The Reach-Around

See...women are amazing.

I know women who can take off a bra which they themselves are wearing, while they're also wearing clothes on top, often while using only one hand.

I've checked with physicists on this, and that's not technically possible within this universe's set of dimensions. Just saying - think about that.

I...don't have those sorts of skills. Honestly, I couldn't undo a bra that someone else is wearing, while staring at it, using both hands and a special bra-undoing device from www.undoingstuff.com.

None of this is strictly relevant, but it kind of explains something.

Right now, with dad having been in hospital for a stone-cold month and fighting a sonofabitch infection, he's down to family-only visitors, and we all have to wear aprons and gloves to visit him.

I can't tie my own apron.

I mean...ever.

I hold the two bits, I tie them together, I try and make it work...and it fails.

What's more, yesterday I had to tie d's. She backed up, and I was looking at the two bits, I tied them together, and they fell apart. I tried again...and they fell apart.

Technically, this isn't relevant either, but it does explain why, for the last few weeks, d's been tying my apron.

Which, in itself, explains why l felt it.
I felt the reach-around.

28 pounds ago, d was able to put her arms waaaay around me. It brought us closer (see what I did there?). Tonight, she wrapped her arms around me to tie my apron and I felt the girth of my body as her arms brushed by me. And I felt...wrong. Just wrong.

I want my wrap-around back. I mean I really want my wrap-around back. And yes, I know, compared to...well, practically anything else in the world, this is small news and small reporting, but right now my life is a focussed thing, and it hit me hard, so the ripples going through my brain are bigger than they might otherwise be. What's more, I delivered to one of my toughest deadlines to date this morning...so it's time to get serious.

Again.

Para

Humph.

No, really, just Humph...

Humphity Dumphity sat on a wall...till I came along and pushed the whingy bastard off...

It's been one of those days, essentially - I'm regaining an ovoid shape, relosing motivation, and watching the hill I eventually have to climb get bigger again before my looking-down-the-length-of-myself eyes. Feels like I'm sliding back down Everest, while knowing, every step of the way, I have to climb right the fuck back up the bugger...

Hence, Humph.

Then again, it's entirely possible that Humph can kiss my increasingly large and hairy white ass, cos let's not forget the Paralympic Games start tonight. The Paralympians just blow my freakin' walking socks off - and not, I hope, in some paternalistic, patronising bullshit way. There are people that have been handed some manner of essential physical 'radical pain in the arse' - for want of a better word than 'disability'. So that's Strike 1. Strike 2 is the rest of us fucks. Cos while we're probably individually all pretty groovy, get us together en masse and we turn into a frightened bunch of lilywhite fucks. How else can you explain the fact that we allow the existence of a transport infrastructure that pretty much says to people with radical pains in the arse - screw you, mate, you wanna get somewhere, ya shoulda been born - and stayed - "normal", like us. How else explain the fact that we don't, en masse call our politicians and our architects and our town planners and our transport chiefs on the bullshit that keeps people who already have a radical pain in the arse from experiencing, with only as little hassle as the rest of us, any damn thing they want to. How else explain that nasty little collective sense of inconvenience and mental finger-pointing you see sometimes on buses when someone with a radical pain in the arse gets on and we all have to shift up a bit or give up our seat. So that's Strike 2 - Strike 2 is us and all the additional unnecessary hassle we give to people who are exactly the same as us in every respect bar one. 

Strike 3 is having a radical pain in the arse, dealing with all the additional bullshit that we as a society, and occasionally, we as individuals, heap on these people, and then thinking "Fuck me, I could just do with a game of basketball right about now." I haven't, I don't think, ever in my life come close to having the kind of commitment and energy it takes to even get to that point. And then Strike 4 is doing all of the above and thinking "I wanna play basketball better than anyone else in the world, man..."

That's Superman. That's Isaac Newton having Einstein's love-children. That's the Green Berets vs the SAS in a grudge-match over who has the coolest fuckin' hats. That's commitment and energy and white-hot goddamn passion for a sport on a level that 98% of us don't put into Being A-Freakin'-Live.

