Killed a Frenchwoman today. She was nice enough, and perky enough, and French, Stoved her head in slowly against a podium. Just...because.
I should explain, it wasn't particularly because she was French. And it certainly wasn't because she was a woman. I have no particular problem with French people - mainly because many English people do, and growing up in Wales, anyone that the English hated was alright by us. And I love women, of course - by far the majority of my pals are women. I'm pretty much the gay friend of a lot of women, except, as my wife is keen to point out, 'no no, he's not gay...he's just Welsh...'
It was just because she kept...on...talking.
Is there a word for the kind of ennui that comes over you when you're trapped in a room for hours on end with a bunch of people you don't know, and not one of them has the common decency to be a rampant serial killer.
Oh yeah, of course there is - conference.
Conferences are dreadful places to try and be a Disappearing Man. I think I woke up in a subliminally foul mood anyway, as a consequence of playing the Bob Cratchett role from yesterday and wanting to not be a humble servant, but in fact to take a 2x4 to the head of my particular Ebenezer. But there was Stuff To Do, so the 2x4ness had to be sublimated beneath what approximates a smile. We went down to the dining room for breakfast, where the boss was having bacon and sausages and eggs and mushrooms and toast and suchlike.
"Continental," sniffed the waiter.
"Eh?" I said.
"You're only allowed the Continental," said Mr Sniffy.
"Oh," I said. "Really?"
"Really," he pronounced, to rhyme with "Scum", "yes sir."
He didn't say anything for a while after that, possibly because I was holding his head under the surface of a big bowl of Greek yoghurt and raspberries.We ate some grapes and a slice or two of cheese and left, d to work, me to what passes for work. And there followed about three or four hours of extremely clever people talking about stuff I don't understand and about which I really couldn't give a toss. I took notes, which I'm fairly confident on reading them back, make no sense whatsoever. Then came lunch. The hotel we're in is brand spanking new. Clearly they have a few kinks to work out. Lunch was a series of not trays in an oval display, with a buffet-style caterpillar of people shuffling by unsavoury looking bits of stinking fish and chicken diablo and the like. I figured I could get away with just having a piece of bread. Three people ahead of me, some guy picked up the last chunk of bread. I kicked him quickly in the back of the shin, but he was a tough guy, and didn't drop the bread. I had to wait for the replenishment of the bread. And it didn't come. It continued not to come. People began to queue up behind me.
"Just go ahead," I said, "I'm waiting for the bread."
The bread didn't come. "That's it," said a waiter skimming by. "Is finish."
S'funny how odd people look with a bone china plate embedded in the back of their head. I went next door to a pub for a bowl of soup, and dammit, some fucking bread, feeling like Clint Eastwood in one of those movies where he just wants things his way, and ain't gonna rest till he gets it.
Then came the Frenchwoman.
She was talking about...erm...something. It had algebra in it. And it just...went...on.
Five minutes after I thought she couldn't possibly keep this up for another second, I got up, walked over to her, smiled, and gently, slwoly, ground her head into the podium...
Irritatingly, she kept on talking right to the end...
Sigh...
No, of course, none of these violent things really took place. It's just been a day of fantastical irritation and boredom. Didn't get to the gym after all last night, it had closed by the time I finished talking to you. Went tonight though. Looks pretty cool, but we didn't do anything there. Just looked. Maybe tomorrow. Ate another pizza though, so that was probably a bad idea. All of this will become academic once this conference...thing...is over with, and we can get back to some sort of routine...Honest, it will.
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Monday 28 November 2011
The Ebenezer Diet
Poverty of course has not in the 21st century been noted as a great inspiration to healthy eating. While the traditional logic runs that if you have no money, you have no money for food, and therefore you buy less and eat less, and therefore you get thinner, and then you get rickets and die.
But of course in the 21st century, highly processed foods are cheaper than naturally grown ones, so it's tended to invert the natural order of things, meaning the poorer you are, often, the fatter and less healthy you tend to be.
Having said which, I have today discovered an exception to this rule - a loophole, if you will, by which the old rules can be forced back into place. The loophole goes like this:
1. Be obliged to attend a conference, and provide after-hours work in exchange for on-site lodgings.
2. Assume meals-expenses are included in this package.
3. Be very very wrong.
4. And very very stubborn.
In the event that all these things occur, you have created an Ebenezer Loop, with yourself in the role of Bob Cratchett. This works on the principle that you really really want an extra lump of coal, but your boss won't pay for it, claiming that if you were at home, you'd pay for your own damn coal. You then point out that you are obliged by him not to be at home, where you have sweaters and blankets and scarves oh my, and so would not need an extra lump of coal. And he says "Well, go there then. Bah. Humbug," and wanders off in the company of a bunch of transparent-looking scary dudes. That leaves you with two options - to pay for the coal (or in this case, the meal) yourself, and have the dissatisfaction of knowing that your boss has got one over on you, or you don't, and you don't eat, and therefore you get thinner, and get rickets and die.
This then is the Ebenezer Diet, on which I'm embarked for the next few days. Have to say, tonight I crumbled, and bought my own lump of culinary coal. Very nice it was too, but then very nice it should have been, given the third mortgage we had to take out to order the damn thing. That's it now - that's our coal allotment for the next four days. Tomorrow we freeze, dammit. Or starve, rather...
Erm...You ever get the feeling you've crawled up the ass of your own simile and lost the way back out?
Ahem...
Oh yeah - I did a weigh-in this morning, but I'm not going to count it as an official one, for two reasons. Firstly, it was Monday, dammit, not Tuesday. And secondly, (and admittedly only because I had the Monday get-out), although I was down a pound on last week at 16 stone 3, it was earlier than normal, and no matter what I tried (don't ask...just don't...) I couldn't get the heaviness I felt in my system...erm...out of my system before I weighed, so it would have been a false reading anyhow...
Having eaten my culinary coal, I'm now torn between options. There's a bed here...a real, soft bed with blankets and so on. There's also a kickass bath-tub and a shower that's on sabbatical from teh Starship Enterprise (before they started pissing about with sonic showers, obviously). And there's a wife to enjoy all of this with.
Alternatively, a couple of floors beneath us, there's a gym, with various state-of-the-torturer's-art machinery, on which I could exorcise some of my coal-bucket for the day...
Hmm...showery, beddy, wifey fun....
orrrrr.....
Pain, torture, and the smug sensation of moral superiority...
Bugger it, I'm gonna flip a coin. Annnnnd....hup!
Tails!
Crap. Piss shit fuck crap and damn...
But of course in the 21st century, highly processed foods are cheaper than naturally grown ones, so it's tended to invert the natural order of things, meaning the poorer you are, often, the fatter and less healthy you tend to be.
Having said which, I have today discovered an exception to this rule - a loophole, if you will, by which the old rules can be forced back into place. The loophole goes like this:
1. Be obliged to attend a conference, and provide after-hours work in exchange for on-site lodgings.
2. Assume meals-expenses are included in this package.
3. Be very very wrong.
4. And very very stubborn.
In the event that all these things occur, you have created an Ebenezer Loop, with yourself in the role of Bob Cratchett. This works on the principle that you really really want an extra lump of coal, but your boss won't pay for it, claiming that if you were at home, you'd pay for your own damn coal. You then point out that you are obliged by him not to be at home, where you have sweaters and blankets and scarves oh my, and so would not need an extra lump of coal. And he says "Well, go there then. Bah. Humbug," and wanders off in the company of a bunch of transparent-looking scary dudes. That leaves you with two options - to pay for the coal (or in this case, the meal) yourself, and have the dissatisfaction of knowing that your boss has got one over on you, or you don't, and you don't eat, and therefore you get thinner, and get rickets and die.
This then is the Ebenezer Diet, on which I'm embarked for the next few days. Have to say, tonight I crumbled, and bought my own lump of culinary coal. Very nice it was too, but then very nice it should have been, given the third mortgage we had to take out to order the damn thing. That's it now - that's our coal allotment for the next four days. Tomorrow we freeze, dammit. Or starve, rather...
Erm...You ever get the feeling you've crawled up the ass of your own simile and lost the way back out?
Ahem...
Oh yeah - I did a weigh-in this morning, but I'm not going to count it as an official one, for two reasons. Firstly, it was Monday, dammit, not Tuesday. And secondly, (and admittedly only because I had the Monday get-out), although I was down a pound on last week at 16 stone 3, it was earlier than normal, and no matter what I tried (don't ask...just don't...) I couldn't get the heaviness I felt in my system...erm...out of my system before I weighed, so it would have been a false reading anyhow...
Having eaten my culinary coal, I'm now torn between options. There's a bed here...a real, soft bed with blankets and so on. There's also a kickass bath-tub and a shower that's on sabbatical from teh Starship Enterprise (before they started pissing about with sonic showers, obviously). And there's a wife to enjoy all of this with.
Alternatively, a couple of floors beneath us, there's a gym, with various state-of-the-torturer's-art machinery, on which I could exorcise some of my coal-bucket for the day...
Hmm...showery, beddy, wifey fun....
orrrrr.....
Pain, torture, and the smug sensation of moral superiority...
Bugger it, I'm gonna flip a coin. Annnnnd....hup!
Tails!
Crap. Piss shit fuck crap and damn...
Sunday 27 November 2011
Rich Pickings
Well, we did it.
We cracked open the Basement, and box by box, weird artefact by weird artefact, we excavated it. We found things we'd long-forgotten were down there, and put them, one by one, out on the wall of the house.
Now, of course, the point of doing something so generally bizarre is that round here, almost anything you put on your wall will be picked up and taken away by some other bugger at the first available opportunity. It's kinda like the Circle of Life, only with junk.
This morning though, we rather loaded up the wall - boxes of old magazines, a box the size of a seven-year-old of assorted teddybears, handbags and rucksacks from the beginnning of time, about a third of a part-work Lord of the Rings chess-set, shoes we don't fit, two yearsworth of film magazines, at least one knackered laptop, all sorts of stuff.
We kept delving down and pulling out more stuff, but this morning, we quickly became something of a local phenomenon. When I came up with a box of stuff of unparallelled dustiness, there was an old Chinese woman bundingling things into a car.
"Bags?" she said by way of introduction.
"Pardon?" I said.
"Bags? More bags?" she demanded, scowling.
"Ah..." I looked into the box.
"Well, yes, as it happens," I said, smiling.
She took the box out of my hands without a word.
"Oh," I said. "Right. Well, enjoy..." and I went back down to the Basement for more stuff.
The next time I emerged, she was still there, loading.
"Wardrobe?" she demanded.
"What?"
"You have wardrobe?"
"Oh...erm...no, no wardrobes. Sorry," I said, inexplicably. She sucked her teeth at me and turned away.
The next time I popped up into the sunlight, there was something of a dispute going on. At least, it had the character of a dispute - as it was being conducted in Chinese and some Eastern European language, I can't be entirely sure. My Chinese wardrobe-pirate was disputing the availability of some of the stock with a family of Eastern Europeans, who had apparently heard the news about the lunatics putting good stuff out on their wall in Stratford.
"Kids' toys!" I said, brandishing still-wrapped Christmas presents from years ago. "And a knackered laptop?"
The Dad from Eastern Europe shouldered the Chinese woman out of the way and took it all out of my hands.
"Pleasure, I'm sure," I muttered.
Next time, most of the stuff had vanished, and so had the Eastern Europeans. The Chinese Optimist had our bin open, and was examining the empty boxes inside.
"Hey!" she said, brandishing the empty box from a long-extinct kitchen mandolin. "I have one of these at home. It's good. You throwing it away?"
"Nono...just the box," I said.
"Hmmph..." she muttered, dropping the box in disgust at the affrontery of some people - not throwing out things she wanted, indeed!
I went back inside for a final time, and d declared that we were done with the excavation portion of the Basement. We stopped for lunch - pizza! - and now she's gone back to the Basement, from where the sound of miscellaneous box-taping is now competing with the over-excitable din of Dick Van Dyck being Caractacus Potts on my TV screen. And now I've finished telling you all this, I'm about to escape back to the depths myself, before Chitty Chitty Bang Bang emerges triumphant and people start singing again.
The Basement still calls, you know, as the countdown to Box Day appears to speed up. And what with the fact that I leave tomorrow for another conference and might have to consider tomorrow as this week's official weigh-in, I'm most officially not going to panic about the whole pizza I just had. After all, done quite a bit of shifting today so far, plus more to come and biking later. Not panicking. Just not, so nehh.
Something occurs to me. Wonder if our Chinese woman is still waiting outside for me to come back out with more stuff...
We cracked open the Basement, and box by box, weird artefact by weird artefact, we excavated it. We found things we'd long-forgotten were down there, and put them, one by one, out on the wall of the house.
Now, of course, the point of doing something so generally bizarre is that round here, almost anything you put on your wall will be picked up and taken away by some other bugger at the first available opportunity. It's kinda like the Circle of Life, only with junk.
This morning though, we rather loaded up the wall - boxes of old magazines, a box the size of a seven-year-old of assorted teddybears, handbags and rucksacks from the beginnning of time, about a third of a part-work Lord of the Rings chess-set, shoes we don't fit, two yearsworth of film magazines, at least one knackered laptop, all sorts of stuff.
We kept delving down and pulling out more stuff, but this morning, we quickly became something of a local phenomenon. When I came up with a box of stuff of unparallelled dustiness, there was an old Chinese woman bundingling things into a car.
"Bags?" she said by way of introduction.
"Pardon?" I said.
"Bags? More bags?" she demanded, scowling.
"Ah..." I looked into the box.
"Well, yes, as it happens," I said, smiling.
She took the box out of my hands without a word.
"Oh," I said. "Right. Well, enjoy..." and I went back down to the Basement for more stuff.
The next time I emerged, she was still there, loading.
"Wardrobe?" she demanded.
"What?"
"You have wardrobe?"
"Oh...erm...no, no wardrobes. Sorry," I said, inexplicably. She sucked her teeth at me and turned away.
The next time I popped up into the sunlight, there was something of a dispute going on. At least, it had the character of a dispute - as it was being conducted in Chinese and some Eastern European language, I can't be entirely sure. My Chinese wardrobe-pirate was disputing the availability of some of the stock with a family of Eastern Europeans, who had apparently heard the news about the lunatics putting good stuff out on their wall in Stratford.
"Kids' toys!" I said, brandishing still-wrapped Christmas presents from years ago. "And a knackered laptop?"
The Dad from Eastern Europe shouldered the Chinese woman out of the way and took it all out of my hands.
"Pleasure, I'm sure," I muttered.
Next time, most of the stuff had vanished, and so had the Eastern Europeans. The Chinese Optimist had our bin open, and was examining the empty boxes inside.
"Hey!" she said, brandishing the empty box from a long-extinct kitchen mandolin. "I have one of these at home. It's good. You throwing it away?"
"Nono...just the box," I said.
"Hmmph..." she muttered, dropping the box in disgust at the affrontery of some people - not throwing out things she wanted, indeed!
I went back inside for a final time, and d declared that we were done with the excavation portion of the Basement. We stopped for lunch - pizza! - and now she's gone back to the Basement, from where the sound of miscellaneous box-taping is now competing with the over-excitable din of Dick Van Dyck being Caractacus Potts on my TV screen. And now I've finished telling you all this, I'm about to escape back to the depths myself, before Chitty Chitty Bang Bang emerges triumphant and people start singing again.
The Basement still calls, you know, as the countdown to Box Day appears to speed up. And what with the fact that I leave tomorrow for another conference and might have to consider tomorrow as this week's official weigh-in, I'm most officially not going to panic about the whole pizza I just had. After all, done quite a bit of shifting today so far, plus more to come and biking later. Not panicking. Just not, so nehh.
Something occurs to me. Wonder if our Chinese woman is still waiting outside for me to come back out with more stuff...
Saturday 26 November 2011
Simple Really
Eight years.
Eight years and probably a couple of weeks, in actual fact. That's how long I've been here in this flat. Seven with d. And today we handed in our notice to quit the place. Strange feeling, really - a combination of exhileration at the new adventure, pin-your-ears-back realisation at the notion that over the time I've been here, I've paid something like £67000 in rent, and yet take nothing of the place with me but its memories, and a kind of stirring sadness that comes naturally with any ending, even one as positively charged as this.
Today was going to be all about breaking open the Basement and clearing out the yearsworth of accumulated Stuff that it's been keeping conveniently out of sight till now.
As it turned out, there was a full day of prepwork to be done before we could even get the door open. Bookcase emptying, bookcase shifting, grocery relocation, vacuuming walls and ceilings and patches of floor that haven't seen the light of day in years, because they've been underneath or behind or above bookcase after bookcase of accumulated knowledge.
Now all that knowledge is piled up in boxes, stacked ready to fill, and then probably refill, the van that Sian texted to say was booked today. And so d and I worked on the preparation for opening up the Basement, and finally, as darkness fell, and I got on the bike, d opened it up.
A few minutes later, while I whined and bitched and tried to hit Sheryl Crow high-notes, slowly slogging along on the wretched bike, d came in...slowly, painfully, but full of smiles.
"I think it'll be fine," she announced. "There's a lot of stuff down there we can either choose to take, or choose to throw out. Simple really."
So, with a hallway now clear of all obstruction, a living room full of empty bookcases, and a bedroom increasingly devoid of space to breathe, we have now crawled into our respective couches. I'm about to force-feed some pain meds and some sleep meds into my girl (I tried getting her to watch Troy, which is pretty good as far as anaesthetics are concerned, but she still appears to be vexingly conscious), and make us sleep. Tomorrow...Tomorrow, we see how 'simple really' the biggest challenge bar probably the kitchen of this move will be.
Oh, and one additional note. It's been pointed out to me that I leave for work on Monday morning, and don't come home again till, in all probability, Friday evening - I'm out at a conference for three days. That means there'll be no official weigh-in this week, unless I can do one Monday morning, and go from there. Also of course, three weeks from now, everything we own, bar this computer and an air mattress, will be gone ahead of me, while I stay here for a week, to finish the year's work. So - that'll be another weekly weigh-in that goes unrecorded as we head in to Christmas, and probably the greatest of the Disappearing Challenges of the year.
Simple really.
Eight years and probably a couple of weeks, in actual fact. That's how long I've been here in this flat. Seven with d. And today we handed in our notice to quit the place. Strange feeling, really - a combination of exhileration at the new adventure, pin-your-ears-back realisation at the notion that over the time I've been here, I've paid something like £67000 in rent, and yet take nothing of the place with me but its memories, and a kind of stirring sadness that comes naturally with any ending, even one as positively charged as this.
Today was going to be all about breaking open the Basement and clearing out the yearsworth of accumulated Stuff that it's been keeping conveniently out of sight till now.
