notsomuch with the major-league return to walking form I was planning.
Made a fairly major realisation today.
It's all Craig Ferguson's fault.
Craig Ferguson will be familiar to any Americans reading as host of the Late Show, and in his previous incarnation as "English Guy from the Drew Carey Show". It takes a serious comedy addiction to recognise him over here in the UK, as either "Lister's Confidence" from an early episode of sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, or as Craig Ferguson, hysterically funny, pretty edgy Scottish stand-up from The Ferguson Theory. That's where I know him from, because, let's face facts here, I am that geek. He kinda dropped off the UK's radar, and mine, for a couple of decades, then popped up in the States, causing anyone who remembered his work in the UK to go "Is that the Craig Ferguson? Ohhhh yeah, it is...oh, cool..."
Ferguson's latest reason for being on the radar is that he's just become an American citizen, and written his autobiography based around that fact. It's called American On Purpose, and it's really with that book that today's problems begin.
I'm listening to it on audiobook at the moment, and what I didn't realise until recently was that the reason he dropped off the UK's radar for a while was that he'd dropped off his own life's radar for a while too, as a seriously dedicated alcoholic and sometime drug user.
Relating his experience of "becoming" an active alcoholic, Ferguson, this morning, said some words into my ears that stopped me dead fucking cold.
"What people don't realise," he said, "is it's not about how much you drink, it's about the effect the drink has on the drinker. What they also don't realise is that if I could drink like a normal person right now, I would. But if I could drink like a normal person, I'd have absolutely no interest in it at all..."
I recognise that feeling. I think a lot of fat fucks do. And, to be fair, I don't know why the words had such an effect on me today - after all, waaaaay back at the start of this thing, I told you all that "my brain works differently" to most people's, that I don't understand people who say no to pleasure, or just have enough to be satisfied. It's not like the writing of this wasn't clear enough on the walls of my 'perspex box principle', by which I've been living since I started this schtick. So why it should have come as a shock to me today, to hear the experiences of an addict and think "Oh....that's me!", I don't really know, but it did.
Every fat fuck is different of course, but if you understand any of this, you'll know, deep down, what it is that the food does to you. In my case, it has always done several things - it's made me abundantly safe from the murky waters of levels of social interaction that frightened me, cos no woman fancies the guy with bigger tits than they have. It's stopped me thinking, and god knows I need that more often than I can possibly explain to you. It's made me momentarily forgetful of the impact of previous binges, and it's been a thing I (laughably) have thought I could control, a thing that I could do to myself that no-one would think of as mental. You become an alcoholic, people notice. You start cutting yourself, people hold an intervention. You eat - nobody says a fucking word. It's wonderful and sneaky and pushes you safely out of their gaze, because somehow, nothing's quite as embarrasing, as untackled, as unpitied, as a fat fuck. And above all, I think above all the other things I've used food for over the years, I have used it as a cliff edge. A marvellous, enjoyable, sugar-high headlong plunge into oblivion, into spectacular self-harm, and ultimately into an early grave. And I've done that knowingly.
What that says about the state of my psyche on some level...I think we can all take a fairly accurate guess at, and the thing is, it happens irrespective of how well your life seems to be going. People around an addict often break their hearts in two, thinking that they're not enough, that they didn't do enough. Parents of an addict think they did something wrong, and chastise themselves endlessly about what it might have been. The truth is, it was nothing. Nobody around an addict does the wrong thing, because there very often isn't a right thing. There's no Holy Grail to find, no amount of love that can be poured on them that somehow is enough to make it stop. That's another thing people don't understand - addiction doesn't give a fuck about the circumstances of your life. Happy? Rich? Loved by all you see? Using hundred dollar bills as condoms seven times a day? Nothing matters, not to the addiction. It's a patient little fucker, cancerous and whispering, and it can wait. All it has to do is stay alive, and it knows, whatever the object of the addiction is, you will feed it. And the more you do, the more it wins, and when it wins completely, when you let go of resistance, it can tear your world to shreds around you, happy as you might be...and the honest, heartbreaking thing is that more often than not, you won't care when it does.
Unless...
Unless you break it. Unless you starve it. One...fucking...day...at a goddamn...time...
"If I could drink like a normal person right now, I would. But if I could drink like a normal person, I'd have absolutely no interest in it at all..."
He's right. If you put a chocolate eclair in front of me now - just the one - I'd eat it. But there's no way it would be enough. You've all heard me rant, ad nauseum, about what it is I really want - and without fail, it's an orgy of excess - to dive into not one cake, but three, or four, or five, and onward till I couldn't eat any more, and then on that little bit further for the safety feeling, the full feeling, the 'guaranteed heart attack' feeling that - not unlike alcohol, actually - would make me warm and happy and everybody's friend, and then later, would leave me cold and empty and wretched and so fucking needy it beggars belief, and self-disgusted but always, always, always needing more...I don't crave 'just enough' of something - who, in their right or wrong minds, craves 'just enough' of anything? - I crave excess, even now, and the effects it brings to me.