So yeah - maybe...just maybe...I should just quit my bitchin' about having to go on a bit of a diet, and bask in the insane commitment of the Paralympics for a bit.

Yeah, that's a plan.

Dead Lines

Forgive me - tonight's entry is gonna be short and to the point. I say at the top of this blog that there will be ranting, there will be laughs, there will be a bitchslap or two.

There will also, just occasionally, be days like today, where deadlines are pressing and very little happens and much as I'd love to try and think of something funny to say about getting my teeth scaled and polished - the highlight of today - I don't really have the microseconds to spare, and I hope you'll all bear with me as I don my white bunny costume, look at my alarm clock, shout "FUCK! I'm late, I'm late, for a very important...erm...deadline...and bog off down my own little rabbithole of self-involvement.

Actually, thinking about it...I don't believe in karma, because it tends to lead to concepts of just desserts (mmm...desserts....) but there's a little resonance about today, now I come to think of it, which would be the kind of thing that people who do believe in karma (Karen Pulley, I'm lookin' at you) might appreciate.

When I was a kid, I was a know-it-all, opinionated, independent brat. I once decided, halfway through a haircut, that I didn't like what the stylist was doing to my pudding-basin coiffure, and jumped out of the chair and ran home...with a fringe that didn't so much slope as positively step down. Empowered by this, I followed this up with a similar exploit at the dentist. Having been told "this won't hurt a bit", and being a trusting know-it-all, opinionated, independent brat, when his needle stung like a sonofabitch I fixed him with my best hard stare, burst into tears, jumped out of the chair and ran all the way home, with a jaw hardening into numbness with every step.

Today, I went to get a scale and polish, and the hygienist dutifully carved away about a decadesworth of tartar from my bottom row. Having done so, she adjusted the chair, told me to spit and said we were done.
"What about the top row?" I said, spitting out chunks of accumulated chalky crap.
"Nah," she said. "Our time's up. Make another appointment and I'll do the top ones..."

Karma? Well no, clearly not, but a nice bit of resonance all the same.

Oh yeah, it's Tuesday, isn't it?
It might as well not be - all that walking round the park, plus the 15 miles on Sunday, had precisely zero impact, and I weighed in today at
16 stone 12.75.

Sigh. Deadlines, you see. They mess up everything.
Anyhow, there's been a new development. Somewhere on our 15 mile walk, I mentioned to Lee my prior intention to get back to playing badminton when we came home, and how, one way and another, it hadn't happened yet.
"Oh, great. I'll go," he said. Tonight I've had a text from my pal Rebecca - Lee's ex, and an international superstar in her own right, to say "Woohoo - Badminton Tuesday?!"

So - Badminton Tuesday, to add to the mix and try and break through the wall of excuses which still, it seems, cling to me like Triffid-ivy.

And now, if you'll accept these dead lines from a pretty dead day, I'll bog off back down the rabbithole and get on with the stuff I really don't have time enough to do in a universe with such a strictly limited number of dimensions.

"FUCK! I'm late..."

The Porno Equivalency

I looked at the screen.

I looked at d.

I looked at the screen again.

"Y'know the next time you're even a little bit horny?" I said. Her eyes bulged in surprise.
"I'm gonna run out and buy some porn and make you watch it, right to the very very end!"

"Ex-cuse me?!" she asked, not without reason.

"Payback!" I said. "For all the times we sit down hungry, and then watch food being lovingly, wondrously prepared...in high definition! By masters! By accomplished professionals in their art, no less!"

At the time, we were watching Iron Chef America. There were goat's cheese tarts and tortellini, there was lobster poached in butter, there was some frankly freakin' weird fish that stalks the bottom of ponds giving dirty looks to all the other pond life getting its comeuppance good and proper...and there were desserts that I would personally have hacked a hobo in two just to get my grubby little sugar-craving mitts on.

"Ah," she said, then had the good grace to laugh. "Hungry dear?" she asked, innocently.