As it turned out, there was a full day of prepwork to be done before we could even get the door open. Bookcase emptying, bookcase shifting, grocery relocation, vacuuming walls and ceilings and patches of floor that haven't seen the light of day in years, because they've been underneath or behind or above bookcase after bookcase of accumulated knowledge.
Now all that knowledge is piled up in boxes, stacked ready to fill, and then probably refill, the van that Sian texted to say was booked today. And so d and I worked on the preparation for opening up the Basement, and finally, as darkness fell, and I got on the bike, d opened it up.
A few minutes later, while I whined and bitched and tried to hit Sheryl Crow high-notes, slowly slogging along on the wretched bike, d came in...slowly, painfully, but full of smiles.
"I think it'll be fine," she announced. "There's a lot of stuff down there we can either choose to take, or choose to throw out. Simple really."
So, with a hallway now clear of all obstruction, a living room full of empty bookcases, and a bedroom increasingly devoid of space to breathe, we have now crawled into our respective couches. I'm about to force-feed some pain meds and some sleep meds into my girl (I tried getting her to watch Troy, which is pretty good as far as anaesthetics are concerned, but she still appears to be vexingly conscious), and make us sleep. Tomorrow...Tomorrow, we see how 'simple really' the biggest challenge bar probably the kitchen of this move will be.
Oh, and one additional note. It's been pointed out to me that I leave for work on Monday morning, and don't come home again till, in all probability, Friday evening - I'm out at a conference for three days. That means there'll be no official weigh-in this week, unless I can do one Monday morning, and go from there. Also of course, three weeks from now, everything we own, bar this computer and an air mattress, will be gone ahead of me, while I stay here for a week, to finish the year's work. So - that'll be another weekly weigh-in that goes unrecorded as we head in to Christmas, and probably the greatest of the Disappearing Challenges of the year.
Simple really.
Paradiso Lost
Hit me. Hit me now.
With a frying pan if you happen to have one to hand. And who doesn't?
"Have you written your blog yet?" said d when we met up.
"Nah," I said. "Nothing's happened to me yet today."
We'd met up in the High Street Kensington book store we often use as a rendez-vous. We didn't exactly discuss it or 'decide' to do it, but our Farewell Tour continued pretty much organically. We wanted to say goodbye to a favourite cheap Japanese place, the Hare and Tortoise, but they were busier than usual, so we figured we'd pop in to one of the better burger joints we know - Byron, again on High Street Kensington. After an hour or so of naked burgers and Iceberg wedges and sketching room plans on graph-paper and getting excited again, we jumped on a bus. On her way in to Kensington, d had gone through Picadilly, and she thought it would be nice to take the bus through that area, as a way to say farewell and do a little reminiscing.
There's so much to spot in this city...the church where d and two of her matrons of honour, Karen and Lori, had tea in the rector's garden. Lori's Cock (It's a tavern, of course). The Cheshire Cheese, Doctor Johnson's favourite haunt. Doctor Johnson's house, come to that. The Lions of Trafalgar Square, where our goddaughters climbed on the day of the Camden Town entry in this blog. The Phantom. Discovering CyberCandy...walking across bridges with Tig and her precocious son. Running after rickshaws full of Tig and Mae to Charing Cross...
"Oh my GOD!"
I blinked at the sound. d pointed.
"It's gone!"
I followed the track of her finger. Oh my God. She was right. It was gone.
It can't be gone. It just...can't.
'It' in this case is Paradiso e Inferno, an Italian restaurant on the Strand.
Paradiso wasn't our first date. Our first date was a Thai restaurant in Covent Garden, where we ate experimental food to the sound of Frosty the Snowman, sung in, oddly enough, Chinese. Great dumplings, but that was about it. But Paradiso really felt like our first date - it was the first place we went to as a couple, rather than as two people forging their relationship. We went there as just us first, and then we went back with Tig (the woman chiefly responsible for us getting together), and her then-boyfriend Ray, a seven-foot Dutchman. It was our coming-out party, if you like. We enjoyed something about the ambience so much we were prepared to name it as our wedding reception venue...
...and then, admittedly, a just ten days before the big day, we had our minds and tastebuds blown by somewhere else, and cancelled them.
It was never quite the same after that. We went back occasionally over the years, coming to a growing understanding that the food wasn't actually that good. But it was still our place.
And tonight, it was closed, and dark. The tables were still set for service, but a notice on the window said it was to let.
"No!" we said, as one. It's not only a sign that our time here is coming to an end, it's an unfortunate pattern we have. Places we really like but don't visit often enough...that then go bust or close down.
There was a great place at the top of our street. They seemed to like us there, and the chef was waaay too good for Stratford, when Stratford wasn't about to host the Olympics. The Polish waitress told us "you like it so much here, tell your friends, come often..." We didn't. We horded that little gem of a place all to ourselves, fretting that if we told too many people, it would stop being 'our place,' stop being special. It stopped being special alright, it went out of business.
There was an Indian place. It was d's first Indian place, her curried cherry, if you like. We went a handful of times. It died. It came back from the dead. We never went. It recently died again.
One of our favourite breakfast spots, Selmos, is not going bust. It's Portugese, and gorgeous, and last weekend we popped in to start our Farewell Tour there. We spoke to the woman who, with her husband, owns the place. She wants to leave, and damn fast. So it's matter of pride that we haven't closed them down...but it seems like a race to the finish line with them.
Back at Paradiso, we didn't really know what to do - to laugh at the 'omenic' status of such a thing happening just as we're preparing to leave, or heatbreak that a place that had been such a fundamental part of our initial getting-to-know-you period no longer existed. Or maybe both.
Heartbreak won out, I think. We're just one couple who fell deeper in love at Paradiso. If it becomes the Strand McDonalds, people may still fall in love there, will still have stories, but it'll be less unique somehow.
A little part of our getting-together story just died. And we hardly have time or space to mourn it. Mind you, part of Paradiso will always be alive in our minds and memories.
Probably the orange sorbet, if we had to choose...
With a frying pan if you happen to have one to hand. And who doesn't?
"Have you written your blog yet?" said d when we met up.
"Nah," I said. "Nothing's happened to me yet today."
We'd met up in the High Street Kensington book store we often use as a rendez-vous. We didn't exactly discuss it or 'decide' to do it, but our Farewell Tour continued pretty much organically. We wanted to say goodbye to a favourite cheap Japanese place, the Hare and Tortoise, but they were busier than usual, so we figured we'd pop in to one of the better burger joints we know - Byron, again on High Street Kensington. After an hour or so of naked burgers and Iceberg wedges and sketching room plans on graph-paper and getting excited again, we jumped on a bus. On her way in to Kensington, d had gone through Picadilly, and she thought it would be nice to take the bus through that area, as a way to say farewell and do a little reminiscing.
There's so much to spot in this city...the church where d and two of her matrons of honour, Karen and Lori, had tea in the rector's garden. Lori's Cock (It's a tavern, of course). The Cheshire Cheese, Doctor Johnson's favourite haunt. Doctor Johnson's house, come to that. The Lions of Trafalgar Square, where our goddaughters climbed on the day of the Camden Town entry in this blog. The Phantom. Discovering CyberCandy...walking across bridges with Tig and her precocious son. Running after rickshaws full of Tig and Mae to Charing Cross...
"Oh my GOD!"
I blinked at the sound. d pointed.
"It's gone!"
I followed the track of her finger. Oh my God. She was right. It was gone.
It can't be gone. It just...can't.
'It' in this case is Paradiso e Inferno, an Italian restaurant on the Strand.
Paradiso wasn't our first date. Our first date was a Thai restaurant in Covent Garden, where we ate experimental food to the sound of Frosty the Snowman, sung in, oddly enough, Chinese. Great dumplings, but that was about it. But Paradiso really felt like our first date - it was the first place we went to as a couple, rather than as two people forging their relationship. We went there as just us first, and then we went back with Tig (the woman chiefly responsible for us getting together), and her then-boyfriend Ray, a seven-foot Dutchman. It was our coming-out party, if you like. We enjoyed something about the ambience so much we were prepared to name it as our wedding reception venue...
...and then, admittedly, a just ten days before the big day, we had our minds and tastebuds blown by somewhere else, and cancelled them.
It was never quite the same after that. We went back occasionally over the years, coming to a growing understanding that the food wasn't actually that good. But it was still our place.
And tonight, it was closed, and dark. The tables were still set for service, but a notice on the window said it was to let.
"No!" we said, as one. It's not only a sign that our time here is coming to an end, it's an unfortunate pattern we have. Places we really like but don't visit often enough...that then go bust or close down.
There was a great place at the top of our street. They seemed to like us there, and the chef was waaay too good for Stratford, when Stratford wasn't about to host the Olympics. The Polish waitress told us "you like it so much here, tell your friends, come often..." We didn't. We horded that little gem of a place all to ourselves, fretting that if we told too many people, it would stop being 'our place,' stop being special. It stopped being special alright, it went out of business.
There was an Indian place. It was d's first Indian place, her curried cherry, if you like. We went a handful of times. It died. It came back from the dead. We never went. It recently died again.
One of our favourite breakfast spots, Selmos, is not going bust. It's Portugese, and gorgeous, and last weekend we popped in to start our Farewell Tour there. We spoke to the woman who, with her husband, owns the place. She wants to leave, and damn fast. So it's matter of pride that we haven't closed them down...but it seems like a race to the finish line with them.
Back at Paradiso, we didn't really know what to do - to laugh at the 'omenic' status of such a thing happening just as we're preparing to leave, or heatbreak that a place that had been such a fundamental part of our initial getting-to-know-you period no longer existed. Or maybe both.
Heartbreak won out, I think. We're just one couple who fell deeper in love at Paradiso. If it becomes the Strand McDonalds, people may still fall in love there, will still have stories, but it'll be less unique somehow.
A little part of our getting-together story just died. And we hardly have time or space to mourn it. Mind you, part of Paradiso will always be alive in our minds and memories.
Probably the orange sorbet, if we had to choose...
Thursday 24 November 2011
Finding The Fourth North...And Being Thankful
Y'know, I love my pal Kathy, but recently, whenever she turns up, there's trouble with geography. This morning, I had a meeting in Westminster, and I was meeting Kathy back in Kensington for lunch. Now, longer term readers will know that I often walk from Kensington to Westminster after work. This was the same journey...only in reverse.
Anyone who remembers the last time Kathy featured in this experiment will also remember that when she did, the world started behaving like a Rubik cube, and east became west, because we pretty much discovered that whichever direction I'm facing, something in my brain tells me it's north.
I came out of the hotel where the morning event was, and navigated by the House of Commons. Then there was a street junction. I blinked like Bambi in the headlights, but fortunately, there was a Commons policememan to ask. He pointed me back towards Victoria. Now, to Victoria, it was pretty much a straight line. But about four minutes further on, there was a crossroads, with roads leading in four directions. I tried going North...
After five minutes, I ended up at what was very clearly Buckingham Palace. Wrong. I tracked back to the crossroads, peering at the options I had. Nothing looked...familiar, exactly, because North had turned into not-North by being turned around. I shrugged, and turned North. That's Second North, for those who don't point North whichever way they look. Five minutes later, I was clearly in unfamiliar territory. North Three, as it turned out, was particularly galling - for the smple reason that in the process of going North and Second North, I'd forgotten which of the four available Norths I'd come from. In fact, I didn't work this out until I ended up...erm...back at Victoria.
North Four, clearly, the last conceivable North I could have chosen, turned out to be the real North...or at least the real direction in which I needed to go, whatever conventional magetics said it was. Ended up being ridiculously late, but went for what turned out ot be an unlikely lunch - my first salad since the summer.
Clearly, Kathy led the way. When we parted outside the restaurant, she said she had to go off to a meeting of her own, and went off down the street to go to it.
I blinked. Where the Hell was I??
"Kathy!" I yelled, and she turned around. "Which way back to the office?!"
She rolled her eyes at me.
"North!" she said. I put my hands on my hips.
"Turn around one hundred and eighty degrees and walk!" she explained...
As it turned out, she was right. Not for the first time in my life, I had been entirely lost in a single straight line from where I was supposed to be.
As it turned out, having a salad for lunch was a staggeringly - and I use the word advisedly - good idea. Caught up with d in the late afternoon, and she was in tears. It was Thanksgiving today of course, an American holiday which the world could probably take to its heart without batting an eye. For d, it has a special resonance, in that it's currently one of those particularly American experiences, and it tugs at the stars and stripes holding her heart together. It's also, as she puts it, the biggest holiday she recognises, because above all, and more than any other, even Christmas, it's about the food. About the cooking. And that's what gets my girl all kindsa hot and bothered. So she was miserable that she was a) away from her best friend Lori, again, on Thanksgiving, and b) stuck on a culinarily impoverished island where the idea of good Thanksgiving feasts is not something that has hugely caught on.
We spoke at four o'clock. By 4.30 I'd been turned down, laughed at, and made to feel like a colonial weirdo by restaurants all around the capital. Then I tried a place just up the road from me, and they booked us in for their Thanksgiving special.
Not bad, since you didn't ask, but...lots. Lots and lots of food, and I did a bit of an Aristotelian experiment - I had fried food! Not much fried food, I grant you, but when the waiter brings something called an 'onion loaf' and it turns out to be two whole housebricks of battered and deep fried onions...you've got to find out what it's like, haven't you, or you're not properly alive.
So, that's Thanksgiving...thunk. For me, I'm thankful for whole worldsful of stuff - including friends who take me to lunch, and the woman who is my real compass. You may need to remind me of all this on Tuesday morning, when the onion loaf expands into a wall of grease and flubber that drags me screaming backwards to higher numbers. Right now, I'm not stressing out about it at all. I didn't sleep very well last night, so I'm basically on auto-pilot now.
In fact though, I don't think I'm gonna stress about it Tuesday either. I think I'm gonna be thankful tomorrow too. And the next day. And the day after that. S'gotta be worth a try, hasn't it?
Anyone who remembers the last time Kathy featured in this experiment will also remember that when she did, the world started behaving like a Rubik cube, and east became west, because we pretty much discovered that whichever direction I'm facing, something in my brain tells me it's north.
I came out of the hotel where the morning event was, and navigated by the House of Commons. Then there was a street junction. I blinked like Bambi in the headlights, but fortunately, there was a Commons policememan to ask. He pointed me back towards Victoria. Now, to Victoria, it was pretty much a straight line. But about four minutes further on, there was a crossroads, with roads leading in four directions. I tried going North...
After five minutes, I ended up at what was very clearly Buckingham Palace. Wrong. I tracked back to the crossroads, peering at the options I had. Nothing looked...familiar, exactly, because North had turned into not-North by being turned around. I shrugged, and turned North. That's Second North, for those who don't point North whichever way they look. Five minutes later, I was clearly in unfamiliar territory. North Three, as it turned out, was particularly galling - for the smple reason that in the process of going North and Second North, I'd forgotten which of the four available Norths I'd come from. In fact, I didn't work this out until I ended up...erm...back at Victoria.
North Four, clearly, the last conceivable North I could have chosen, turned out to be the real North...or at least the real direction in which I needed to go, whatever conventional magetics said it was. Ended up being ridiculously late, but went for what turned out ot be an unlikely lunch - my first salad since the summer.
Clearly, Kathy led the way. When we parted outside the restaurant, she said she had to go off to a meeting of her own, and went off down the street to go to it.
I blinked. Where the Hell was I??
"Kathy!" I yelled, and she turned around. "Which way back to the office?!"
She rolled her eyes at me.
"North!" she said. I put my hands on my hips.
"Turn around one hundred and eighty degrees and walk!" she explained...
As it turned out, she was right. Not for the first time in my life, I had been entirely lost in a single straight line from where I was supposed to be.
As it turned out, having a salad for lunch was a staggeringly - and I use the word advisedly - good idea. Caught up with d in the late afternoon, and she was in tears. It was Thanksgiving today of course, an American holiday which the world could probably take to its heart without batting an eye. For d, it has a special resonance, in that it's currently one of those particularly American experiences, and it tugs at the stars and stripes holding her heart together. It's also, as she puts it, the biggest holiday she recognises, because above all, and more than any other, even Christmas, it's about the food. About the cooking. And that's what gets my girl all kindsa hot and bothered. So she was miserable that she was a) away from her best friend Lori, again, on Thanksgiving, and b) stuck on a culinarily impoverished island where the idea of good Thanksgiving feasts is not something that has hugely caught on.
We spoke at four o'clock. By 4.30 I'd been turned down, laughed at, and made to feel like a colonial weirdo by restaurants all around the capital. Then I tried a place just up the road from me, and they booked us in for their Thanksgiving special.
Not bad, since you didn't ask, but...lots. Lots and lots of food, and I did a bit of an Aristotelian experiment - I had fried food! Not much fried food, I grant you, but when the waiter brings something called an 'onion loaf' and it turns out to be two whole housebricks of battered and deep fried onions...you've got to find out what it's like, haven't you, or you're not properly alive.
So, that's Thanksgiving...thunk. For me, I'm thankful for whole worldsful of stuff - including friends who take me to lunch, and the woman who is my real compass. You may need to remind me of all this on Tuesday morning, when the onion loaf expands into a wall of grease and flubber that drags me screaming backwards to higher numbers. Right now, I'm not stressing out about it at all. I didn't sleep very well last night, so I'm basically on auto-pilot now.
In fact though, I don't think I'm gonna stress about it Tuesday either. I think I'm gonna be thankful tomorrow too. And the next day. And the day after that. S'gotta be worth a try, hasn't it?
Wednesday 23 November 2011
Metabolic Swings and Disappearing Roundabouts
No blood result this morning. I woke up on the couch, still not entirely believing it was real, and in the dark.
"Morning honey," said d, proffering a bowl of hot gorgeousness.
"Mmm...umph," I said, aiming for "Wow, thanks baby," and clearly failing. I blinked. It seemed as hard as a push-up, frankly.
"Been awake since 5.30," said d. "Packing boxes."
"Urr...umph?" I said.
"Woke up. Couldn't go back to sleep," she explained.
I scratched myself.
"Armmph..." I said, sympathetically.
d turned on the TV, and the Breakfast team popped up, already wittering.
"Urgle," I said, nodding at the screen, and beginning to shovel hot porridge into myself.
An item was clearly ending. Some tall, skinny blonde woman was affirming to the world.
"Well of course, the more weight you lose, the harder it will get, because your metabolism slows down as it doesn't have to cope with so much..."
"Thank you Arabella Bleeding-Obvious. We'll never return to you, ever, despite showing a report about mistreatment in home care seven times in the next hour..." was what I thought the male presenter said. He might as well have - she was there, and then she was gone, like a blonde, skinny portent of doom.