I'd just about realised that, properly, fully, when the next bombshell hit me.
That means this isn't what I thought it was.
I can't just do all this, and get healthy, and then eat what I like. Not even a little of what I like - because a little is never enough. This godawful culinary 'wagon' I'm on...is gonna have to be for life.
The exercise, presumably, doesn't entail any similar eternity - I'm not, oddly enough, addicted to sloth. But the logic of all this, of understanding and feeling and knowing all this, would seem to suggest I've eaten my last cream cake...ever. My last ice cream cone...ever. My last chocolate bar...
I was wondering, earlier, what to call this addiction I'm admitting to. Overeating doesn't come close - it's only certain things that seem to trigger the addictive cascade. Compulsive eating? Yeah...maybe, because one is certainly compelled to do these things, against one's conscious, daylight, sunshine-smiley will...Sucraholic? Hmm...speaks to the trigger, but, if we're honest, sounds far too twee and flowery and New Age for the visceral sensations of this thing...Personally, I think I'm a Culinary Lemming - seems to speak to the ultimate goal, and allows any trigger that you stick in your mouth and swallow. Yeah, that's it - I have Culinary Lemming Syndrome.
And the only way to survive, as a Culinary Lemming, is to stay on the top of the cliff. To not take the single mad step into whirling, delicious oblivion.
Ever.
I want it on record, right now, that this is not what I signed on for. I signed on for a year, an evil-bastard year of getting healthy, losing weight, escaping the need and the qualification for having half my stomach sliced out of me - AND THAT WAS ALL.
This...this is a whole different ball game.
Thanks a lot, Craig...ya bastard...
Thursday 6 October 2011
Resumption Of Hostilities?
Blood was down to 4.6 this morning, for no terribly good reason.
The toe is pretty much healed, as far as I can tell. The blisters, while always a threat, lurking there on the horizon, are not currently troubling me.
It's time to change all that.
Since the weigh-in on Tuesday (never mind the weigh-in, show me the way out, as Hancock said...), I seem to have been, not to put too fine on it, ravenous enough to ride a three-legged horse to the hot dog stand, while chewing on one of it's ears.
Had a sort of double-breakfast yesterday - porridge and a sausage sandwich - and a double-lunch today - soup and a sausage pasta, so I'm probably having more food this week than I've had in recent weeks. Also, last night, I ran out of time, and did no biking whatsoever. I've certainly been doing some walking, but it's easy walking, training-wheels walking, thoroughly pleasant, not-gonna-aggravate-anything walking.
I think it's time to change all that too. Tonight I'm certainly going to get to the bike, and tomorrow, I'm thinking of getting back to the 'getting up early, strapping on the walking boots with good socks, and walking my ass off before work' routine. This may, ultimately, be foolish, but I feel like I have to come back out from the cotton-wool fog of stupid-ass injury and recuperation, and really get back on with the business of this weightloss challenge.
Of course, I'm way out of practice, so I may wake up tomorrow and go "Ah, bugger it," and stay warm and safe and yummy under my blankets till the very last conceivable second. The Path of Good Intentions and all that...
But I figure the best way to tackle a Path of Good Intentions is with a stout pair of walking boots on.
The toe is pretty much healed, as far as I can tell. The blisters, while always a threat, lurking there on the horizon, are not currently troubling me.
It's time to change all that.
Since the weigh-in on Tuesday (never mind the weigh-in, show me the way out, as Hancock said...), I seem to have been, not to put too fine on it, ravenous enough to ride a three-legged horse to the hot dog stand, while chewing on one of it's ears.
Had a sort of double-breakfast yesterday - porridge and a sausage sandwich - and a double-lunch today - soup and a sausage pasta, so I'm probably having more food this week than I've had in recent weeks. Also, last night, I ran out of time, and did no biking whatsoever. I've certainly been doing some walking, but it's easy walking, training-wheels walking, thoroughly pleasant, not-gonna-aggravate-anything walking.
I think it's time to change all that too. Tonight I'm certainly going to get to the bike, and tomorrow, I'm thinking of getting back to the 'getting up early, strapping on the walking boots with good socks, and walking my ass off before work' routine. This may, ultimately, be foolish, but I feel like I have to come back out from the cotton-wool fog of stupid-ass injury and recuperation, and really get back on with the business of this weightloss challenge.
Of course, I'm way out of practice, so I may wake up tomorrow and go "Ah, bugger it," and stay warm and safe and yummy under my blankets till the very last conceivable second. The Path of Good Intentions and all that...
But I figure the best way to tackle a Path of Good Intentions is with a stout pair of walking boots on.
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