"I'M NOT SODDING SURE ANYMORE!" I yelled, flumping on the couch and realising precisely why one should never flump after walking 15 miles if one wants to have hips in the morning.
"I have some biological impulse, but right at this precise moment, I'm not a hundred percent sure where it's located!" I explained. She was laughing at me openly now.

"I'm not entirely unconvinced I don't want to eat your food and fuck Jamie Oliver!"

"I'm sure you'll be very happy together," she smirked.

"Flash me!" I demanded, crazed with some bodily desire of which I wasn't entirely certain. "Flash me now, woman, for I am Man and I have spoken!"

She pursed her lips.

"How about I make you a bacon and egg sandwich instead?" she compromised.

"Close enough!" I said, and off she went, to unlock the Good Bacon the secret coded vault in which she hides it.

Time and Relative Dimension In Space

Yes Dimension, singular. No it doesn't make any sense...it's a purist thing, leave it alone...

At probably several different previous points in this blog, I have propounded (or "waffled on about at interminable length" to those of a less scientific or pretentious bent) the theory that no-one can truly understand the length of a mile unless they have walked it. We are so divorced, in this day and age, from the true distance of a thing - and therefore the true time it would take to reach - by our dependence on various forms of motorised transport. This, I somewhat modestly call Tony's General Theory of Relative Distance.

Because I can, that's why.

Today, I should like to set down for the awestruck wonder of posterity an addendum to the General Theory, which I shall call Tony's Special Theory of Relative Distance. This posits that the more miles you walk, the longer each successive mile becomes in real terms, and therefore the longer it takes to complete.

I know what you're going to say. You're going to witter on about how that's just a perception, and how you feel more tired with every mile and so your relative speed decreases, yadda yadda yadda - NO!

I believe it's a physical law that by the action of choosing a destination point, and then walking several miles towards that destination, you actually change the laws of physics, extending the physical length of the remaining miles to the destination point, and the corresponding length of time it takes to reach that point...and I speak as a man who's walked 15 miles today, just for fun, so nehh.

It actually was fun, I should point out. Lee and I set out before either of us was really awake, and assumed that our destination was actually just 13 miles away...because everything we'd read, everywhere, claimed it was. After ten miles of walking, the sign we passed said we had 4.5 miles left to go.

What's in a mile and a half, right? I'll tell you, shall I? At 12.5 miles, with just two miles to go, things really started to hurt. We walked forever. I mean literally forever - I think in some version of reality, we're still there, walking. 2 miles, said the sign. We walked forever again. 1.5 miles.
"Are you freakin' kidding me?" we said, each to the other. Chip, Lee's dog, looked up at us both, as if to say
"Are we havin' fun? Are we? Are we? Are we, eh? Eh? Eh?"
We walked for three more eternities before recognising any damn thing familiar. Then we collapsed. There is not a single shred of doubt in my mind that time and space had been warped, not once, not twice, but three times, all within the alleged "space" of that last two and a half mile stint.

Time and space, people. They're tricky bastards...

Here endeth the theorem. Please post my Nobel Prize by return.

Oh, for the vampires - blood was 6.2 yesterday, and 5.2 at 6.30 this morning.

The Things That Are Hard

Today was a tunnel-vision day, buried in work until we went to visit dad. He'd had a bad night (did I mention the mantraps still left before we're out of the woods?), but by the time we went in, he was feeling a bit better. By the time we left though, we were concerned again. He's fighting a big and fairly mean infection right now, so - hence the man-traps.

Got home to the news that Neil Armstrong had died.
So on this sad night, my thoughts are with Neil Armstrong's family. He will never be forgotten, by his nation or by the world - that is a testament to the man, his dedication, and his skill. Most of us have never known Armstrong the man, so let us mourn the loss of our legend, and send our love and compassion to those most deeply touched by his passing.

And two short words to those who fill the world with rumours about the faking of the Moon Landings. Those who would make this man's career, and those of all his fellow Apollo astronauts, a lie. Those who do not understand enough to know what they do not know, and so conclude that there must have been some other, darker explanation than that brave human beings worked together to attain what seemed impossible.

For all those people, I have just two short words:
For shame.