I'd be lying of course if I told you this was definitively the reason why, after some extraordinary weeks and months, things appear to have slowed down in the Disappearing stakes - the fact is, I'm not doing the morning walks I used to do, I'm not doing as many of the evening walks as I used to do, and I'm probably eating more carb than is strictly advisable. But while Arabella was depressing in the sense of counteracting my own feeling of nearly being at the top of the bill hill of weightloss (at 4.5 stone, I technically reach the halfway point), in another sense, it's sort of fun to have a tall blonde woman on the TV tell you you're too successful to succeed, that you've lost too much for it to be easy to lose any more...
Of course, only having had a snippet of Arabella to judge from, I may be hopelessly deluding myself - as I still, by any standard, have a lot of weight to lose, maybe the metabolic issue is yet to properly kick in. I've hit what might be called plateaus at various stages of this experiment, but at most of them, I've been able to chart my own failings, or falterings, and log reasons why I think things have happened, without particularly bringing in the factor of a slowing metabolism. Overall, not that keen to bring that element in now either - as I say, I'm not working as hard at this point as I did in the early stages, and I'm probably eating more than - at this stage - I should be.
There is of course always something better and more fun and more pressing to think about than the discipline of Disappearing. It's not fun, or anywhere near fun, to do, so there are always better things to think about. At the moment of course, my better things to think about are largely tied up with the move that appears to be impending something rotten since we got the go-ahead. Two and a half weeks from now, we do the box run. Three and a half weeks from now, d leaves. Four and a half weeks from now, I leave - oh and by the way, shoppers, it's Christmas! In between all that, I have a magazine to put together, a business quote to put together in the first seven dimensions that come to hand, another visit to Nottingham (me and Robin Hood, we're like that...oi, keep the Friar Tuck jokes to yourself!), and a three day conference to attend here int he heart of London. Plus of course a 'farewell tour' of friends and places to fit in.
Still - on to the boxes! If nothing else, I suppose, box-lifting is more muscle-building that fat-burning, which is good for a change right about now...
"Morning honey," said d, proffering a bowl of hot gorgeousness.
"Mmm...umph," I said, aiming for "Wow, thanks baby," and clearly failing. I blinked. It seemed as hard as a push-up, frankly.
"Been awake since 5.30," said d. "Packing boxes."
"Urr...umph?" I said.
"Woke up. Couldn't go back to sleep," she explained.
I scratched myself.
"Armmph..." I said, sympathetically.
d turned on the TV, and the Breakfast team popped up, already wittering.
"Urgle," I said, nodding at the screen, and beginning to shovel hot porridge into myself.
An item was clearly ending. Some tall, skinny blonde woman was affirming to the world.
"Well of course, the more weight you lose, the harder it will get, because your metabolism slows down as it doesn't have to cope with so much..."
"Thank you Arabella Bleeding-Obvious. We'll never return to you, ever, despite showing a report about mistreatment in home care seven times in the next hour..." was what I thought the male presenter said. He might as well have - she was there, and then she was gone, like a blonde, skinny portent of doom.
I'd be lying of course if I told you this was definitively the reason why, after some extraordinary weeks and months, things appear to have slowed down in the Disappearing stakes - the fact is, I'm not doing the morning walks I used to do, I'm not doing as many of the evening walks as I used to do, and I'm probably eating more carb than is strictly advisable. But while Arabella was depressing in the sense of counteracting my own feeling of nearly being at the top of the bill hill of weightloss (at 4.5 stone, I technically reach the halfway point), in another sense, it's sort of fun to have a tall blonde woman on the TV tell you you're too successful to succeed, that you've lost too much for it to be easy to lose any more...
Of course, only having had a snippet of Arabella to judge from, I may be hopelessly deluding myself - as I still, by any standard, have a lot of weight to lose, maybe the metabolic issue is yet to properly kick in. I've hit what might be called plateaus at various stages of this experiment, but at most of them, I've been able to chart my own failings, or falterings, and log reasons why I think things have happened, without particularly bringing in the factor of a slowing metabolism. Overall, not that keen to bring that element in now either - as I say, I'm not working as hard at this point as I did in the early stages, and I'm probably eating more than - at this stage - I should be.
There is of course always something better and more fun and more pressing to think about than the discipline of Disappearing. It's not fun, or anywhere near fun, to do, so there are always better things to think about. At the moment of course, my better things to think about are largely tied up with the move that appears to be impending something rotten since we got the go-ahead. Two and a half weeks from now, we do the box run. Three and a half weeks from now, d leaves. Four and a half weeks from now, I leave - oh and by the way, shoppers, it's Christmas! In between all that, I have a magazine to put together, a business quote to put together in the first seven dimensions that come to hand, another visit to Nottingham (me and Robin Hood, we're like that...oi, keep the Friar Tuck jokes to yourself!), and a three day conference to attend here int he heart of London. Plus of course a 'farewell tour' of friends and places to fit in.
Still - on to the boxes! If nothing else, I suppose, box-lifting is more muscle-building that fat-burning, which is good for a change right about now...
Tuesday 22 November 2011
Sudden Impact
OK, the run-of-the-mill Tuesday stuff is as follows. Blood was a rather low 4.3 this morning, and the weigh-in reads:
16 stone 4 pounds. It wavered, couldn't make up it's mind this morning between 4 and 3.75, but settled on 4 finally, so there it is - a pound and a fart down on last week. Given the absence of serious walking and intermittent biking this week, not a bad result - two solid weeks now and I'll be hitting the 4.5 stone barrier, and then we'll be into the 15 stone zone. So, a very miniature woohoo for that.
Ran into an old pal of mine on my way down for lunch today. Her name's Brenda, she works just down the hall from me, and a kinder, funnier, more genuinely nice human being it'd be difficult to find. The thing is, while we only work down the corridor, we both work in fairly 'head down, bum up' environments, so we don't actually meet that often (regular readers will remember my post from last week about the friends who should figure bigger in my life, only I'm a bit crap at plate-spinning our lives in sync). The upshot of which is that I'm not sure Brenda's actually seen me since this whole Disappearing malarkey began.
"Oh my God, Tone, you're looking great!" she said. My head grew three sizes in about half a second (which means it's probably just as well I forgot my 'I'm-not-bald-honest' hat today). She was amazed at the difference in the way I looked, and wanted to know the ins and outs of how I'd gone from Lardarse Boy to Not-Quite-So-Lardarse Boy, so we had a lovely catch-up chat, and I got to unexpectedly revel in the apparently noticeable difference that all this whining and bitching and pedalling and self-denial and more bitching, and more bitching, and more bitching has made. Of course, you lot don't really count for that, cos even though I'm happy if you just pop in and out, I'm here every day, so it seems like a narrative of inch-by-inch slices to me, every pound-and-a-fart barely noticeable in and of itself unless it hits a marker. So to get a perspective from someone who hasn't seen or followed the process, and so gets the impact like a frying-pan in the face, was particularly pleasing and unexpected today.
She said I was 'an inspiration' - which I've heard before on this journey. I never quite know how to react to that...sort of makes me want to adopt a serious face and put on a tie, to set a good example, but clearly, being essentially a comedy scruffbag, that'll never happen. I'm delighted if people think this experiment is inspiring in any way, cos I have to tell you, it pretty much sucks from the inside and the doing of it - except in moments where you get a slap in the face realisation, like I had with The Disappearing Coat a couple of weeks ago, or like today when someone who hasn't seen it happen suddenly gets the impact of it all, and leaves a smile on your lips that simply won't go away.
As it happened, I only bumped into Brenda today cos she'd just come back into the building after doing a lunchtime walk. She's decided to do a bit of Disappearing herself, after an encounter with a well-meaning but rather tactless friend made her decide to take her life in hand a bit. I've seen her do this a couple of times in different situations, seen her 'change her stars' as the expression used to be, so for her to call this modest, self-revolving palaver of mine 'inspiring' is actually rather humbling.
Tonight, it's more boxes, and biking, and ideally, finding the drugs box before I pack anything more into our bedroom. And probably doing it with a bit more of a Snow White song on my lips, and all cos I met Brenda, while heading down for lunch.
16 stone 4 pounds. It wavered, couldn't make up it's mind this morning between 4 and 3.75, but settled on 4 finally, so there it is - a pound and a fart down on last week. Given the absence of serious walking and intermittent biking this week, not a bad result - two solid weeks now and I'll be hitting the 4.5 stone barrier, and then we'll be into the 15 stone zone. So, a very miniature woohoo for that.
Ran into an old pal of mine on my way down for lunch today. Her name's Brenda, she works just down the hall from me, and a kinder, funnier, more genuinely nice human being it'd be difficult to find. The thing is, while we only work down the corridor, we both work in fairly 'head down, bum up' environments, so we don't actually meet that often (regular readers will remember my post from last week about the friends who should figure bigger in my life, only I'm a bit crap at plate-spinning our lives in sync). The upshot of which is that I'm not sure Brenda's actually seen me since this whole Disappearing malarkey began.
"Oh my God, Tone, you're looking great!" she said. My head grew three sizes in about half a second (which means it's probably just as well I forgot my 'I'm-not-bald-honest' hat today). She was amazed at the difference in the way I looked, and wanted to know the ins and outs of how I'd gone from Lardarse Boy to Not-Quite-So-Lardarse Boy, so we had a lovely catch-up chat, and I got to unexpectedly revel in the apparently noticeable difference that all this whining and bitching and pedalling and self-denial and more bitching, and more bitching, and more bitching has made. Of course, you lot don't really count for that, cos even though I'm happy if you just pop in and out, I'm here every day, so it seems like a narrative of inch-by-inch slices to me, every pound-and-a-fart barely noticeable in and of itself unless it hits a marker. So to get a perspective from someone who hasn't seen or followed the process, and so gets the impact like a frying-pan in the face, was particularly pleasing and unexpected today.
She said I was 'an inspiration' - which I've heard before on this journey. I never quite know how to react to that...sort of makes me want to adopt a serious face and put on a tie, to set a good example, but clearly, being essentially a comedy scruffbag, that'll never happen. I'm delighted if people think this experiment is inspiring in any way, cos I have to tell you, it pretty much sucks from the inside and the doing of it - except in moments where you get a slap in the face realisation, like I had with The Disappearing Coat a couple of weeks ago, or like today when someone who hasn't seen it happen suddenly gets the impact of it all, and leaves a smile on your lips that simply won't go away.
As it happened, I only bumped into Brenda today cos she'd just come back into the building after doing a lunchtime walk. She's decided to do a bit of Disappearing herself, after an encounter with a well-meaning but rather tactless friend made her decide to take her life in hand a bit. I've seen her do this a couple of times in different situations, seen her 'change her stars' as the expression used to be, so for her to call this modest, self-revolving palaver of mine 'inspiring' is actually rather humbling.
Tonight, it's more boxes, and biking, and ideally, finding the drugs box before I pack anything more into our bedroom. And probably doing it with a bit more of a Snow White song on my lips, and all cos I met Brenda, while heading down for lunch.
Monday 21 November 2011
Boxing Not-So-Clever
After writing last night's entry, we seemed to get a bit of a...(counts fingers)...fourth wind, and we shifted boxes. All in all, about 70-some-odd boxes, shoved into our bedroom. Then, because it had become one of d's goals for the weekend, we shifted a bookcase too. Then, with our wind blown out, we collapsed onto our respective couches, grunting in pain and misery and a sense of a job well done.
"Ow!"
"Urrgh..."
"Just...freakin'...ow!"
"Kill me. Kill me now..."
"Did I mention the owness?"
"Mebbe just a little, yeah. You're talking. You're talking and it's morning. Kill me. Or yourself. I don't care. Whichever's easier..."
We were...shall we say...a little grumpy when we woke up this morning, after Night 2 of our self-imposed Couchy Exile.
And no, of course I didn't do the 6.30 walk. It was all I could manage to drag myself out of...couch...at all this morning. Pootled through the day, doing one of the other inevitable things that needs doing. My boss, bless him, has something of a satirical sense of humour. He's been keen to impress upon me the fact that my move to the work-from-Wales basis is conditional on his being able to see at least some of the surface of my desk.
Honestly - you'd think the man had never worked with journalists before...Which, now I come to think of it, he probably hasn't, which explains altogether too much for a Monday evening. Annyway - what this means is that, for all the 70-odd boxes of stuff we packed this weekend, I have my own private excavation job to do at work to make this move a reality. I packed my rucksack with as much desk-flotsam as I could carry - at least three mugs, a cyber-head, a thermal vest, y'know, the normal stuff you'd expect on any well-used desk - and carried it all home. By the time I got through the door, My back and neck had remembered the grumpiness of this morning. I staggered in through the door, and dumped the sack.
"Hey honey," said d. "I'm dead now."
I looked past her into the kitchen, where a rather delicious-smelling, complex meal was on the stove.
"Still cooking though," I noted. She raised an eyebrow at me, as if to ask "is that all you ever think about?"
"Good, good," I added, flashing the skeleton of a smile. "Me too," I added. "Dead, I mean."
"No boxes," she mumbled at me. "No more boxes. Not tonight."
"No," I agreed. "No boxes tonight."
"Pain pill?" she asked.
"Hit me," I said. Bad choice of phrase, given our pre-existing pain levels, but fortunately, d was in too much pain of her own to take a free shot.
"They're in the pill box," she said.
I blinked.
"Ah."
You see, we take a lot of drugs between us - diabetic drugs of different sorts, thyroid drugs for d, pain pills, heartburn pills, Xenical, allergy pills, yadda yadda yadda...We had them all in a big canvas shopping bag in the living room.
Until last night.
When we put them all into a storage box. And put a lid on it....and then, on the breath of our fourth wind, put it somewhere in the bedroom. Among the 70-odd others.
"Bugger," I said.
And the night wound on.
I'll have to go through the boxes in the next day or so, as I'm running low on Xenicals in the rucksack. But not tonight. Tonight there's pain and Tuesday to focus on and obsess about, if I can be bothered. Or alternatively, there's glorious, couchy sleep to have, and Tuesday to meet in the morning...Oh, blood was 4.7 this morning, by the way...Now, where was I?...Oh yeah...
ZZZZzzzz....ZZZZzzzzz....ZZZZ....
"Ow!"
"Urrgh..."
"Just...freakin'...ow!"
"Kill me. Kill me now..."
"Did I mention the owness?"
"Mebbe just a little, yeah. You're talking. You're talking and it's morning. Kill me. Or yourself. I don't care. Whichever's easier..."
We were...shall we say...a little grumpy when we woke up this morning, after Night 2 of our self-imposed Couchy Exile.
And no, of course I didn't do the 6.30 walk. It was all I could manage to drag myself out of...couch...at all this morning. Pootled through the day, doing one of the other inevitable things that needs doing. My boss, bless him, has something of a satirical sense of humour. He's been keen to impress upon me the fact that my move to the work-from-Wales basis is conditional on his being able to see at least some of the surface of my desk.
Honestly - you'd think the man had never worked with journalists before...Which, now I come to think of it, he probably hasn't, which explains altogether too much for a Monday evening. Annyway - what this means is that, for all the 70-odd boxes of stuff we packed this weekend, I have my own private excavation job to do at work to make this move a reality. I packed my rucksack with as much desk-flotsam as I could carry - at least three mugs, a cyber-head, a thermal vest, y'know, the normal stuff you'd expect on any well-used desk - and carried it all home. By the time I got through the door, My back and neck had remembered the grumpiness of this morning. I staggered in through the door, and dumped the sack.
"Hey honey," said d. "I'm dead now."
I looked past her into the kitchen, where a rather delicious-smelling, complex meal was on the stove.
"Still cooking though," I noted. She raised an eyebrow at me, as if to ask "is that all you ever think about?"
"Good, good," I added, flashing the skeleton of a smile. "Me too," I added. "Dead, I mean."
"No boxes," she mumbled at me. "No more boxes. Not tonight."
"No," I agreed. "No boxes tonight."
"Pain pill?" she asked.
"Hit me," I said. Bad choice of phrase, given our pre-existing pain levels, but fortunately, d was in too much pain of her own to take a free shot.
"They're in the pill box," she said.
I blinked.
"Ah."
You see, we take a lot of drugs between us - diabetic drugs of different sorts, thyroid drugs for d, pain pills, heartburn pills, Xenical, allergy pills, yadda yadda yadda...We had them all in a big canvas shopping bag in the living room.
Until last night.
When we put them all into a storage box. And put a lid on it....and then, on the breath of our fourth wind, put it somewhere in the bedroom. Among the 70-odd others.
"Bugger," I said.
And the night wound on.
I'll have to go through the boxes in the next day or so, as I'm running low on Xenicals in the rucksack. But not tonight. Tonight there's pain and Tuesday to focus on and obsess about, if I can be bothered. Or alternatively, there's glorious, couchy sleep to have, and Tuesday to meet in the morning...Oh, blood was 4.7 this morning, by the way...Now, where was I?...Oh yeah...
ZZZZzzzz....ZZZZzzzzz....ZZZZ....
Sunday 20 November 2011
Sedentary Movement and Relentless Disappearing
I've had a very low-energy weekend, all in all. Which has pretty much meant that d's been working like a whippet on crack. I seem to have invented a new sport-cum-yogic art - the zen discipline of sedentary house-moving. From more or less a sitting position, I've filled quite a few boxes, thrown away a good few garbage-bagsfull of stuff that have cluttered up our lives without our knowing it for years. d meanwhile has done the real heavy lifting, clearing our bedroom, shiftin our mattress, and beginning to pile up our boxes of life there, as we planned. I've failed to move a necessary bookcase, and write this on one of the couches I didn't shift either, and on which it appears we shall be sleeping for a while.
Our life - my life, indeed - looks set to revolve around this entirely different kind of Disappearing for a while, though I did fit some biking in today. I don't at this point expect to have made even the slightest progress towards the 16 stone barrier on Tuesday, and while disappointed, I'll have to simply get on with it. One good thing, I guess, is that I'm intending to get back on the 6.30 walking kick tomorrow.
d pointed something out to me yesterday. As of today, we have just one hundred days left of year one of the Disappearing Man experiment. Clearly, at this point, I'm neither going to reach my ultimate target weight within this time, nor my original target loss of 104 pounds. At most, I'll have lost about 80-odd pounds, a little over six stone in a year. While this will of course be no mean achievement, it won't be enough to let me stop, or even pause for too long a breath. I didn't, after all, start this thing to get close but still be three stone overweight...even though 14 stone, from what I dimly remember, suits me rather better than 11 stone ever did. So, for any that want to come along, or dip in, there will be a Year 2 of this experiment, and we'll see what we shall see, I guess. Rest assured, for all the whining and bitching, this thing ends with just one result - until I get where I want to be, there is no end to the Disappearing.
Our life - my life, indeed - looks set to revolve around this entirely different kind of Disappearing for a while, though I did fit some biking in today. I don't at this point expect to have made even the slightest progress towards the 16 stone barrier on Tuesday, and while disappointed, I'll have to simply get on with it. One good thing, I guess, is that I'm intending to get back on the 6.30 walking kick tomorrow.
d pointed something out to me yesterday. As of today, we have just one hundred days left of year one of the Disappearing Man experiment. Clearly, at this point, I'm neither going to reach my ultimate target weight within this time, nor my original target loss of 104 pounds. At most, I'll have lost about 80-odd pounds, a little over six stone in a year. While this will of course be no mean achievement, it won't be enough to let me stop, or even pause for too long a breath. I didn't, after all, start this thing to get close but still be three stone overweight...even though 14 stone, from what I dimly remember, suits me rather better than 11 stone ever did. So, for any that want to come along, or dip in, there will be a Year 2 of this experiment, and we'll see what we shall see, I guess. Rest assured, for all the whining and bitching, this thing ends with just one result - until I get where I want to be, there is no end to the Disappearing.
Saturday 19 November 2011
Eyes On The Prize
As I write this, we no longer have a bed, and are surrounded by what could probably best be described as 'creative carnage'.
Yes, yes, I do appreciate that from your point of view, breaking down the bed the verys same week I got the go-ahead for the moving plan might sound like jumping the gun - especially as we're still going to be here for four and five weeks respectively (d's leaving on the 18th of December, with the moving guys - there have to be moving guys, as well as my pal Sian, because a) we have a lot of stuff accumulated after seven years together and the rest of our lifes beforehand, and b) the moving guys actually do the work for you, and I'm a lazy, clumsy-ass wuss who'd fall over his own feet and smash whatever we have in the way of priceless family heirlooms, guaranteed. I meanwhile have to work until the 23rd of December, and then get a train Home two days before Christmas. Ticket's already bought.)
But you see, here's the thing. We've been packing for a while now. Quite a while actually - certainly long before I put the work-from-Wales plan forward. We've been doing this on the principles that, a) 'something might turn up overnight,' and b) we really have a lot of stuff, crammed into what is technically a one-bedroom apartment. In the event of (a) happening, we wanted to have taken advance notice of (b), and not be caught with, say, just a month in which to pack, clean and move everything we own. This means that we've actually done quite a lot...without, in fact, it either looking or feeling like we've done very much at all. This in turn means WE HAVE NO SPACE in which to do anything more. Think of our little one-bedroom apartment as one of those sliding puzzles you used to do as a kid, and then put that little plastic ring in the slidey-space, to make the picture complete and immovable. We can't pack any more boxes because there's no more space to put any more boxes. That little plastic ring...
is the bed.
So today, we've broken down the bed, and stacked it neatly where our headboard used to be. We've double-wrapped the mattress in duvet-covers and taped them down, to protect it rom mountains and mountains of semi-prehistoric dust, which we've uncovered and sucked to a vacuumy doom. Whole ecosystems of spiderswebs that have been hidden behind bits of furniture that haven't moved in years have been rendered extinct by our callous waving of a vacuum-wand - we're pretty much a metaphor for Mankind today - carving out the world as we want it, and fuck the rest of you.
So now we have nowhere to sleep, but plenty of space for box-stacking. Haven't really started stacking them yet - have stepped out to take stock.
Wow...loooooooot of stock.
I'm guessing the next thing to do is pretty much put all the boxes from everywhere else in the flat, into the space where our lovely, soft, warm, comforting bed used to be. Oh, excuse me - incoming transmission from My Brain: WHERE THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO SLEEP TONIGHT, SCHMUCK-FACE???!!!
Ah, well, you see, we still have two couches. So anyway, as I was saying, once we've shifted all the current boxes into the bed-space, we'll be able to take everything off the remaining bookshelves and DVD units, fill a bunch more boxes, shift the bookcases into the bedroom, then up-end the couches and shove them in there too...
THEN WHERE THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO SLEEP TONIGHT, SCHMUCK-FACE???!!!
Fortunately, I bought an air mattress last weekend, and an electronic pump (not as young as I was when I used to take pride in blowing those up by lung power alone, and everybody was too frightened of shattering my fragile ego to point out they used to sag a bit at the corners)...so we'll use the air mattress as a combination couch and bed.
OH, YIPPEE!
Hey, you think this is mad, you wait till we make it down the Basement. The Basement is not what you might be thinking of when you hear the word 'Basement'. This is a door, leading to a ricketty, half-rotten wooden staircase, leading to...well, basically, a cave. No, really, a cave. The kind of thing that would come as a great optional extra if you wanted to take up caped vigilantism or serial killing. It's literally a hole, hacked out of the black, dusty earth, and we've used it for...well, pretty much everything we haven't had space for in the civilised floor on which we live. There are children's Christmas presents down there that we wrapped for kids when they were babies, who are now probably in fifth grade by now (Brits - suck it up, these were American babies!). There's the original fridge down there, that came with the apartment, and which d referred to, not unjustly, as a 'mini-fridge'. Don't think it's worked in about five years, but it's still down there. Probably home to at least three generations of rats by now too. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking The Basement might be a job for a whooooole other weekend. Right now, there's enough work cut out for both of us making sure we have absolutely nowhere comfortable to plonk either our asses or our exhausted, shattered bodies at the end of a night.
"These..." said d, as she unscrewed the last bolt that held the bed together, "are gonna be some cranky-ass weeks. You realise that, right?"
She's not wrong. Time to fix our eyes firmly on the prize, probably. Once more with feeling - more space, more time, fewer bastards, fewer bastards with knives, less nightmarish transport, better Disappearing facilities, family, friends, yadda yadda yadda...
Right. This has been quite enough stock taken. Boxes a-go-go.
Yes, yes, I do appreciate that from your point of view, breaking down the bed the verys same week I got the go-ahead for the moving plan might sound like jumping the gun - especially as we're still going to be here for four and five weeks respectively (d's leaving on the 18th of December, with the moving guys - there have to be moving guys, as well as my pal Sian, because a) we have a lot of stuff accumulated after seven years together and the rest of our lifes beforehand, and b) the moving guys actually do the work for you, and I'm a lazy, clumsy-ass wuss who'd fall over his own feet and smash whatever we have in the way of priceless family heirlooms, guaranteed. I meanwhile have to work until the 23rd of December, and then get a train Home two days before Christmas. Ticket's already bought.)
But you see, here's the thing. We've been packing for a while now. Quite a while actually - certainly long before I put the work-from-Wales plan forward. We've been doing this on the principles that, a) 'something might turn up overnight,' and b) we really have a lot of stuff, crammed into what is technically a one-bedroom apartment. In the event of (a) happening, we wanted to have taken advance notice of (b), and not be caught with, say, just a month in which to pack, clean and move everything we own. This means that we've actually done quite a lot...without, in fact, it either looking or feeling like we've done very much at all. This in turn means WE HAVE NO SPACE in which to do anything more. Think of our little one-bedroom apartment as one of those sliding puzzles you used to do as a kid, and then put that little plastic ring in the slidey-space, to make the picture complete and immovable. We can't pack any more boxes because there's no more space to put any more boxes. That little plastic ring...
is the bed.
So today, we've broken down the bed, and stacked it neatly where our headboard used to be. We've double-wrapped the mattress in duvet-covers and taped them down, to protect it rom mountains and mountains of semi-prehistoric dust, which we've uncovered and sucked to a vacuumy doom. Whole ecosystems of spiderswebs that have been hidden behind bits of furniture that haven't moved in years have been rendered extinct by our callous waving of a vacuum-wand - we're pretty much a metaphor for Mankind today - carving out the world as we want it, and fuck the rest of you.
So now we have nowhere to sleep, but plenty of space for box-stacking. Haven't really started stacking them yet - have stepped out to take stock.
Wow...loooooooot of stock.
I'm guessing the next thing to do is pretty much put all the boxes from everywhere else in the flat, into the space where our lovely, soft, warm, comforting bed used to be. Oh, excuse me - incoming transmission from My Brain: WHERE THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO SLEEP TONIGHT, SCHMUCK-FACE???!!!
Ah, well, you see, we still have two couches. So anyway, as I was saying, once we've shifted all the current boxes into the bed-space, we'll be able to take everything off the remaining bookshelves and DVD units, fill a bunch more boxes, shift the bookcases into the bedroom, then up-end the couches and shove them in there too...
THEN WHERE THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO SLEEP TONIGHT, SCHMUCK-FACE???!!!
Fortunately, I bought an air mattress last weekend, and an electronic pump (not as young as I was when I used to take pride in blowing those up by lung power alone, and everybody was too frightened of shattering my fragile ego to point out they used to sag a bit at the corners)...so we'll use the air mattress as a combination couch and bed.
OH, YIPPEE!
Hey, you think this is mad, you wait till we make it down the Basement. The Basement is not what you might be thinking of when you hear the word 'Basement'. This is a door, leading to a ricketty, half-rotten wooden staircase, leading to...well, basically, a cave. No, really, a cave. The kind of thing that would come as a great optional extra if you wanted to take up caped vigilantism or serial killing. It's literally a hole, hacked out of the black, dusty earth, and we've used it for...well, pretty much everything we haven't had space for in the civilised floor on which we live. There are children's Christmas presents down there that we wrapped for kids when they were babies, who are now probably in fifth grade by now (Brits - suck it up, these were American babies!). There's the original fridge down there, that came with the apartment, and which d referred to, not unjustly, as a 'mini-fridge'. Don't think it's worked in about five years, but it's still down there. Probably home to at least three generations of rats by now too. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking The Basement might be a job for a whooooole other weekend. Right now, there's enough work cut out for both of us making sure we have absolutely nowhere comfortable to plonk either our asses or our exhausted, shattered bodies at the end of a night.
"These..." said d, as she unscrewed the last bolt that held the bed together, "are gonna be some cranky-ass weeks. You realise that, right?"
She's not wrong. Time to fix our eyes firmly on the prize, probably. Once more with feeling - more space, more time, fewer bastards, fewer bastards with knives, less nightmarish transport, better Disappearing facilities, family, friends, yadda yadda yadda...
Right. This has been quite enough stock taken. Boxes a-go-go.
Friday 18 November 2011
Thanksgiving
I did a weird thing yesterday. Just as I came around the corner of the park next to my house, I said thank you.
Now, this is weird. As I've probably mentioned ad nauseum, I'm an atheist - I don't believe there's an external lifegiving intelligence, ordering destiny about. So who the Hell was I thanking?
Well, the answer to that, I suppose, is anyone.
My mother is an occasional visitor of spiritualists and mediums, and I have been known to pop along myself. Because while I think we can be as sure as we need to be that there's no universal ordering force, I can pseudo-science my way to the idea of consciousness-survival. I don't claim this is something that actualy happens, or that it needs to happen for humans any more than it needs to happen for any other kind of creature, I'm not advocating for the specialness of humanity...but if you abandon all we know about traditional science and wander into the open-minded territory of science fantasy, trust me when I tell you you can make the case, step by step. As I say, I don't claim this happens, I'm not someone who believes this happens, but I'm more open minded about the potential for consciousness-survival.
Ma recently went to a spiritualist, and apparently, plenty of people popped up, including my bio-dad, Brian. This was interesting to me, cos the last time she went to one, he popped up then too, and apparently said that I'd be fine, but I had to watch my health. That was a couple of months before I started this Disappearing lark.
Again, I'm not saying that in any way, this 'warning' was an inspiration for this experiment. It wasn't. I genuinely just stopped eating some things, and started Disappearing. And again, I find myself on the back foot, because I'm not, at this late stage, claiming I was helped from beyond the grave to get as far as I've gotten so far. You may have noticed, I'm something of a master at taking credit for the tiniest positive thing. I just suddenly had the thought that while I've done this, IF you accept that people continue to exist after material death, and IF you accept the idea that there are people who, being dead, still give a toss about what happens to you, then why not occasionally give them the benefit of a nod, and an occasional thank you.
So I said it - to Brian, to my gran, Peggy, to John, who you've heard of before, to...whoever there is, because this year has seen me change beyond almost all recognition, and in a positive direction. I don't mean just the Disappearing itself, I mean something about the scope of my life, that has allowed me to do it, allowed me to think a whole different way, allowed me to plan to go Home. This kind of change is pretty much exactly the sort of thing that makes people think there's something bigger than themselves, some guiding force making things possible for them. I say again, I'm quite happy to take credit for it all myself...but hey, if anyone's out there giving me a kick and a hand...why not say thank you?
Then tonight, d and I met up for what we unofficially dubbed "Night 1" of our "Farewell Tour". A trip to Mile End, to our favourite Chinese restaurant in the city, now that our friend Yuen's family place has closed down - the Golden Bird. If you get a chance, go - it's a short stroll from Mile End station.
They did us proud tonight, with crispy chicken and beef, ribs and rice. At the end of the night, we had a long chat with the manageress, told her our story, and the part she and her place had played in it. She knew us of old, and told us we were always smiling and laughing, so we were always a pleasure to see. We told us she'd given us great birthdays, amazing new years, bubbly aniversaries, and fantastic memories that we'd take with us. We gave thanks for her, and all that she'd given us.
And then we came home, thankful for all our past together, and thankful to be moving on to a future that excites us.
What are you thankful for this year?
Blood this morning - still high. 6.0.
Now, this is weird. As I've probably mentioned ad nauseum, I'm an atheist - I don't believe there's an external lifegiving intelligence, ordering destiny about. So who the Hell was I thanking?
Well, the answer to that, I suppose, is anyone.
My mother is an occasional visitor of spiritualists and mediums, and I have been known to pop along myself. Because while I think we can be as sure as we need to be that there's no universal ordering force, I can pseudo-science my way to the idea of consciousness-survival. I don't claim this is something that actualy happens, or that it needs to happen for humans any more than it needs to happen for any other kind of creature, I'm not advocating for the specialness of humanity...but if you abandon all we know about traditional science and wander into the open-minded territory of science fantasy, trust me when I tell you you can make the case, step by step. As I say, I don't claim this happens, I'm not someone who believes this happens, but I'm more open minded about the potential for consciousness-survival.
Ma recently went to a spiritualist, and apparently, plenty of people popped up, including my bio-dad, Brian. This was interesting to me, cos the last time she went to one, he popped up then too, and apparently said that I'd be fine, but I had to watch my health. That was a couple of months before I started this Disappearing lark.
Again, I'm not saying that in any way, this 'warning' was an inspiration for this experiment. It wasn't. I genuinely just stopped eating some things, and started Disappearing. And again, I find myself on the back foot, because I'm not, at this late stage, claiming I was helped from beyond the grave to get as far as I've gotten so far. You may have noticed, I'm something of a master at taking credit for the tiniest positive thing. I just suddenly had the thought that while I've done this, IF you accept that people continue to exist after material death, and IF you accept the idea that there are people who, being dead, still give a toss about what happens to you, then why not occasionally give them the benefit of a nod, and an occasional thank you.
So I said it - to Brian, to my gran, Peggy, to John, who you've heard of before, to...whoever there is, because this year has seen me change beyond almost all recognition, and in a positive direction. I don't mean just the Disappearing itself, I mean something about the scope of my life, that has allowed me to do it, allowed me to think a whole different way, allowed me to plan to go Home. This kind of change is pretty much exactly the sort of thing that makes people think there's something bigger than themselves, some guiding force making things possible for them. I say again, I'm quite happy to take credit for it all myself...but hey, if anyone's out there giving me a kick and a hand...why not say thank you?
Then tonight, d and I met up for what we unofficially dubbed "Night 1" of our "Farewell Tour". A trip to Mile End, to our favourite Chinese restaurant in the city, now that our friend Yuen's family place has closed down - the Golden Bird. If you get a chance, go - it's a short stroll from Mile End station.
They did us proud tonight, with crispy chicken and beef, ribs and rice. At the end of the night, we had a long chat with the manageress, told her our story, and the part she and her place had played in it. She knew us of old, and told us we were always smiling and laughing, so we were always a pleasure to see. We told us she'd given us great birthdays, amazing new years, bubbly aniversaries, and fantastic memories that we'd take with us. We gave thanks for her, and all that she'd given us.
And then we came home, thankful for all our past together, and thankful to be moving on to a future that excites us.
What are you thankful for this year?
Blood this morning - still high. 6.0.
Thursday 17 November 2011
Donkey Dung and Friends
I lost a friend yesterday.
Didn't give a toss, to be honest, on the day I announced the success of the work-from-Wales plan.
This, under any normal circumstances, would be a self-contradictory statement of course. But then again, in the days of social networking 'normal circumstances' as regards friendship have pretty much stopped applying.
As if to underline this fact, I'm (still!) reading Aristotle's Ethics, and His Nibs has just finished a dissertation on friendship. He breaks friends into categories - Intimate (Good) Friends, Advantageous Friends etc. He says it's probably a good idea to limit the Good Friends you have to a number to whom you can actually be a Good Friend, sympathising with their problems, rejoicing in their triumphs, sharing your mind with them, doing favours when you can etc etc.
I think, on some level, I do that. I have maybe a handful, maybe two, of what I'd call Good Friends - people I'm comfortable talking to on any day, people I know would be there if I was destitute and burbling, people who never take from me more than I have in terms of emotional resources, and who, more often than not, make me laugh and lift my life. Then there are people with whom I'm not "intimate" in Aristotle's terms - our lives don't thread in and out on a daily or even weekly basis, but every time we get together, or get in contact, we're comfortable as a good old coat. Some of these probably should be intimate friends of mine, but I'm not as good at spinning the plates of our lives as I could or should be.
I have friends abroad - some of whom - many of whom, in fact, I consider to be on a par with those old coat friends - I can't be in and out of their lives day to day, but if I can help in some way, I'm more than happy to do so.
And then, in this day and age, there are social network 'friends'; in my case Facebook friends. These friends multiply and cross pollinate like bacteria. Some of them, I've had enough contact with, and have enough daily contact with, to bump them up to satellite friends, but others...many, many others...are sadly little more than clicks on a page to me.
Yesterday, one of my abroad-old-coaters, Sarah, posted something and asked her friends to share it. It seemed a worthy cause to me, so I expended the slightest shred of energy, clicked a button, and passed it on, thinking of her and her family, feeling pleased to have seen something from her.
A Facebook friend flamed up and told me the thing I'd shared was wrong, and bullshit, and self-indulgent to boot, and that I should remove it. I told her she was missing the point, that I was sharing the thing because I'd been asked to by a friend, and saw nothing wrong in doing so. She told me I was a real jerk, and that I should have a good life and, at some point, learn to write, because my blog sucked all sorts of donkey dung. Then she de-friended me.
I guess the real lesson here is that if a friend is a Good friend, it'll matter when they leave your life. And if it doesn't, you were probably no friend to them, and they were probably no friend to you either, so all in all, you're probably better off without each other.