President Kennedy, my pal Maz reminded me, said that we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That mindset sent human beings to the Moon. That mindset, more recently, allowed us to land a rover on Mars. That mindset will allow us, ultimately, do do everything that's doable.

My dad's doing the hard thing right now too. He may not be a legend to the world, but he is to us, and the mindset prevails in him too...

Me, I'm walking to Pontypridd in the morning. That doesn't come anywhere near to qualifying as a thing that is hard...
Remind me I said that when I get home tomorrow, won't you?

The Final Four

Today was just a Friday, but both d and I took it as annual leave, so for us, it was the first Saturday of two consecutive weekends (Monday is a bank holiday here).

Woke early, somewhat against our will and the spirit of this weekend feeling, and I walked up to Ma's for our now usual circuits of the local lake. This morning, we did just two revolutions before the rain began to pour down, and we looked at each other.
"Really?" I asked.
"Really," she agreed.
The rain got cold on our heads and necks. I grinned.
"Jog to the end of the line?"
"Alright," she said, matching my grin with a laugh and setting off.
I caught up with her, and we jogged on together for a handful of paces.
Then we stopped that kind of foolishness, clutching dramatically at our chests. And then we went for coffee.

I popped in to the library to pick up some large print books for my dad, who - rather stunningly - had asked for some. He's been moved into a room of his own, with an infection. Since which time, he's asked for books, used a portable DVD player, been walking back and forth to the bathroom, and been really much more his old self. We're fighting shy of thinking we're out of the woods with him - because frankly, the woods are full of deeply disguised man-traps. But there seems to be room for cautious optimism. So we're feeding that as much as we can, hence an armful of large print Jeffrey Archer with which I came home this morning.

Then d and I went to Cardiff again, for another enjoyable day of wandering. Went back to Madame Fromage for lunch - not as stellar as last time, but still pretty enjoyable. Pleasant meandering for a few hours led us home again, and up to see dad, who was talkative, engaging and engaged, and who thought he'd probably enjoy having a look at the books tonight.

No actual exercise today, but it's felt like a positive, active sort of day - quite a bit of walking about.
Tomorrow, I have to bury myself, head and all, in some editing for the majority of the day. Sunday morning though sees me joining up with Lee to walk from Merthyr to Pontypridd...something like 13 miles. Depending on the state of the feet by the end of that, might even try and walk some of the way back. Have to try and stretch my endurance within the next four weeks - four weeks right now, as it approaches 11PM, I will have been walking for something like four hours (and so will probably be at something like the 12-mile stage of the Maggie's Night Hike). If I'm going to do the 20 miles, I really need to get some longer practice in within the next four weeks.

The one good thing about this is the new boots. The new boots are almost ridiculously comfortable. Will see how they do with an endurance challenge on Sunday morning, but so far, they're just dreamy. Mmm...To dream...to sleep. To sleep perhaps to pull my finger out...

Wonder if I should put the boots on to go to bed.
Might just try that.

Now.

Wear A Tall Hat...

Back to the local park with Ma this morning, for more walking round the lake. Did our five revolutions, then she went to the car.
"I'm just gonna do a fast one to music," I said, handing her my by now somewhat battered, misshapen straw summer hat and plugging in my iPod. The first few chords of Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" ramped up, and off I strode...singing.

"I remember when rock was young," I told the ducks.
"Me and Susie had so much fun," I informed a big old tree.
It was when I got to the edge of the lake and turned to wave at Ma that I saw her standing there, shaking her head, stifling a laugh. I waved,  turned a circle, and sang extra loud at the man and his dog who were coming over the hillock in my direction.
"While the other kids were rocking round the clock...we were hoppin' and boppin' to the Crocodile Rock, yeah!"

Clearly, when walking solo, I'm something of a menace to public sanity. But at least I'm walking...sort of.
The next track on my "Seriously, how freakin' old are you, 70s-boy?" compilation was a T-Rex classic...Ride A White Swan.