Just to underscore this is big thick red ink, a couple of other things happened today. My pal Sian - one of the oldest and most enduring of my friendships - was in London and we met for lunch. Before the lunch was over, my imminent move home had been unfolded in detail, and Sian had made plans to hire me a transit van from her town (where they're cheaper than in London), and to drive it to us, help pack it with boxes, drive us to Merthyr, help unpack the van, drive us back to London, and then drive herself home. She did this with no expectation, no thought of reward, nothing but the desire to help a friend. Despite Aristotle's insistence that we should accept offers of help from friends reluctantly, I thought 'screw it' and accepted like a shot.
Likewise, Karen "Pulley" - who dates in my life from the same period as Sian - made contact with d, and the two of them made plans to meet when we get to Merthyr and cook together. A spontaneous gesture of friendship and inclusion, of welcome to the Valleys, and a merging of two parts of my world that I love.
Those, ladies and gentlemen, are Good friends. I have a treasure-chest life, and although I only have maybe two handfuls of people of this calibre and vintage, every one of them, I know, wishes me - wishes us the best things we could hope for. That's worth more than a million Facebook flamers who make zero impact and who leave as unobtrusively as they arrived, or were.
Oh and incidentally, I'm not making the case here that she was wrong about the blog. I have no illusions that what I'm writing here is literary gold. I made the case right at the start that what it was was a diary, a motivator, and, as it's grown, a disciplinary aid. If I make some people laugh along the way, or think along the way, or even, as I've occasionally been told, inspire some people along the way, that's a bonus. Unlike d, I don't expect people to read this blog day in, day out. I'm happy if people pop in and out. But four stone some-odd down the line, this thing is still working as a motivation and a discipline aid. If you spot a big pile of donkey dung along the way, feel free to step around it and see what comes along tomorrow.
Wear sensible shoes. They'll help.
Blood was a tad high this morning - 6.3! Veins must be slapped about and duly chastised tomorrow...
Didn't give a toss, to be honest, on the day I announced the success of the work-from-Wales plan.
This, under any normal circumstances, would be a self-contradictory statement of course. But then again, in the days of social networking 'normal circumstances' as regards friendship have pretty much stopped applying.
As if to underline this fact, I'm (still!) reading Aristotle's Ethics, and His Nibs has just finished a dissertation on friendship. He breaks friends into categories - Intimate (Good) Friends, Advantageous Friends etc. He says it's probably a good idea to limit the Good Friends you have to a number to whom you can actually be a Good Friend, sympathising with their problems, rejoicing in their triumphs, sharing your mind with them, doing favours when you can etc etc.
I think, on some level, I do that. I have maybe a handful, maybe two, of what I'd call Good Friends - people I'm comfortable talking to on any day, people I know would be there if I was destitute and burbling, people who never take from me more than I have in terms of emotional resources, and who, more often than not, make me laugh and lift my life. Then there are people with whom I'm not "intimate" in Aristotle's terms - our lives don't thread in and out on a daily or even weekly basis, but every time we get together, or get in contact, we're comfortable as a good old coat. Some of these probably should be intimate friends of mine, but I'm not as good at spinning the plates of our lives as I could or should be.
I have friends abroad - some of whom - many of whom, in fact, I consider to be on a par with those old coat friends - I can't be in and out of their lives day to day, but if I can help in some way, I'm more than happy to do so.
And then, in this day and age, there are social network 'friends'; in my case Facebook friends. These friends multiply and cross pollinate like bacteria. Some of them, I've had enough contact with, and have enough daily contact with, to bump them up to satellite friends, but others...many, many others...are sadly little more than clicks on a page to me.
Yesterday, one of my abroad-old-coaters, Sarah, posted something and asked her friends to share it. It seemed a worthy cause to me, so I expended the slightest shred of energy, clicked a button, and passed it on, thinking of her and her family, feeling pleased to have seen something from her.
A Facebook friend flamed up and told me the thing I'd shared was wrong, and bullshit, and self-indulgent to boot, and that I should remove it. I told her she was missing the point, that I was sharing the thing because I'd been asked to by a friend, and saw nothing wrong in doing so. She told me I was a real jerk, and that I should have a good life and, at some point, learn to write, because my blog sucked all sorts of donkey dung. Then she de-friended me.
I guess the real lesson here is that if a friend is a Good friend, it'll matter when they leave your life. And if it doesn't, you were probably no friend to them, and they were probably no friend to you either, so all in all, you're probably better off without each other.
Just to underscore this is big thick red ink, a couple of other things happened today. My pal Sian - one of the oldest and most enduring of my friendships - was in London and we met for lunch. Before the lunch was over, my imminent move home had been unfolded in detail, and Sian had made plans to hire me a transit van from her town (where they're cheaper than in London), and to drive it to us, help pack it with boxes, drive us to Merthyr, help unpack the van, drive us back to London, and then drive herself home. She did this with no expectation, no thought of reward, nothing but the desire to help a friend. Despite Aristotle's insistence that we should accept offers of help from friends reluctantly, I thought 'screw it' and accepted like a shot.
Likewise, Karen "Pulley" - who dates in my life from the same period as Sian - made contact with d, and the two of them made plans to meet when we get to Merthyr and cook together. A spontaneous gesture of friendship and inclusion, of welcome to the Valleys, and a merging of two parts of my world that I love.
Those, ladies and gentlemen, are Good friends. I have a treasure-chest life, and although I only have maybe two handfuls of people of this calibre and vintage, every one of them, I know, wishes me - wishes us the best things we could hope for. That's worth more than a million Facebook flamers who make zero impact and who leave as unobtrusively as they arrived, or were.
Oh and incidentally, I'm not making the case here that she was wrong about the blog. I have no illusions that what I'm writing here is literary gold. I made the case right at the start that what it was was a diary, a motivator, and, as it's grown, a disciplinary aid. If I make some people laugh along the way, or think along the way, or even, as I've occasionally been told, inspire some people along the way, that's a bonus. Unlike d, I don't expect people to read this blog day in, day out. I'm happy if people pop in and out. But four stone some-odd down the line, this thing is still working as a motivation and a discipline aid. If you spot a big pile of donkey dung along the way, feel free to step around it and see what comes along tomorrow.
Wear sensible shoes. They'll help.
Blood was a tad high this morning - 6.3! Veins must be slapped about and duly chastised tomorrow...
Wednesday 16 November 2011
The Best of Both Worlds
"If you could keep that box exactly that distance away, and have it here...the large one would fit inside the small one."(Fourth Doctor explaining the whole Tardis, bigger-on-the-inside malarkey, Doctor Who)
If I've judged it right, most people will now be going "Wha-? What the Hell's that got to do with anything?"
Well, quite apart from anything else, it proves that Doctor Who, not the Godfather, is the I-Ching - there's no situation in life so weird or so wonderful that a Who-quote can't encapsulate it.
And what situation is that relevant to, I hear you ask, stifling a yawn. Well, stick with me, Daniel-san, and all will be revealed.
When I came to live in London this last time (having spent three earlier years studying for an ultimately rather underused degree in History here), the point was in being here. It felt like London was the only place in the UK where people were really alive, where they really counted at all, and every day not spent here was almost like a day of lifetime wasted. I needed to be here.
Now I've needed to be here for nigh on ten years, and in that time, London itself and my relationship to it has changed significantly. Stratford used to feel safe, but now gangs have moved in. Stratford used to be cheap, but since Olympic fever started really bubbling, the property and rental prices have pushed higher and higher, like Mercury in a Malarial thermometer. The cost of living in the capital has kept pace as the economy has crumbled, while salaries have frozen as prices have continued to climb and climb and climb. And then there's the people.
I know, I know, you live in a capital city, it's gonna be crowded, that's the point, but there's fun, buzzy, pursuing-the-dream crowding, which seemed to be how it was when I arrived, and then there's pain-in-the-arse, under-catered-for-by-the-infrastructure, get-the-Hell-out-of-my-face crowding, which is what seems to be happening right now, making everything both slower and more Hellish to do, to get to, to get through. Plus of course, I'm nearly ten years older and crankier and more prone to prod people with sticks and get happy-slapped or simply stabbed in return.
So, as longer-term readers will know, I've been exploring the idea of getting the Hell out of Dodge for a while. But this is where the Tardis principle comes in. The one surviving reason, bar the occasional buzz, to live and work in London is - ker-ching! - the money.
If you don't work in London, you get less money. If you do work in London, you get more money, but you also get gigundo-costs, and you lose the benefits of frankly not being in London.
Of course the ideal - the best of both worlds, if you will - would be to be somewhere else...and then to have London exactly that distance away, and have it here, so you'd get paid a London wage, without all the London hassle, but with the opportunity to dip your toe back in every now and again and get the buzz. But you can't do that, clearly. That'd be silly...
So colour me Silly, bee-atches, cos that's exactly what I'm pulling off!
Regular readers will also know that I've been mellowing towards my home town of Merthyr Tydfil for some time now. Hated the place growing up, couldn't wait to get the Hell out. But I've changed since then, and it's changed since then, and over the last year, it's been very good to me. It's also, of course, where my folks are, and quite a number of my friends too. I first conceived the idea of maybe getting closer to the folks when my dad fell pretty ill last year, so as to be more immediately on hand to look out for and look after them if necessary. Since then, my dad's gotten better-than-he-was, if not Better-Better, and my mother has taken voluntary retirement from the Health Service (thank you David 'Wrecker' Cameron) and is now a freelance Force of Nature, looking for mischief! I applied for a couple of jobs in Cardiff, but the point about jobs in Cardiff is...they're in Cardiff. Not London. So you have to take a punch-in-the-face pay-cut, and still, if you're in Merthyr, commute every day. As I say, the ideal would be to earn a London wage, without the London hassle.
So I talked to my boss. Took him quite a while of umming and ahing to dot his t's and cross his eyes, but eventually, yesterday, he agreed to the idea I proposed - starting in January, I'm gonna be doing my current job...from home, in Merthyr. Now it's true, I had to offer to give up my London Weighting to swing this deal (Hey, I'm getting old and sentimental - I daresay fifteen years ago, I would have tried to swing it without this concession). But the point is I'll save an equal amount in rent every year by making this move. What's more, we've got a place with more space, being entirely remodelled and stocked with furniture, all of which we're kind of point-and-click choosing, and only some of which we're paying for, and we'll be a couple of hundred yards from that kickass, really cheap leisure centre I was dreaming about yesterday. Plus, without all the schlepping back and forth, I'll have time to get on with my writing. Plus of course, I'll be on hand for the folks. The real coup, I suppose, was the add-on - my boss wants me to come into the office once a week - so I still get just enough London in my veins to make me love the place, without having to hang around and battle the seven million other bastards for any particular length of time.
So let's see:
Better flat - check.
More space - check.
More time with wife - check.
Far less rent and living expenses - check.
Smaller likelihood of stabbing, or being stabbed by, a total stranger - check.
More time to write - check.
Close to friends - check.
Close to family - check.
Better, cheaper, closer Disappearing facillities - check.
Happier wife - d grew up in a small town and loves the atmosphere. Plus my folks - check.
Weekly visit to London to get my fill of the vibe - check.
Escaping the insanity of the next Olympics - check.
More or less still getting a London wage - check.
Did I mention the ability to sit on my ass all day in my jimjams if I want to? - check.
All in all, not too shabby for Tony. Without wishing to brag...Oh alright then, entirely wishing to brag, I reckon what we've pulled off here is the creation of a work-life-balance Tardis. We've built the best of both worlds, and fused them together. Huge Fatboy-Dancing wave in tribute to the Awesomeness of Us.
So now, let's turbo-boost the thing - got to do all the myriad things you have to do when moving across the country in the space of about six weeks. There are lists to write, and things to tick off, and vans to hire, and movers to book, and boxes to pack, and bedrooms to dismantle so as to fit in all the boxes you've packed, and organisations to tell, cellars to excavate, and Stuff, in a word, To Do.
Can I get an "Awoohoo!" for Stuff To Do?
Oh, and yeah, by all means, feel free to hate me right about now! I'd be entirely surprised if a lot of people didn't...
Blood was 4.9 yesterday by the way, and 5.3 this morning.
Tuesday 15 November 2011
The Need For Speed
I feel the need...the need for speed!
Ah, the 80s, when it was still cool to like Tom Cruise movies and the rape of the public sector was in its infancy...
Thing is, over the last few days, I've noticed something really rather fun - I'm getting faster.
I mean, obviously I've been getting faster since I started this experiment and the weight got less and my muscles, such as they are, woke up and started earning their keep - I mean, when I started I could barely walk a mile without pain, and speed was hardly a concern compared with goggle-eyed survival. Then, as the weight began to properly begin to drop off, I got fitter, more like my old self, and my old estimates of how long it would take to get from A-B began to have some validity again.
But this is beyond what I can ever recall. A couple of mornings ago, I was doing my five-mile walk, and tube stations appeared to be whizzing by at a rather more pleasing rate than usual. Last night, I did what is usually a half hour's walk from Kensington to Marble Arch in about 15 minutes. And my 500-calories of biking, which at level 12 I can usually get done in between 70-80 minutes...the last few times I've done it, I've achieved sub-hour times. I know the logic says that obviously, the lighter you get with the same muscles working better, the faster you go, but I have to tell you it's just a little unnerving, because it undermines decades of understanding of how long things will take. It's not exactly unnerving in a bad way, just...takes a little getting used to.
Mind you, I'll always have the joys of public transport to slow me right the Hell down again - I swear, London has strapped on its Tony-kicking boots, ever since we've come back from Amroth. The last few days have been needlessly Hellish on tubes and buses, meaning any increase in my walking speed has been utterly negated by the fuck-you-and-the-feet-you-walked-in-on, think-you're-something-special-well-have-a-monster-delay-fat-boy reality that is Transport for London.
Sigh.
Oh and of course the blisters. Didn't realise the blisters were making a comeback tour until I got into bed last night, but oh yes, blisters a-go-go here and there on both feet, favouring the right though, as it tends to be the 'best foot' I put forward. So now I'm gooped and plastered, and off the walking for several days again....bastard things. I'm still gonna bike though, cos I can manage to do that without particularly putting pressure on the blistery bits. Honest...
Oh yeah, and score one for the spirits of panic, shame and over-compensation - today's official weigh-in result is:
16 stone 5.25
Down two and a quarter pounds on last week after all. I guess the trick now is to still push that down next week, despite the blisters. It's at moments like this I start looking at the £180 per month Kensington gym fees, and recalling the £25 per month leisure centre fees back in Merthyr, and really pondering hard.
Hmmm...
Ah, the 80s, when it was still cool to like Tom Cruise movies and the rape of the public sector was in its infancy...
Thing is, over the last few days, I've noticed something really rather fun - I'm getting faster.
I mean, obviously I've been getting faster since I started this experiment and the weight got less and my muscles, such as they are, woke up and started earning their keep - I mean, when I started I could barely walk a mile without pain, and speed was hardly a concern compared with goggle-eyed survival. Then, as the weight began to properly begin to drop off, I got fitter, more like my old self, and my old estimates of how long it would take to get from A-B began to have some validity again.
But this is beyond what I can ever recall. A couple of mornings ago, I was doing my five-mile walk, and tube stations appeared to be whizzing by at a rather more pleasing rate than usual. Last night, I did what is usually a half hour's walk from Kensington to Marble Arch in about 15 minutes. And my 500-calories of biking, which at level 12 I can usually get done in between 70-80 minutes...the last few times I've done it, I've achieved sub-hour times. I know the logic says that obviously, the lighter you get with the same muscles working better, the faster you go, but I have to tell you it's just a little unnerving, because it undermines decades of understanding of how long things will take. It's not exactly unnerving in a bad way, just...takes a little getting used to.
Mind you, I'll always have the joys of public transport to slow me right the Hell down again - I swear, London has strapped on its Tony-kicking boots, ever since we've come back from Amroth. The last few days have been needlessly Hellish on tubes and buses, meaning any increase in my walking speed has been utterly negated by the fuck-you-and-the-feet-you-walked-in-on, think-you're-something-special-well-have-a-monster-delay-fat-boy reality that is Transport for London.
Sigh.
Oh and of course the blisters. Didn't realise the blisters were making a comeback tour until I got into bed last night, but oh yes, blisters a-go-go here and there on both feet, favouring the right though, as it tends to be the 'best foot' I put forward. So now I'm gooped and plastered, and off the walking for several days again....bastard things. I'm still gonna bike though, cos I can manage to do that without particularly putting pressure on the blistery bits. Honest...
Oh yeah, and score one for the spirits of panic, shame and over-compensation - today's official weigh-in result is:
16 stone 5.25
Down two and a quarter pounds on last week after all. I guess the trick now is to still push that down next week, despite the blisters. It's at moments like this I start looking at the £180 per month Kensington gym fees, and recalling the £25 per month leisure centre fees back in Merthyr, and really pondering hard.
Hmmm...
Monday 14 November 2011
The Reappearing Man?
Blood was 5.3 this morning.
Slept badly last night.
Kept tossing and turning. Replaying the events of yesterday.
The thing is...yesterday started out so promisingly. Did an unofficial just-for-the-sake-of-knowing weigh-in in the morning, after which I turned to d.
"There you go then - all I have to do is not do anything stupid and remember to crap Tuesday morning..."
"Yes dear," said d, who by now has grown apparently entirely used to such declarations from me.
The day went well - cleaning, packing, sueing Mary poppins, yadda yadda yadda. Then, while I was looking at a handful of souvenirs I only vaguely remembered ever owning, wondering whether they were priceless heirlooms or bits of pointless tat we just hadn't had the conviction to throw away, d grinned around the bedroom door.
I love a good grin around a bedroom door - it promises fun, and possibly even frolics.
"Gotcha somethin'" said d, like Mary-Ann to Gilligan when trying to persuade him to do something dangerous.
"Yeah?" I said, holding up a pink ceramic polar bear, as if for explanation.
She showed me what she'd brought. It was a thing of beauty.
It was a big, big graze box - nuts and dried fruit in a lovely promising tupperware almost the size of a shoe box.
"Awww," I said, throwing the polar bear onto the bed behind me. "Come to me, wench, let me love you forever..."
d's not stupid though - she's had invitations like that from me before, and knows that, diverting though those afternoons may be, if I'm already doing something she wants done, it's best not to get within arms' reach. She held out the box, and as I reached and took it, she scarpered back down to her kitchen.
I pawed it open, not unlike the pink polar bear to a sky-blue walrus-carcass, and shovelled up pawful after pawful of the deliciousness inside. How to describe it...Well, to the Brits, it should be relatively simple - if you've ever eaten a Picnic bar, it's exactly like that, only without the chocolate coating. And trust me when I tell you that as I shovelled, I closed my eyes and imagined the chocolate just fine and dandy thankyouverymuch.
I gave myself a warning after about seven handfuls of the stuff, and closed the lid back on the box. But I couldn't...quite...bring myself to ignore it, and over the course of the next couple of hours, I had at least another three or four handfuls. Eventually, d had to come and take it off me. I let her, and thanked her, but there was a yearning in something that clearly wasn't my soul as it left the room.