As it happens, there aren't any white swans on the lake. Mainly just ducks and a pair of distinctly stick-up-the-butt sergeant major Canada Geese, who give you not so much the stinkeye as you walk past as the "You're lucky I'm not still a dinosaur, that's all I can say" eye. My dynamic, finish the lap enthusiasm rather burned away. We weren't Ride A White Swan people in our house, we were Get It On, Children of the Revolution people, so I didn't actually hear the deliciously nonsensical Ride A White Swan until the late 1980s and early 90s, when a girl with whom I'd fallen hopelessly in pity at the local am dram group introduced me to the song by...well, frankly by singing it, along with a cute up and downy dance.

I thought of Emma (the girl) this morning. And as I did the last half-lap, I did the up and downy dance, with some improvised turn-aroundy bits myself, singing to the sky and the past and the present and the future, to Marc Bolan, and my dad, to Emma and to d, to the swans and the geese and the ducks and the sky, and it made me feel like everything was potential. Everything was possible. Wear a tall hat like the druids of the old days - wear a tall hat, and a tattooed gown...

That's about as meaningful as today has been, really.

I realise of course that just as I've mentioned some oddball characters within these blogs, I am actually one myself. I'm loud fat uninhibited singing guy.

But hey, wear a tall hat and none of it matters. Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead, say a few spells and baby...there you go!

Re...Re...Re...Probably Return of the Disappearing Man

D'you remember in the 1970s and 1980s, when the beginnings of the imagination-drain began to tap itself out in the landscape of movies and TV, and they started re-hashing TV classics from the 60s, only they didn't have the balls to simply call them by the same names? Not just The Saint, but Return of The Saint. Not just The Man From UNCLE, but The Return of the Man From UNCLE.

Today's like that, only, imagine a franchise that's three or four re-boots down the line. That's me. That's The Disappearing Man.

"Oh," said Ma as I sat down in her kitchen at 7.30 this morning, brand new walking boots feeling comfy as butter (but without the oogy connotations of having butter squish through your toes). "You're back, aren't you?"
This was apropos of nothing, you understand, just me walking through the door and sitting down.
"Yeah," I said. "Do I smell focused or something?"
She laughed.
"I'm the same," she explained. "When I'm right, everything's right - money, focus, diet, everything. When I'm wrong, everything's doolally. You've gone non-doolally again."

I blinked.
"Well, that's good to know."

We walked five times round the local lake, which turns out to be three miles, then Ma went off to make sure dad ate a proper breakfast and I came home to work.

It's not much of a start, but it's a start. Tomorrow, we'll do more. Tomorrow, I can actually see a little bit of light in the deadline-fury. Tomorrow, there'll be walking in the morning and lunchtime biking. And up we go, building the exercise, reducing the food - the only path to a proper, successful re-boot of the Disappearing franchise...

The Excuses Diaries

OK, so the headline of today is that yep, I've put on a shitload, but it's marrrrginally less than I'd bargained for.

Today's weigh-in: 16 stone 11.75.

So rather than the next 28 pounds, I'm looking at the next 25.75. This has a weird effect, because even though I've put on  nearly five pounds in the space of a week, it feels like I've got out of jail at least partially free.

Was talking to Karen "Slinky" earlier by text. Told her I'd put on about two stone (give or take) in recent months, and she said something telling to me.

"You can either lose weight or make excuses. You can't do both."

She's right, of course. I've been making excuses for a while now, because my focus has shifted and drifted and slipped out of discipline. There comes a point of course among all the re-starts that the Crying Wolf principle of "Yeah, we've heard this before dude" kicks in when you hear that the drifting stops here. I understand that completely - and I'm not gonna lie to you, the deadlines remain intense in my life at the minute, and the dad-visiting looks set to continue for another week, minimum. But these are really just excuses. The thing to do is adjust, rather than be swept away. Adjust, add the exercise into the routine, re-establish a metabolically pro-active routine...get off my ass, eat fruit and veg and protein rather than carb...get back to a routine that aids the Disappearing principle.

Rather than sitting on my arse, hypnotised by deadlines, doing no exercise and eating carb at stupid times of night.

What can possibly go wrong, eh?

The Best Part of a Muffin

As I've now mentioned incessantly, tomorrow's weigh-in's gonna suck, but I'm already over it and focusing on the push towards losing the next 28 pounds.

In among a whole shedload of stuff about which I don't wanna talk right now, I had a haircut today.

I've mentioned before that getting a haircut in the Valleys is more of a gossipy experience than many people might be used to.
As the talk turned to courting rituals on a Saturday night and the only other male in the hairdressers - one of the staff - was trying to convince a room full of women that his approach to seduction (coming on like Mr Darcy with a "May I take the seat next to you?") had been more successful than any of them believed, another young female hairdresser was regaling us with her dieting woes after having eaten pizza..."like, twice this week!...And I had raspberry Mojitos an' all..."

The young woman who had a pair of clippers aimed at my skull gave a contemptuous "T'chaw!" and exclaimed
"Oh, have what you like, girl! Life's too short to be thin, innit?"
It occurred to me this was aimed in my direction, and that she probably felt entirely safe in the assumption that I'd agree with her, being a big fat bastard myself.

In all honesty, this concept has guided me for many decades, but in recent years, the numbers have begun rather to baffle me. Surely...sigh...surely life is only too short, potentially, if you're overweight. A crass generalisation of course, but one that holds more merit than it's ever given credit for, surely.

"Look at me," she added. "I've got a muffin top!" she she explained.
At best, she had what could be called a mini-muffin top, but this, to me, raises another question.

When did we start using "muffin-top" as some sort of physical pejorative for a bit of flesh over the trouser-top? When did "muffin-top" become a pejorative term for anything, come to that? Unless I reeeeeallly missed a meeting, people love the tops of muffins. Without the tops, muffins are kinda just like spongy unfrosted cup-cakes. The tops of muffins are THE BEST BIT.

Now...I'd never say that the belly is a better bit than the stuff it tops, but let's be pretty clear here - on women, at least, it's a pretty damn cool area. It's part of the whole curvy Mother Earth  hummuna hummuna hummana thing......

Damn...now I want a muffin. I'd say a big-ass muffin, but all in all, that would probably confuse matters even more...

Madame Fromage

Had a day in Cardiff yesterday with d.
We had plans to hit John Lewis, HMV, Carluccios...familiar friendly notes from our long association with strip-mall Britain.

Arriving on the bus though, we kinda mutually decided to seek out places that weren't on the beaten track.

As it happened, we didn't have to go far. We went to the Castle Arcade - one of a good handful of quaint, tight warrens of commerce with more than a hint of Victoriana to them.

We popped into Price's Sweet Shop - a real old-fashioned looking British tuck shop - and picked up some sugar-free boiled sweets and licorice toffees for my dad. We strolled along and found TroutMark...

TroutMark is a dangerous place for a bibliophile. I used to go there whenever I could afford it as a teenager - often with my pal Sian - and come home with armfuls, bagfuls of second hand books of good quality and, in a pre-Amazon age, often more than a few of them gems of hard-to-find fiction.

It was fantastic to be able to report that a) it had survived the recession so far, and was still crammed to the gills with great quality books. Ahem...

We came away with armfulls, bagfulls of great books, which is always enough to put a giant smile on my face.

"Lunch?" I said.
"Where?" said d. I shrugged.

"Well, there's this place," said d.
Madame Fromage was somewhere we'd passed several times before - usually in a hurry to get to somewhere else. Now though, we stopped and investigated. Phenomenal cheese counter - check. Home-made looking pies with enticing flavours - check. Moderately culturally weird bagpipe music on the speakers - check. Specials board of truly irresistible delights - check.

We sat down.
I started with a bowl of the special butternut squash and sweet potato soup, and followed it with a goat's cheese and red onion marmalade galette (a thin folded crepe, essentially). d had Welsh rarebit.

It's important to understand that whenever either of us has ordered Welsh rarebit anywhere before, it's been fundamentally disappointing. Either made on thin, processed white bread, or ungenerous with cheese, or overpowering in terms of the mustard content.

Welcome to Madame Fromage, please leave your preconceptions at the door, pilgrim, cos we're gonna take GOOD care of you here...