I was consumed with not-exactly-guilt almost immediately. It's not guilt because I'd done what I did willingly, though perhaps not in quite my fully right mind. It's more like that sense you get when you've been sent to the headmaster for something you actually did but have managed to convince yourself you wouldn't get caught for. I did extra biking as a kind of please-don't-hurt-me penance last night (about 11 miles on level 12 - I seem to have pretty much leapfrogged level 10, for some reason, probably connected with speed of achievement). And then this morning I got out of bed and did my five mile walk without anything even vaguely approaching complaint. Shame, possibly, if such a word and such an emotion isn't too strong when transgressing one's own entirely self-constructed, entirely self-revolving boundaries, about which the wider world cares not a jot, but not complaint. So now I'm heading into Tuesday having had a glimpse of progress, more than a little convinced I've blown it.
Sigh...
The Reappearing Man, anyone?
Slept badly last night.
Kept tossing and turning. Replaying the events of yesterday.
The thing is...yesterday started out so promisingly. Did an unofficial just-for-the-sake-of-knowing weigh-in in the morning, after which I turned to d.
"There you go then - all I have to do is not do anything stupid and remember to crap Tuesday morning..."
"Yes dear," said d, who by now has grown apparently entirely used to such declarations from me.
The day went well - cleaning, packing, sueing Mary poppins, yadda yadda yadda. Then, while I was looking at a handful of souvenirs I only vaguely remembered ever owning, wondering whether they were priceless heirlooms or bits of pointless tat we just hadn't had the conviction to throw away, d grinned around the bedroom door.
I love a good grin around a bedroom door - it promises fun, and possibly even frolics.
"Gotcha somethin'" said d, like Mary-Ann to Gilligan when trying to persuade him to do something dangerous.
"Yeah?" I said, holding up a pink ceramic polar bear, as if for explanation.
She showed me what she'd brought. It was a thing of beauty.
It was a big, big graze box - nuts and dried fruit in a lovely promising tupperware almost the size of a shoe box.
"Awww," I said, throwing the polar bear onto the bed behind me. "Come to me, wench, let me love you forever..."
d's not stupid though - she's had invitations like that from me before, and knows that, diverting though those afternoons may be, if I'm already doing something she wants done, it's best not to get within arms' reach. She held out the box, and as I reached and took it, she scarpered back down to her kitchen.
I pawed it open, not unlike the pink polar bear to a sky-blue walrus-carcass, and shovelled up pawful after pawful of the deliciousness inside. How to describe it...Well, to the Brits, it should be relatively simple - if you've ever eaten a Picnic bar, it's exactly like that, only without the chocolate coating. And trust me when I tell you that as I shovelled, I closed my eyes and imagined the chocolate just fine and dandy thankyouverymuch.
I gave myself a warning after about seven handfuls of the stuff, and closed the lid back on the box. But I couldn't...quite...bring myself to ignore it, and over the course of the next couple of hours, I had at least another three or four handfuls. Eventually, d had to come and take it off me. I let her, and thanked her, but there was a yearning in something that clearly wasn't my soul as it left the room.
I was consumed with not-exactly-guilt almost immediately. It's not guilt because I'd done what I did willingly, though perhaps not in quite my fully right mind. It's more like that sense you get when you've been sent to the headmaster for something you actually did but have managed to convince yourself you wouldn't get caught for. I did extra biking as a kind of please-don't-hurt-me penance last night (about 11 miles on level 12 - I seem to have pretty much leapfrogged level 10, for some reason, probably connected with speed of achievement). And then this morning I got out of bed and did my five mile walk without anything even vaguely approaching complaint. Shame, possibly, if such a word and such an emotion isn't too strong when transgressing one's own entirely self-constructed, entirely self-revolving boundaries, about which the wider world cares not a jot, but not complaint. So now I'm heading into Tuesday having had a glimpse of progress, more than a little convinced I've blown it.
Sigh...
The Reappearing Man, anyone?
Sunday 13 November 2011
Sueing Mary Poppins For Damages
Complaint:
1. The National Amalgamated Union of Woodland Creatures and Disappearers (NAUWOOCaDs), hereafter known as The Plaintiff, is bringing a complaint against:
a) The Princess Snow White, and
b) The Nanny Mary Poppins.
2. The Complaint consists of a statement that:
a) The Princess Snow White did knowingly oppress a number of woodland creatures, including deer, doves, chipmunks and a family of bluebirds (who have chosen to remain anonymous at this time), and did knowingly take credit for their labour, in particular in relation to the Dwarvic Mining Consortium. Said Princess, it is alleged, extorted board and lodging out of the Consortium as a 'Housekeeper', while not, in fact, getting off her perfectly-drawn Princess arse. The Plaintiff is sueing for proper reparation for their back-breaking labours, and for the misrepresentation of housework as something as easy as a singalong.
b) The Nanny Mary Poppins did likewise knowingly misrepresent the exhausting labour of housework, claiming that if you 'find the fun', the job would become 'a game'. This is clearly and palpably untrue, to the extent that Poppins was forced to resort to the black arts and child labour to get the job done. The Plaintiff is co-sueing, with Master and Miss M and J Banks, for misrepresentation and damages.
The Plaintiff is also representing two other co-complainants, Tony and d of Stratford, London, both of whom claim mental and physical distress, having been raised to believe both Snow White and Mary Poppins in their assertions of the easiness of housework, and having therefore decided to clean their one bedroom apartment over the weekend of 12th-13th November 2011. Attempts to coax friendly bluebirds to doing the work on their behalf failed on two counts: 1) It's November, bluebirds have all fucked off south for the winter, and 2) Robins are miniature raptors, and when invited in, the little bastards shat all over the bedroom.
Attempts to turn the job into a game via a 'spoonful of sugar' and finger-snap magic resulted in the co-complainants being cornered by a ravenous, demon-possessed chest of drawers and a bookcase full of vampire bats.
The Plaintiff is demanding damages to the extent of half of the Charmings' kingdom, and seeking an injunction to stop Ms Poppins from practicing as a Nanny or in any other field in which she might be called upon to practice housewifery.
The Complaint rests.
1. The National Amalgamated Union of Woodland Creatures and Disappearers (NAUWOOCaDs), hereafter known as The Plaintiff, is bringing a complaint against:
a) The Princess Snow White, and
b) The Nanny Mary Poppins.
2. The Complaint consists of a statement that:
a) The Princess Snow White did knowingly oppress a number of woodland creatures, including deer, doves, chipmunks and a family of bluebirds (who have chosen to remain anonymous at this time), and did knowingly take credit for their labour, in particular in relation to the Dwarvic Mining Consortium. Said Princess, it is alleged, extorted board and lodging out of the Consortium as a 'Housekeeper', while not, in fact, getting off her perfectly-drawn Princess arse. The Plaintiff is sueing for proper reparation for their back-breaking labours, and for the misrepresentation of housework as something as easy as a singalong.
b) The Nanny Mary Poppins did likewise knowingly misrepresent the exhausting labour of housework, claiming that if you 'find the fun', the job would become 'a game'. This is clearly and palpably untrue, to the extent that Poppins was forced to resort to the black arts and child labour to get the job done. The Plaintiff is co-sueing, with Master and Miss M and J Banks, for misrepresentation and damages.
The Plaintiff is also representing two other co-complainants, Tony and d of Stratford, London, both of whom claim mental and physical distress, having been raised to believe both Snow White and Mary Poppins in their assertions of the easiness of housework, and having therefore decided to clean their one bedroom apartment over the weekend of 12th-13th November 2011. Attempts to coax friendly bluebirds to doing the work on their behalf failed on two counts: 1) It's November, bluebirds have all fucked off south for the winter, and 2) Robins are miniature raptors, and when invited in, the little bastards shat all over the bedroom.
Attempts to turn the job into a game via a 'spoonful of sugar' and finger-snap magic resulted in the co-complainants being cornered by a ravenous, demon-possessed chest of drawers and a bookcase full of vampire bats.
The Plaintiff is demanding damages to the extent of half of the Charmings' kingdom, and seeking an injunction to stop Ms Poppins from practicing as a Nanny or in any other field in which she might be called upon to practice housewifery.
The Complaint rests.
Saturday 12 November 2011
JEI
Blood this morning was 4.4, though I did wait till 11AM beofre taking it, so I'm not sure that counts.
Mainly today, we've been taking stock and tidying up in the house. Lunch was fun though - you've heard me bitch...well, even this week, come to think of it, about TMI - how having calorie-counts on foods is both great in practical terms, but also, too much freakin' information when there happen to be too many damn calories in it to let me kid myself it's fine to eat, whereas, without the information printed on menus and packets and the like, this particular Disappearing Man could convince himself everything was fiiiiiiine and chow the Hell on down.
Today we popped to Pizza Hut for lunch, and - as d says, letting my Inner Teenage Girl out to play, my brain was calculating calorie-values, and what happened if you went for the ultra thin instead of the pan, and yadda yadda yadda...
Well, Pizza Hut have (as I mentioned a while ago), taken to printing calorie-values per slice on their menus. But, for the Disappearing among us, they've now taken to delivering a thinner-than-thin, crispy-as-crisps range of practically non-existent pizzas, each of which go under the proud boast of being 'under 500 calories - per pizza' - or 'within daily bikeable range' in case you needed the translation. This, to me, is a classic example of JEI - Just Enough Information, and one which earns The Hut my Disappearing Dudes of the Day award.
Now - back to the kitchen for more washing up...then onto the bike to make lunch a thing of the past!
Can we say 'Obsessive Much'?
Mainly today, we've been taking stock and tidying up in the house. Lunch was fun though - you've heard me bitch...well, even this week, come to think of it, about TMI - how having calorie-counts on foods is both great in practical terms, but also, too much freakin' information when there happen to be too many damn calories in it to let me kid myself it's fine to eat, whereas, without the information printed on menus and packets and the like, this particular Disappearing Man could convince himself everything was fiiiiiiine and chow the Hell on down.
Today we popped to Pizza Hut for lunch, and - as d says, letting my Inner Teenage Girl out to play, my brain was calculating calorie-values, and what happened if you went for the ultra thin instead of the pan, and yadda yadda yadda...
Well, Pizza Hut have (as I mentioned a while ago), taken to printing calorie-values per slice on their menus. But, for the Disappearing among us, they've now taken to delivering a thinner-than-thin, crispy-as-crisps range of practically non-existent pizzas, each of which go under the proud boast of being 'under 500 calories - per pizza' - or 'within daily bikeable range' in case you needed the translation. This, to me, is a classic example of JEI - Just Enough Information, and one which earns The Hut my Disappearing Dudes of the Day award.
Now - back to the kitchen for more washing up...then onto the bike to make lunch a thing of the past!
Can we say 'Obsessive Much'?
Friday 11 November 2011
The Disappearing Coat
Meant to mention this yesterday - blood was 4.8 yesterday. Was reminded this morning, because the blood was 4.8 again this morning....
Anyhow - bit more of my usual Stubborn Bastard today - had coffee for breakfast, little bit of walking, am about to get back on the bike, yadda yadda yadda, so awoohoo, and fuck you to SBF, which is always reassuring.
Another busy day though, so hardly time to worry about being a Disappearing Man. Then I met up with d for a high-protein dinner, courtesy of Nandos, and a Friday night Adventure, which turned into a nice, relaxed wander round Notting Hill.
"Ohh, look at that," said d. It was one of those retro clothes shops that are scattered higgledy-piggledy throughout Britain. "I've always wanted to have a look in one of these places, but we're always on a bus at the time."
I checked.
"We're not on a bus right now," I said, once I was sure of my facts.
"Oh," she said. "No." She grew a grin that made me fall in love with her all over again, and pushed open the door.
It was almost exactly like you'd imagine a retro clothes shop would be, only classier and better. d wandered the aisles, fingering fabrics and sighing in appreciation. I wandered the opposite aisle, which turned out to be menswear.
I love wandering through this sort of place, but I've never considered buying anything in one of them before. It's just not something that you think about when you're a fundamentally fat fuck - all the clothes are second hand, and it simply doesn't occur to you that anyone else, especially a generation or so ago, was ever quite the same size as you. And the idea of taking of your existing clothes to try stuff on, in the absolute concrete certainty that what's going to happen is that you'll be standing there, looking like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag, with your certainties confirmed and your self-esteem shattered and crumbled round your ankles...it's soul-destroying.
I know, I know, women everywhere who read this are going "You don't know you're fucking born, mate..." - and this is of course true - the humiliation regularly meted out to women in the process of simply buying stuff to cover their bodies is far and away beyond what any Disappearing Man has ever had to cope with. All I'm saying is that I went in to browse and vaguely fantasise.
"Oh, baby, look at this," said d.
This was a coat. A grey, grown-up, beautiful long coat. Wool and cashmere blend, styled, lined and perfect.
"Yeah, 's'lovely, Honey," I said. She held it out to me, looking expectant. I had the soul-destroying monologue in my head...and then I looked at d. At her face, and her eyes, and look of sparkly expectation...and I took the coat from her.
I slipped one arm in, and bent it - normally, you'll know if a coat is going to git when you bend your arm. I was expecting the barely-bend of groaning material...but no. It bent comfortably, so I slid the other arm in. That worked too. I pulled the coat on fully.
Now I'd be lying if I said it fit perfectly. It didn't quite do up, but it fit well enough to make me look at myself in the mirror.
"Holy...Hell," I said.
I took it out of the shop for £20.
Longer-term readers will remember the saga of buying jeans that were too small, in order to Disappear into them.
This is different.
This is not optimism, or hope, or foolishness made manifest. This is progress personified. This is the death of absolute fear. This is having a moment of ultimate self-justification, of looking at yourself in the mirror and not loathing what you see, and knowing that progress has got you this far, and will get you further, with work and time and the resurgence of the Stubborn Bastard Within.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Disappearing Coat.
And now it's mine.
Anyhow - bit more of my usual Stubborn Bastard today - had coffee for breakfast, little bit of walking, am about to get back on the bike, yadda yadda yadda, so awoohoo, and fuck you to SBF, which is always reassuring.
Another busy day though, so hardly time to worry about being a Disappearing Man. Then I met up with d for a high-protein dinner, courtesy of Nandos, and a Friday night Adventure, which turned into a nice, relaxed wander round Notting Hill.
"Ohh, look at that," said d. It was one of those retro clothes shops that are scattered higgledy-piggledy throughout Britain. "I've always wanted to have a look in one of these places, but we're always on a bus at the time."
I checked.
"We're not on a bus right now," I said, once I was sure of my facts.
"Oh," she said. "No." She grew a grin that made me fall in love with her all over again, and pushed open the door.
It was almost exactly like you'd imagine a retro clothes shop would be, only classier and better. d wandered the aisles, fingering fabrics and sighing in appreciation. I wandered the opposite aisle, which turned out to be menswear.
I love wandering through this sort of place, but I've never considered buying anything in one of them before. It's just not something that you think about when you're a fundamentally fat fuck - all the clothes are second hand, and it simply doesn't occur to you that anyone else, especially a generation or so ago, was ever quite the same size as you. And the idea of taking of your existing clothes to try stuff on, in the absolute concrete certainty that what's going to happen is that you'll be standing there, looking like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag, with your certainties confirmed and your self-esteem shattered and crumbled round your ankles...it's soul-destroying.
I know, I know, women everywhere who read this are going "You don't know you're fucking born, mate..." - and this is of course true - the humiliation regularly meted out to women in the process of simply buying stuff to cover their bodies is far and away beyond what any Disappearing Man has ever had to cope with. All I'm saying is that I went in to browse and vaguely fantasise.
"Oh, baby, look at this," said d.
This was a coat. A grey, grown-up, beautiful long coat. Wool and cashmere blend, styled, lined and perfect.
"Yeah, 's'lovely, Honey," I said. She held it out to me, looking expectant. I had the soul-destroying monologue in my head...and then I looked at d. At her face, and her eyes, and look of sparkly expectation...and I took the coat from her.
I slipped one arm in, and bent it - normally, you'll know if a coat is going to git when you bend your arm. I was expecting the barely-bend of groaning material...but no. It bent comfortably, so I slid the other arm in. That worked too. I pulled the coat on fully.
Now I'd be lying if I said it fit perfectly. It didn't quite do up, but it fit well enough to make me look at myself in the mirror.
"Holy...Hell," I said.
I took it out of the shop for £20.
Longer-term readers will remember the saga of buying jeans that were too small, in order to Disappear into them.
This is different.
This is not optimism, or hope, or foolishness made manifest. This is progress personified. This is the death of absolute fear. This is having a moment of ultimate self-justification, of looking at yourself in the mirror and not loathing what you see, and knowing that progress has got you this far, and will get you further, with work and time and the resurgence of the Stubborn Bastard Within.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Disappearing Coat.
And now it's mine.
Thursday 10 November 2011
A Lingering Case of SBF
This week feels far from the triumphant return to Disappearing form I was hoping for. Instead, it feels like Tuesday's 'four stone' result was the quick-snatched breath of a drowning man, caught in the undertow of calories and fat. Tuesday I did a lot of walking. Since then, practically nothing - no walking, no biking, and frankly very little time to do any tonight either.
This morning, I had a severe case of SBF - or Stubborn Bastardy Failure, to the uninitiated. The alarm went off at 6.30, and I did some rapid math - the cold and wet and walking added up to a less attractive option than the warm and snuggly and snoring. And perhaps dangerously, the joy of Disappearing simply didn't add up at that point either.
What's more, I had soup for both breakfast and lunch today, and reached for a piece of bread with the first of them. Mmm....bread gooood. I reached for another. And before I looked up, I'd had three slices. Now, let's talk TMI.
I said a couple of days ago that I could really have done without those adorable calorie-scamps at Starbucks telling me exactly how much energy I was pouring into myself with my bucket of chosen pointlessness. So quite why I reached for the bread bag and interrogated its table of contents, I'm not entirely sure. Masochism, probably. Three slices, at no less than 135 calories per slice though whacked me in the face with the frying-pan of panic and guilt. Adding 150 calories of soup meant it was a huge wobbly arse of a breakfast, and I don't feel like the day has ever quite recovered from that.
Which is probably the moment to mention I had pizza for dinner. Complete SBF from start to finish today. Gonna try not to stress about the fact that a day like this probably equates to a pound and a half or more of regrown blubber. Instead, I'm gonna try and get on the bike for a while before heading to bed, then go snore, get up, and wake up the Stubborn Bastard you know and laugh at.
Sigh...
This morning, I had a severe case of SBF - or Stubborn Bastardy Failure, to the uninitiated. The alarm went off at 6.30, and I did some rapid math - the cold and wet and walking added up to a less attractive option than the warm and snuggly and snoring. And perhaps dangerously, the joy of Disappearing simply didn't add up at that point either.
What's more, I had soup for both breakfast and lunch today, and reached for a piece of bread with the first of them. Mmm....bread gooood. I reached for another. And before I looked up, I'd had three slices. Now, let's talk TMI.
I said a couple of days ago that I could really have done without those adorable calorie-scamps at Starbucks telling me exactly how much energy I was pouring into myself with my bucket of chosen pointlessness. So quite why I reached for the bread bag and interrogated its table of contents, I'm not entirely sure. Masochism, probably. Three slices, at no less than 135 calories per slice though whacked me in the face with the frying-pan of panic and guilt. Adding 150 calories of soup meant it was a huge wobbly arse of a breakfast, and I don't feel like the day has ever quite recovered from that.
Which is probably the moment to mention I had pizza for dinner. Complete SBF from start to finish today. Gonna try not to stress about the fact that a day like this probably equates to a pound and a half or more of regrown blubber. Instead, I'm gonna try and get on the bike for a while before heading to bed, then go snore, get up, and wake up the Stubborn Bastard you know and laugh at.
Sigh...
Wednesday 9 November 2011
Disappearing By Dictat?
Did I fall down a crack in the universe and end up in BizarroWorld?
I have to ask, because the news headline on today's BBC Health website is "Eating Like The English Could Save Thousands Of Lives."
This is the English Diet that includes soggy, greasy chips, faggots, mushy peas, suet puddings, spotted dick and the like...
Mind you, I suppose the background makes this a bit clearer - the English Diet is apparently much healthier than...the rest of the British Diet - Scotland with its reputation of deep frying everything, Wales with it National Dish of cheese on toast and its penchant for seaweed, and Northern Ireland, land of the Almighty Potato. There's apparently a 'vegetable gap' between England and the rest of the UK. I love that idea - like people in Scotland are wandering about down by the border, when they see a field of broccoli and start cowering back in terror, like "Wha' the Hell's yon greeeen stuff, eh?"
"Ach, they're cunning wee Sassenach bastards, right enough, let's get away up the chippy for a fried boot and leave well alone, no?..."
Perhaps the more truly weird, truly scary part of this story is that the researchers from Oxford University who came up with this data about the English Diet being of much healthier have also recommended following the lead of Denmark.
You don't know about Denmark? Ah - the home of Danish pastries and kickass bacon recently passed a 'fat tax' on foods high in saturated fats. Irony...not so big in Denmark these days, I'm thinking. Other countries are also considering passing an additional tax on fatty foots and fizzy drinks. And the 'Eat Like An Englishman' boffins at Oxford are endorsing the idea of exploring a British tax on foods that are "bad for you".
Can I just say, I will never be the Disappearing equivalent of a rabid ex-smoker, who then thinks smoking is the most evil thing on the planet. As far as I'm concerned, if you wanna shove a block of lard into pastry and then deep-fry the guts out of it and eat the whole thing yourself - good on ya. Enjoy if it genuinely makes you happy. There are plenty of reasons why people eat crap - poverty, ease, sheer gorgeous enjoyment, self-hatred, yadda yadda yadda, but should you be forced into behaving "properly"? By all means have the debate among yourself, this Disappearing Man will be voting strictly in the negative. But then I'm in favour of legalising most things.
Except possibly Justin Bieber.
I have to ask, because the news headline on today's BBC Health website is "Eating Like The English Could Save Thousands Of Lives."
This is the English Diet that includes soggy, greasy chips, faggots, mushy peas, suet puddings, spotted dick and the like...
Mind you, I suppose the background makes this a bit clearer - the English Diet is apparently much healthier than...the rest of the British Diet - Scotland with its reputation of deep frying everything, Wales with it National Dish of cheese on toast and its penchant for seaweed, and Northern Ireland, land of the Almighty Potato. There's apparently a 'vegetable gap' between England and the rest of the UK. I love that idea - like people in Scotland are wandering about down by the border, when they see a field of broccoli and start cowering back in terror, like "Wha' the Hell's yon greeeen stuff, eh?"
"Ach, they're cunning wee Sassenach bastards, right enough, let's get away up the chippy for a fried boot and leave well alone, no?..."
Perhaps the more truly weird, truly scary part of this story is that the researchers from Oxford University who came up with this data about the English Diet being of much healthier have also recommended following the lead of Denmark.
You don't know about Denmark? Ah - the home of Danish pastries and kickass bacon recently passed a 'fat tax' on foods high in saturated fats. Irony...not so big in Denmark these days, I'm thinking. Other countries are also considering passing an additional tax on fatty foots and fizzy drinks. And the 'Eat Like An Englishman' boffins at Oxford are endorsing the idea of exploring a British tax on foods that are "bad for you".
Can I just say, I will never be the Disappearing equivalent of a rabid ex-smoker, who then thinks smoking is the most evil thing on the planet. As far as I'm concerned, if you wanna shove a block of lard into pastry and then deep-fry the guts out of it and eat the whole thing yourself - good on ya. Enjoy if it genuinely makes you happy. There are plenty of reasons why people eat crap - poverty, ease, sheer gorgeous enjoyment, self-hatred, yadda yadda yadda, but should you be forced into behaving "properly"? By all means have the debate among yourself, this Disappearing Man will be voting strictly in the negative. But then I'm in favour of legalising most things.
Except possibly Justin Bieber.
Tuesday 8 November 2011
Go Figure
Blood was 5.3 this morning, which is fine for me.
Had a bit of a Damascus moment today, in Starbucks at Aldgate. Cos one of the things you really don't want if you're embarked on a self-deluding path is cold hard facts...
So thanks a freakin' lot, Starbucks Aldgate, for happening to have a brochure by the stirrers, with the calorific values of your coffees in. Needed that like a goddamned hole in the head.
Turns out my big-ass bucket o'pointlessness - nnnotsofreakin' pointless after all - even with skimmed milk, you're looking at 165 calories per bucket. Now, there will be those among you who think..."So the Hell what?" Well, for perspective, a big-ass can of really hearty "full meal by itself" soup...is 165 calories. Two buckets of coffee per day is over 300 calories. A day like I had recently, with cofee coming out of every orifice, is gonna be over 500 calories.
And I know how hard I have to work to burn 500 calories. And that's a sonofabitch.
So - time to start exercise the self-mastery that Aristotle keeps banging on about every time I pick up the Kindle, and the thing is, knowing the figures makes that self-mastery a walk in the park, because knowing how much each bucket of coffee costs me in terms of cycling is a great counterbalance to how much I think I actually want it at the moment of consumption. I'm by no means gonna do a volte-face and swear off the decaff - sometimes, I really enjoy those buckets, sometimes they make my day snap into focus and rightness, and make me go "Oh yeah, game on." And I'm not gonna whinge when I have them. I'm just gonna make sure when I have them, I really want them. If I just want the sensation, I can always downsize (I should explain, d's gonna be laughing and feeling smug right about now, cos she's told me this for months now) - a small bucket is only about 102 calories, which I can handle.
So this is just me getting a bit rational about the whole coffee as replacement-dessert thing.
Oh wait, it's Tuesday, isn't it? You'll be wanting to know the weigh-in result, won't you?
That's four stone, Brit-readers. 56 pounds if you're American and 25.5 kg for the Europeans, Australians and other metric fans. Do the Four Stone Dance, people, go wild and crazy!
So - that's 44.4444 recurring percent of my goal achieved. If I maintain a two pound per week loss consistently over the next four weeks, I'll have made it a whole 50% of the way before Christmas. I seem to have said this a lot of times already, but this is based on the shifted, eventual goal of getting to my 'ideal weight.' On the original target of losing 104 pounds in a year, I've now completed 53% of the task in 66% of the time. But, as I've also said before, given the blisters, and the broken toes, and the occasional broken bike here and there, I'm happy enough with this progress.
Here's to the next milestone - the halfway point...
Had a bit of a Damascus moment today, in Starbucks at Aldgate. Cos one of the things you really don't want if you're embarked on a self-deluding path is cold hard facts...
So thanks a freakin' lot, Starbucks Aldgate, for happening to have a brochure by the stirrers, with the calorific values of your coffees in. Needed that like a goddamned hole in the head.
Turns out my big-ass bucket o'pointlessness - nnnotsofreakin' pointless after all - even with skimmed milk, you're looking at 165 calories per bucket. Now, there will be those among you who think..."So the Hell what?" Well, for perspective, a big-ass can of really hearty "full meal by itself" soup...is 165 calories. Two buckets of coffee per day is over 300 calories. A day like I had recently, with cofee coming out of every orifice, is gonna be over 500 calories.
And I know how hard I have to work to burn 500 calories. And that's a sonofabitch.
So - time to start exercise the self-mastery that Aristotle keeps banging on about every time I pick up the Kindle, and the thing is, knowing the figures makes that self-mastery a walk in the park, because knowing how much each bucket of coffee costs me in terms of cycling is a great counterbalance to how much I think I actually want it at the moment of consumption. I'm by no means gonna do a volte-face and swear off the decaff - sometimes, I really enjoy those buckets, sometimes they make my day snap into focus and rightness, and make me go "Oh yeah, game on." And I'm not gonna whinge when I have them. I'm just gonna make sure when I have them, I really want them. If I just want the sensation, I can always downsize (I should explain, d's gonna be laughing and feeling smug right about now, cos she's told me this for months now) - a small bucket is only about 102 calories, which I can handle.
So this is just me getting a bit rational about the whole coffee as replacement-dessert thing.
Oh wait, it's Tuesday, isn't it? You'll be wanting to know the weigh-in result, won't you?
16 stone 7.5 pounds.
That's four stone, Brit-readers. 56 pounds if you're American and 25.5 kg for the Europeans, Australians and other metric fans. Do the Four Stone Dance, people, go wild and crazy!
So - that's 44.4444 recurring percent of my goal achieved. If I maintain a two pound per week loss consistently over the next four weeks, I'll have made it a whole 50% of the way before Christmas. I seem to have said this a lot of times already, but this is based on the shifted, eventual goal of getting to my 'ideal weight.' On the original target of losing 104 pounds in a year, I've now completed 53% of the task in 66% of the time. But, as I've also said before, given the blisters, and the broken toes, and the occasional broken bike here and there, I'm happy enough with this progress.
Here's to the next milestone - the halfway point...
The Parisian Principle
Have you ever wondered what Evil tastes like?
Relax, I've got you covered. It tastes like Tinseltown, Westbourne Grove. Seriously, I've been alive for forty years now, and I've rarely, if ever, had a more nauseating and frankly enraging food experience than tonight.
It being payday, d and I met up in my neck of the woods. We'd had a regular meet-up spot for a while, called Bodeans in Westbourne Grove - it had succeulent pulled pork, ribs, burnt ends, all the best things humans have thought to do to pigs. Then it closed down (retreating to its core location by Tower Bridge). After a while laying fallow, the space was bought by these Tinseltown jokers.
It claims to be an American diner and milkshake bar. Our expectations, frankly, weren't high, because we've been well and truly ass-fucked by places claiming to be American diners in this city before (apologies for the image, but really, that's what it feels like when a place not only lies to you but rapes the culture of a diverse cuisine).
But still, we figured we'd give it a try.
"Oh look honey," I said as we approached the door, "it's a Halal American Diner and Milkshake Bar".
d blinked.
"Only in London," I said. Not that the idea of a Halal American Diner is particularly weird - one thing you should take as read in the States is that if you can slam the words together, somebody will invent it. But stuck in Westbourne Grove, West London, it spoke not of exciting culinary invention, but more of taking the piss.
We walked in all the same.
"Table for two, please," we said.
"Unff," said the waiter, walking us past plenty of empty tables and booths, and gesturing upstairs. We blinked at him.
"Really?" we said. "We have to go upstairs?"
"Errrryes," he said.
"Why?" said d.
"Err..." he said, sighing heavily and going to mutter to his colleague.
"Unff," he snorted, gesturing at a downstairs booth. The menu was full of halal dishes and piri piri, which, in their place are both cool, but on a menu full of burgers and hot dogs, they felt out of place, and the decor was more shabby British 50s caff than American diner. We chose halal dogs, I had beans, d had mash.
When they came, they looked like nothing you'd ever actually aim to make, let alone consume. d's mash looked greyish and gluey, but my girl's a veteran of this kind of thing - she's been in Britain seven years now.
"Scuse me, can we get some butter?" we asked, thinking to stir it in and exchange gluey for glorious, on one of d's fundamental principles - "Butter makes it better, Baby" - but the waiter frowned as if we'd asked for blended fetus. I wouldn't have minded, but if that's what we'd wanted, we could have stirred my 'black forest smoothie' into the thing - it had a colour and consistency you'd expect to find spouting out of someone who counted their life in seconds.
Butter, clearly, was a foreign concept - how much more evidence do you need that this American Diner was frankly full of shit.
"Nnnno," he said.
"You have no butter?"
"Nnno," he said. "It's already in the mash. It comes from our factory," he shrugged, walking off before we could say anything...
The evening went from unbelievable to gloopy when we discovered some garlicky crap at the bottom of our dogs.
"Is mustard!" snarled a waitress when we enquired what it was. Bullshit of course, it was some sort of aioli, but then, when d squirted 'mustard' out of the yellow globe on the table, what splurted out was dark and brown and suspicious.
All of which is by way of illustrating a principle that we've been feeling more and more since coming back from Amroth - The Parisian Principle.
Paris, you might remember, is where we went on our honeymoon. It was perfectly nice and pink and welcoming to us (as a city - the behaviour of individual Parisian hoteliers notwithstanding) from the moment we arrived, until the moment we woke up on the final day, aiming to leave it. Then it turned its teeth on us and mauled us at every step till we got the Hell out of the place.
Not that we're aiming to leave London as such, but we've certainly done our fair share of bitching about it since we came back. And it's like London, too, is baring its teeth and biting our lily white asses, on a 'hate me, I'll hate you back' vibe. So it's as though the city itself is turning on us, as though it feels we no longer belong in its streets and restaurants. Oh sure, it'll take our money, but it's quite happy, too, to step on our toes and spit in our hot dogs - it's like London is treating us now not as its own, but as tourists who have outstayed their welcome. So, big thick single-finger salutes to you, one and all at Tinseltown, and anywhere else that doesn't want to treat us like human beings. I'm happy to consider it a Disappearing Aid, and fuck you too!
Blood, by the way, was 4.8 this morning...
Relax, I've got you covered. It tastes like Tinseltown, Westbourne Grove. Seriously, I've been alive for forty years now, and I've rarely, if ever, had a more nauseating and frankly enraging food experience than tonight.
It being payday, d and I met up in my neck of the woods. We'd had a regular meet-up spot for a while, called Bodeans in Westbourne Grove - it had succeulent pulled pork, ribs, burnt ends, all the best things humans have thought to do to pigs. Then it closed down (retreating to its core location by Tower Bridge). After a while laying fallow, the space was bought by these Tinseltown jokers.
It claims to be an American diner and milkshake bar. Our expectations, frankly, weren't high, because we've been well and truly ass-fucked by places claiming to be American diners in this city before (apologies for the image, but really, that's what it feels like when a place not only lies to you but rapes the culture of a diverse cuisine).
But still, we figured we'd give it a try.
"Oh look honey," I said as we approached the door, "it's a Halal American Diner and Milkshake Bar".
d blinked.
"Only in London," I said. Not that the idea of a Halal American Diner is particularly weird - one thing you should take as read in the States is that if you can slam the words together, somebody will invent it. But stuck in Westbourne Grove, West London, it spoke not of exciting culinary invention, but more of taking the piss.
We walked in all the same.
"Table for two, please," we said.
"Unff," said the waiter, walking us past plenty of empty tables and booths, and gesturing upstairs. We blinked at him.
"Really?" we said. "We have to go upstairs?"
"Errrryes," he said.
"Why?" said d.
"Err..." he said, sighing heavily and going to mutter to his colleague.
"Unff," he snorted, gesturing at a downstairs booth. The menu was full of halal dishes and piri piri, which, in their place are both cool, but on a menu full of burgers and hot dogs, they felt out of place, and the decor was more shabby British 50s caff than American diner. We chose halal dogs, I had beans, d had mash.
When they came, they looked like nothing you'd ever actually aim to make, let alone consume. d's mash looked greyish and gluey, but my girl's a veteran of this kind of thing - she's been in Britain seven years now.
"Scuse me, can we get some butter?" we asked, thinking to stir it in and exchange gluey for glorious, on one of d's fundamental principles - "Butter makes it better, Baby" - but the waiter frowned as if we'd asked for blended fetus. I wouldn't have minded, but if that's what we'd wanted, we could have stirred my 'black forest smoothie' into the thing - it had a colour and consistency you'd expect to find spouting out of someone who counted their life in seconds.
Butter, clearly, was a foreign concept - how much more evidence do you need that this American Diner was frankly full of shit.
"Nnnno," he said.
"You have no butter?"
"Nnno," he said. "It's already in the mash. It comes from our factory," he shrugged, walking off before we could say anything...
The evening went from unbelievable to gloopy when we discovered some garlicky crap at the bottom of our dogs.
"Is mustard!" snarled a waitress when we enquired what it was. Bullshit of course, it was some sort of aioli, but then, when d squirted 'mustard' out of the yellow globe on the table, what splurted out was dark and brown and suspicious.
All of which is by way of illustrating a principle that we've been feeling more and more since coming back from Amroth - The Parisian Principle.
Paris, you might remember, is where we went on our honeymoon. It was perfectly nice and pink and welcoming to us (as a city - the behaviour of individual Parisian hoteliers notwithstanding) from the moment we arrived, until the moment we woke up on the final day, aiming to leave it. Then it turned its teeth on us and mauled us at every step till we got the Hell out of the place.
Not that we're aiming to leave London as such, but we've certainly done our fair share of bitching about it since we came back. And it's like London, too, is baring its teeth and biting our lily white asses, on a 'hate me, I'll hate you back' vibe. So it's as though the city itself is turning on us, as though it feels we no longer belong in its streets and restaurants. Oh sure, it'll take our money, but it's quite happy, too, to step on our toes and spit in our hot dogs - it's like London is treating us now not as its own, but as tourists who have outstayed their welcome. So, big thick single-finger salutes to you, one and all at Tinseltown, and anywhere else that doesn't want to treat us like human beings. I'm happy to consider it a Disappearing Aid, and fuck you too!
Blood, by the way, was 4.8 this morning...
Sunday 6 November 2011
The Partnership Principle
Whisper this quietly, in case the Bastards of Fate can hear you, but it looks like I'm coming to the end of a time of utterly mad busyness (and yet frustratingly pointless production). What that means, if we're lucky, is time to think, time to write (cos damn, I miss that), time to focus more thoroughly on Disappearing, hopefully without reverting to scale-watching, insane, paranoid whipped-through-the-world nerosis.