Two big slabs of fresh, crusty, home-made-feeling bread, generosity of cheese, and a mustard layer that looked as if it would blow your head off, but which was actually sublime, subtle and kept you making yummy noises and coming back for more.

My soup was warming but not claggy, well-flavoured and accompanied by a range of - again, home-made-feeling - breads: olive, tomato, walnut and crusty white.

The galette...
Oh god, the galette. The galette was like something from a different dimension, sent here to reward reeeeeeallly good boys and girls for Christmas. The thin crepe was perfectly golden brown, the goat's cheese warm and unctuous with just the right sharpness to match its own creamy texture - AND stand up to the sweet and sharp beauty of the marmalade. I saved some of it for "dessert" - because of course (and at this I have a tendency to start kicking things) I wasn't allowing myself to eat any of their incredible looking desserts, cakes or sweet crepes.

All this, plus soft drinks and a bottle of gold medal winning bottle of cider, was just £32...so we left entirely full and more happy than we'd thought imaginable...

We're going back on Friday, to celebrate a day off with more Madame Fromage goodness...

Go. Just take my word for it. Go now...

The Next 28

I lay in bed last night, sighing.
"What's up honey?"suffering from Fryer's Remorse.
"Awww..." said d. "Is that it?"
"Yeah, that's it baby..."
She sighed.
"There are people fighting real battles close at home you know," she said, slipping arms around my increasingly girthy belly.
"I know babe," I murmured. "This is all just a whirlwind of me."
"Thing is, you sound like you're at the end of this thing," she said. "And if you are, that's fine, go downstairs, fire up the computer and tell everyone 'That's it, that's the end...might drop you a line when I get back to 20 stone...'"
I think she was only partly joking. That thought flitted through my brain.
"Or," she said, "alternatively, don't do that at all. Remember the stubborn bastard you are, and get on with it."
"Hmm," I said.

Woke up with something of a different attitude. Say, just for argument's sake, that come Tuesday, my Nazi Scales report that I'm back to 17 stone. OK, what that means in the long run is I'm six and a half stone overweight (as opposed, let's not forget, to my initial 10 stone overweight - I do rather keep forgetting that even where I am, I've kicked an appreciable amount of my own ass). The lowest point I've reached was 14 stone 9, but the most believable, consistent place I reached was 15 stone.

You know what that is?

That's 28 pounds.

That's all - not 91 pounds, which is the equivalent of the 6.5 stone I still have to lose. Just 28 little pounds. 28 ogrefarts of weight - or 56 UK pats of butter. That's the difference between everything in my wardrobe fitting beautifully, and everything new rather straining at the seams. At two pounds per week, that's 14 weeks. Three and a half months.  Give or take a week or two that means - with a faintly laughable logic - I could get back to something like 14 stone 9 in time for Christmas this year. Which would mean by March 1st 2013 - the second Disappearing anniversary, I could get to about 14 stone dead. After which, there's, say, just another 28 pounds to go - and then another 28 pounds after that. and then we'd be done and just maintaining. I'm going to stop thinking so hard about what I've done so far and what there is left to do. Just gonna focus on the next 28 pounds. Getting back to the bridgehead of 15 stone, in 28 pounds' time, will feel really good, BUT, crucially, it won't feel like the end of anything, which I think, for some reason, probably to do with the ending of the first year of this experiment, it did the first time. Let's just focus on 28 pounds at a time.

PMSL

People have different goals in life. Some want vast personal wealth. Some want carnal knowledge of huge numbers of the opposite - or indeed their own - sex. Some, poor benighted souls as they are, want to write down the engine numbers of all the diesel locomotives in service between 1952 and 1968. Each to their own.

I have one main goal that's not Disappearing related. I want to make people pee themselves with laughter.

I've done this a couple of times. My pal Mary succumbed on a couple of occasions...including the first day we met in Hamilton, Scotland, when I told a story about a high street store declaring itself an independent state and annexing the hanging baskets of a neighbouring store.

Yeah, clearly, you had to be there.