Today has mainly, once again, been about sitting on my ass, writing stuff for other people, to which I have no particular connection but which has to be gotten out of the way. Annnd now it is. So - it's almost like I've had a week or more actually off from this whole Disappearing lark. But now it's time to knuckle down and really kick this thing - feels like I've been swanning around back and forth in the shallows of 3.5 stone for too damn long now - it's time to get 4 stone out of the weigh (see what I did there), and start pushing on.
Haven't biked or walked properly since last Monday, so it's time to get back on the damn thing and remind my legs what the Hell they're for.
"Can we say 6.30?" d begged over breakfast.
"What?"
"Tomorrow. You're gonna walk, can we say 6.30? Cos I gotta tellya, you're killing me here..."
She's right of course. This blog is very often all about me, me, me, but let's not gloss over the facts here - as hard as being a Disappearing Person can be sometimes, being married to a Disappearing Person...pretty much sucks ass, I'd imagine. Let's not forget, before I even got on this kick, d herself had Disappeared to the tune of 3.5 stone, so I'm jussst about creeping up on her now. And she did hers with no song and dance, no 'everybody-pay-attention-to-me' self-revolution, no dramatic, woe-is-me "God, this is so haaaaard" whinging, and no 180 degree life-change that put everybody else second, and demanded every tiny victory be a ticker-tape parade.
That's not why being married to a Disappearing Person is hard of course - that's just why being married to Disappearing Me is. Being married to any Disappearing Person though does change the rules - signs of affection, signs of congratulation, long-established routines, long-established moments of communion and understanding and shared enjoyment - all of that tends to go through a paradigm shift, and it can leave you feeling like you don't know the person who's emerging from underneath the fat-blanket. I don't want to overdramatise this, but just be aware, fellow Disappearers, or partners of my fellow Disappearers - it's not easy for the partners either.
For every mile I ride the bike, it's about six minutes when technically I'm with d, but most of the time, I'm zoned off into my own little musical world. For every morning I get up at Christ o'clock to walk, it's a morning she wakes up at that time too, and can't get back to sleep. For every evening I try and add some walking into my daily routine, it's another hour added into my already-tenuous relationship to time and geogrpahy and travel, another hour d's probably waiting somewhere, because of my decision.
The point, I guess, is that this whole palaver is actually for the partners, as much as the Disappearers. The idea is that you make us want to live longer, and be able to do more with the time we have. That's more often than not why we want to Disappear in the first place. And we trust that you know that, and will tell us if and when we're putting you unnecessarily second.
"Six-thirty. Sure," I said, having pretty much run through all this in the space of a handful of nanoseconds in my brain.
"No problem baby."
Today has mainly, once again, been about sitting on my ass, writing stuff for other people, to which I have no particular connection but which has to be gotten out of the way. Annnd now it is. So - it's almost like I've had a week or more actually off from this whole Disappearing lark. But now it's time to knuckle down and really kick this thing - feels like I've been swanning around back and forth in the shallows of 3.5 stone for too damn long now - it's time to get 4 stone out of the weigh (see what I did there), and start pushing on.
Haven't biked or walked properly since last Monday, so it's time to get back on the damn thing and remind my legs what the Hell they're for.
"Can we say 6.30?" d begged over breakfast.
"What?"
"Tomorrow. You're gonna walk, can we say 6.30? Cos I gotta tellya, you're killing me here..."
She's right of course. This blog is very often all about me, me, me, but let's not gloss over the facts here - as hard as being a Disappearing Person can be sometimes, being married to a Disappearing Person...pretty much sucks ass, I'd imagine. Let's not forget, before I even got on this kick, d herself had Disappeared to the tune of 3.5 stone, so I'm jussst about creeping up on her now. And she did hers with no song and dance, no 'everybody-pay-attention-to-me' self-revolution, no dramatic, woe-is-me "God, this is so haaaaard" whinging, and no 180 degree life-change that put everybody else second, and demanded every tiny victory be a ticker-tape parade.
That's not why being married to a Disappearing Person is hard of course - that's just why being married to Disappearing Me is. Being married to any Disappearing Person though does change the rules - signs of affection, signs of congratulation, long-established routines, long-established moments of communion and understanding and shared enjoyment - all of that tends to go through a paradigm shift, and it can leave you feeling like you don't know the person who's emerging from underneath the fat-blanket. I don't want to overdramatise this, but just be aware, fellow Disappearers, or partners of my fellow Disappearers - it's not easy for the partners either.
For every mile I ride the bike, it's about six minutes when technically I'm with d, but most of the time, I'm zoned off into my own little musical world. For every morning I get up at Christ o'clock to walk, it's a morning she wakes up at that time too, and can't get back to sleep. For every evening I try and add some walking into my daily routine, it's another hour added into my already-tenuous relationship to time and geogrpahy and travel, another hour d's probably waiting somewhere, because of my decision.
The point, I guess, is that this whole palaver is actually for the partners, as much as the Disappearers. The idea is that you make us want to live longer, and be able to do more with the time we have. That's more often than not why we want to Disappear in the first place. And we trust that you know that, and will tell us if and when we're putting you unnecessarily second.
"Six-thirty. Sure," I said, having pretty much run through all this in the space of a handful of nanoseconds in my brain.
"No problem baby."
Saturday 5 November 2011
AcMe Replacement
Yesterday was weird, all ways up. In fact, this week's been weird from start to finish. I appear to have started doing something fundamentally unhealthy, mainly as a result, I think, of Diabetic-Penis Boy. I appear to have started a sort of Accidental Meal Replacement.
Meal Replacement, for those who don't know, is...well, pretty much what it sounds like - you don't have a meal, and replace it with...something else. Ordinarily, in cases where this is medically sanctioned, you replace it with a kind of slurry-shake full of vitamins and nutrients and absolutely no fun whatsoever. It was sanctioned for Penis-Boy, and it seems to be the cornerstone of some radical weightloss regimes, where eating very few calories is fundamental.
Of course, it could be argued that eating very few calories is fundamental to any weightloss regime - certainly, this one that I'm on is all about balancing what goes into my system with the amount of work I ask that system to do.
I think what probably can't be argued though is that replacing meals with enormo-mugs of decaff skinny latte is really the way to go.
I didn't really notice this was what I was doing till yesterday, when I met a friend for coffee, and ended up with two double-handed bowls of the stuff in the space of an hour, then followed that throughout the day with at least a couple of large (fuck you Starbucks, I'm not calling it Venti, because that leads to a system where the smallest coffee size is Tall, and henceforth into madness!) mugfulls of utter pointlessness.
Then, when I thought back on it, there was the mising breakfast on a couple of mornings, replaced with pointlessness. And a couple of lunches that were reduced in size because of the volume of pointlessness still in my stomach. As I say, I genuinely hadn't realised this was happening until my second mugfull in Costa yesterday (oh yeah, I'm not as proud as I once was, I'm becoming a bit of a pointlessness-whore - probably another sign that things are getting out of hand!) that the thought occurred to me.
I mean...with my wheedling, self-justifying, any-damn-thing-rationalising head on, I could plead that it a) gives me a sense of fulness that reduces the habitual 'hunger' which isn't really hunger at all, and b) it's both decaff and skinny and artificially sweetened, so it's as chronically low-impact as can possibly be imagined, so where's the bad?
But we all know this is wheedling self-justifying bullshit, right?
Aristotle would certainly be whipping me up and down the street, for not having the self-mastery to do the cold-turkey thing and simply reduce calories, increase work and suffer like a bitch inbetween. And to some extent, for once I think he'd be right. I said early on that I wasn't a 'substitution' kinda guy - though clearly, any insight into my history would prove this itself to be bullshit, as I drank Diet Coke for years without batting an ironic eye - but clealry what I've done here is discovered something that is nothing more than three substitutes in a single mug - something that, if you keep your eyes shut and don't have much of a pallette, you can convince yourself is milk, something which is little more than a flavouring to your hot milkshake, and something which gives at least the baseline systems of your tastebuds the idea of being sweet - so I'm replacing coffee, milkshakes and desserts all in one, and then clearly mainlining as much of this crap as I can get, to make up for the fact that I'm not allowing myself the genuine pleasures of real coffee, real milkshakes or real desserts.
The sick thing, probably, is that as I sit here with one eye on the clock, knowing I have about half an hour before I go out, alone, for a comedy music gig (already-thoroughly-Disappeared Man, Mitch Benn, who I've mentioned before..."Yes dear, incessantly" as d would undoubtedly say), describing the process I appear to have fallen into, I'm already thinking "Hmm, I could stop at Stratford on the way and pick up a coffee..."
Clearly unhealthy thinking, and probably, at some point in time, I should cut the decaff intake down. but right now, if some replacements have managed to sneak through my perspex walls and are helping make the Disappearing less of a fundamentally gittish process, I say screw it - it's like using Methadone to come off Heroin or some equally inappropriate and over-dramatic comparison (I often wonder, when I say these things, whether junkies or alcoholics would just like to rip my pimply head off for daring to compare addictions with them...). What I mean is, it's clearly less dangerous than if I were 'using' real coffee, milkshakes and desserts, so how about I get to a healthy weight first, and then we see?
On the business of accidental meal replacement though, I'm undecided. Clearly, under any normal circumstances, it's not healthy. But I think we're also in danger of over-accentuating the positive here - and again, I've talked about this before (sorry, this wasn't meant to be a 'Greatest Hits' post...). While everybody's delighted that I've lost my first 3.5 stone, objectively speaking, what I am is a man who's still at least five stone overweight, so I'm still really on the uphill part of the climb. And while, as I say, under normal circumstances, meal replacement's something of an emergency measure, the whispering mathematician in my brain is saying "Yeah, but if you can do it without starving and actively reducing the number of mealsworth of calories that go into your system on any given day...where's the bad?"
I'm not gonna be stupid about this, in all fairness - I did this accidentally this week. And one day, certainly, I was roaringly hungry by lunchtime. I'm not gonna do this without a net, and will always ensure I have Disappearing-friendly food available any time I feel hungry - I'm not ignoring the whole 'keeping the metabolism going' thing. I'm just gonna take it on advisement, shall we say. Watch this space...
Meal Replacement, for those who don't know, is...well, pretty much what it sounds like - you don't have a meal, and replace it with...something else. Ordinarily, in cases where this is medically sanctioned, you replace it with a kind of slurry-shake full of vitamins and nutrients and absolutely no fun whatsoever. It was sanctioned for Penis-Boy, and it seems to be the cornerstone of some radical weightloss regimes, where eating very few calories is fundamental.
Of course, it could be argued that eating very few calories is fundamental to any weightloss regime - certainly, this one that I'm on is all about balancing what goes into my system with the amount of work I ask that system to do.
I think what probably can't be argued though is that replacing meals with enormo-mugs of decaff skinny latte is really the way to go.
I didn't really notice this was what I was doing till yesterday, when I met a friend for coffee, and ended up with two double-handed bowls of the stuff in the space of an hour, then followed that throughout the day with at least a couple of large (fuck you Starbucks, I'm not calling it Venti, because that leads to a system where the smallest coffee size is Tall, and henceforth into madness!) mugfulls of utter pointlessness.
Then, when I thought back on it, there was the mising breakfast on a couple of mornings, replaced with pointlessness. And a couple of lunches that were reduced in size because of the volume of pointlessness still in my stomach. As I say, I genuinely hadn't realised this was happening until my second mugfull in Costa yesterday (oh yeah, I'm not as proud as I once was, I'm becoming a bit of a pointlessness-whore - probably another sign that things are getting out of hand!) that the thought occurred to me.
I mean...with my wheedling, self-justifying, any-damn-thing-rationalising head on, I could plead that it a) gives me a sense of fulness that reduces the habitual 'hunger' which isn't really hunger at all, and b) it's both decaff and skinny and artificially sweetened, so it's as chronically low-impact as can possibly be imagined, so where's the bad?
But we all know this is wheedling self-justifying bullshit, right?
Aristotle would certainly be whipping me up and down the street, for not having the self-mastery to do the cold-turkey thing and simply reduce calories, increase work and suffer like a bitch inbetween. And to some extent, for once I think he'd be right. I said early on that I wasn't a 'substitution' kinda guy - though clearly, any insight into my history would prove this itself to be bullshit, as I drank Diet Coke for years without batting an ironic eye - but clealry what I've done here is discovered something that is nothing more than three substitutes in a single mug - something that, if you keep your eyes shut and don't have much of a pallette, you can convince yourself is milk, something which is little more than a flavouring to your hot milkshake, and something which gives at least the baseline systems of your tastebuds the idea of being sweet - so I'm replacing coffee, milkshakes and desserts all in one, and then clearly mainlining as much of this crap as I can get, to make up for the fact that I'm not allowing myself the genuine pleasures of real coffee, real milkshakes or real desserts.
The sick thing, probably, is that as I sit here with one eye on the clock, knowing I have about half an hour before I go out, alone, for a comedy music gig (already-thoroughly-Disappeared Man, Mitch Benn, who I've mentioned before..."Yes dear, incessantly" as d would undoubtedly say), describing the process I appear to have fallen into, I'm already thinking "Hmm, I could stop at Stratford on the way and pick up a coffee..."
Clearly unhealthy thinking, and probably, at some point in time, I should cut the decaff intake down. but right now, if some replacements have managed to sneak through my perspex walls and are helping make the Disappearing less of a fundamentally gittish process, I say screw it - it's like using Methadone to come off Heroin or some equally inappropriate and over-dramatic comparison (I often wonder, when I say these things, whether junkies or alcoholics would just like to rip my pimply head off for daring to compare addictions with them...). What I mean is, it's clearly less dangerous than if I were 'using' real coffee, milkshakes and desserts, so how about I get to a healthy weight first, and then we see?
On the business of accidental meal replacement though, I'm undecided. Clearly, under any normal circumstances, it's not healthy. But I think we're also in danger of over-accentuating the positive here - and again, I've talked about this before (sorry, this wasn't meant to be a 'Greatest Hits' post...). While everybody's delighted that I've lost my first 3.5 stone, objectively speaking, what I am is a man who's still at least five stone overweight, so I'm still really on the uphill part of the climb. And while, as I say, under normal circumstances, meal replacement's something of an emergency measure, the whispering mathematician in my brain is saying "Yeah, but if you can do it without starving and actively reducing the number of mealsworth of calories that go into your system on any given day...where's the bad?"
I'm not gonna be stupid about this, in all fairness - I did this accidentally this week. And one day, certainly, I was roaringly hungry by lunchtime. I'm not gonna do this without a net, and will always ensure I have Disappearing-friendly food available any time I feel hungry - I'm not ignoring the whole 'keeping the metabolism going' thing. I'm just gonna take it on advisement, shall we say. Watch this space...
Friday 4 November 2011
The Point of Five
Today was a basic Disappearing day - no walking, no biking, basic eating. I haven't done proper Disappearing exercise since Monday, so this is likely to be a deeply dodgy Disappearing week.
Had a Thought earlier though, which is, as you know, is often dangerous. I've often thought that people with penises shouldn't really be allowed to do Thinking, we're not properly equipped. It's like women peeing standing up - doable, but rarely a good idea, least of all in company.
This particular thought was about five stone.
I mentioned a while back that having gone through the 3.5 stone barrier, I wasn't aiming at 4 stone as the next 'Big Barrier', but oddly, and unreasonably, 5 stone. I was on a tube today when the reason finally hit me.
Four stone is less than halfway. Five stone is definitively more than halfway to my nine stone goal.
Yeah, simple as that - It's the power of fractions and percentages. Three stone's a third. Four stone - nada. Really speaking, the next Big Barrier is 4.5 stone, cos it's half, or 50%. So in terms of stone barriers, five is the Next Big Thing.
See? Thinking - not for those with penises, generally. The weirdest thing is that the Thought, such as it was, wasn't even original. It was given to me in a blinding flash by a press of a button.
"50%" said Virgil...or Kenny, depending on whether or not we have posh company. Virgil Kenny is of course my Kindle. It was letting me know I'd reached the halfway point in Aristotle's Ethics, and just like that, my subconscious palaver made at least a sort of sense.
Not a great deal of sense, granted, but some.
I don't know whether this is a human thing, a guy thing or just a me thing, but everything seems more manageable, and somehow weirdly more meaningful, if you break it into fractions and percentages. I swear, it's one of the simplest and best things about e-readers, it's a thing regular books have been sadly lacking all these years - just a little superscript line every now and again that says "Keep going - this might be a crappy chapter, but you're 23% of the way through!" I think birthdays should come with this sort of information too - then maybe we'd get more done and play fewer online games - can you imagine that - "Happy 21st birthday, you're a quarter of the way dead!"
So there you go - that's the point of five, revealed by an e-reader. Oddly enough, there was a headline last week that said most people are reading relatively low-brow stuff on their e-readers. But you see - you never know when you'll get profound thingummyjigs from the additional extras, no matter what it is you're 50% through.
Had a Thought earlier though, which is, as you know, is often dangerous. I've often thought that people with penises shouldn't really be allowed to do Thinking, we're not properly equipped. It's like women peeing standing up - doable, but rarely a good idea, least of all in company.
This particular thought was about five stone.
I mentioned a while back that having gone through the 3.5 stone barrier, I wasn't aiming at 4 stone as the next 'Big Barrier', but oddly, and unreasonably, 5 stone. I was on a tube today when the reason finally hit me.
Four stone is less than halfway. Five stone is definitively more than halfway to my nine stone goal.
Yeah, simple as that - It's the power of fractions and percentages. Three stone's a third. Four stone - nada. Really speaking, the next Big Barrier is 4.5 stone, cos it's half, or 50%. So in terms of stone barriers, five is the Next Big Thing.
See? Thinking - not for those with penises, generally. The weirdest thing is that the Thought, such as it was, wasn't even original. It was given to me in a blinding flash by a press of a button.
"50%" said Virgil...or Kenny, depending on whether or not we have posh company. Virgil Kenny is of course my Kindle. It was letting me know I'd reached the halfway point in Aristotle's Ethics, and just like that, my subconscious palaver made at least a sort of sense.
Not a great deal of sense, granted, but some.
I don't know whether this is a human thing, a guy thing or just a me thing, but everything seems more manageable, and somehow weirdly more meaningful, if you break it into fractions and percentages. I swear, it's one of the simplest and best things about e-readers, it's a thing regular books have been sadly lacking all these years - just a little superscript line every now and again that says "Keep going - this might be a crappy chapter, but you're 23% of the way through!" I think birthdays should come with this sort of information too - then maybe we'd get more done and play fewer online games - can you imagine that - "Happy 21st birthday, you're a quarter of the way dead!"
So there you go - that's the point of five, revealed by an e-reader. Oddly enough, there was a headline last week that said most people are reading relatively low-brow stuff on their e-readers. But you see - you never know when you'll get profound thingummyjigs from the additional extras, no matter what it is you're 50% through.
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