I've made d's best and lifelongest friend Lori lose control once...which is worth mentioning as it's her 47th birthday today (wink...wink, wink...) today. Honestly can't remember what made her lose it.

Made my ex lose control a few times, but that was more to do with her chronic need to Disappear (Yeah, I'm a bitch....you didn't know this by now?) than my skills as a humourist.

So far...eight years in...I've never quite made d lose it. On some occasions, I'd like to point out, this has been down to the fact that she has weaker lungs than she has a pelvic floor - so instead of losing bladder control, she'd stop being able to breathe, and then I'd have to get her an inhaler.

Tonight though....tonight I sooooo nearly got her (she lives in Wales now, not London, so she doesn't cough up a lung nearly so often!).

Again, I have a feeling you really had to be there for this one.
We'd had an evening "off" visiting my dad, as he's had a great day and Ma wanted some time alone with him. We'd gone out for a meal that, in the spirit of having the night off was fish and chips and sue the fuck out of me!

Then we went to Aldi's. Aldi's a store where we have a history. Tonight, with a limited budget, we went for just a handful of items. As I paid, d wandered off to look at the potted plants.
"Don't even think about it!" I called.
She shuffled back, looking sheepish.
"I just want a palm tree!" she declared.

See...the reason we have history with Aldi's is because we have a stunning inability to leave there, normally, without both a handful of DVDs and a potted plant. Normally, this is in addition to our normal groceries. so Muggins here ends up staggering the several hundred yards, up a couple of flights of stairs, wobbling under the weight of some new demented chunk of greenery.

"I know you do!" I replied. "Look, we're going to Cardiff tomorrow, so we'll be absolutely dropping with assorted Stuff, we can tip the donkey then!"

Not, all in all, that funny a line. d almost lost it. She laughed all the way out of the store and half the way home, clutching her stomach to retain bladder control...

I'll get you one day, my pretty...and your little dog too...

Blood was 6.3 this morning, for anyone keeping score. have to say, I'm probably screaming towards 17 stone again - mentioned this yesterday I think. Sigh...Disappearing vectors. Just a matter of numbers and vectors and work, oh my!

Walking Back to Gloominess

Blood was 5.2 this morning - not sure if I missed it but it was 6.1 yesterday too.

Something occurred to me while I was glued to the toilet, relishing the joy of having my Zenical supply renewed.

When I first did the Maggie's Night Hike...I was about 17 stone.

Early in this year, when I was near 15 stone, I was cavalier in my statements - "Oh, who knows how Disappeared I'll be by the time I do the Night Hike this year in September..."

Yyyyeah - with the bounce-back I'm currently experiencing, I'll probably be back to about 17 stone at this rate! So this'll be me trudging 20 miles of stone-kicking misery.

Bugger, bugger, bugger...should be four whole stone lighter than this by now. Have BEEN two stone lighter...Rassen-frassen bastard bounce-back sonsofbitches fuck!

S'kinda touch and go in our flat at the minute, cos d is starting, finally, to increase her diabetic medication to something like what it should be...given that having breakfast now kicks her ass by mid-afternoon, and she ends up nearly zonking and drooling on her computer. The downside of the meds increase is that if I'm not running to the bathroom in a Zenical-driven fury, she's running to the bathroom, as the diabetic meds have a similar - though notably less orange - effect on her. We're kinda doing laps up and down the stairs at the moment. I just got back, she leapt up off the couch.
"Ohgodohgodohgoddygodgod..."
"Enjoy honey!" I called as she disappeared in a flurry of very fast, very small steps.

Can't believe I'm looking at the business end of 17 stone again. That sucks. That just freakin' sucks...

The Cartoon Frying Pan

Been a Tom and Jerry day really. You know sometimes, Tom is tearing round corners, and Jerry's just standing there, examining his nails? Cut back to Tom, really getting into his stride now, legs going like pistons, or like the limbs of a prairie cat, powering him on. Cut back to Jerry, picking his teeth unconcernedly. Cut back to Tom - he can see success finally, he's finally gonna catch and eat that little mousy prick, his shoulders raise, he prepares for one almighty tiger-pounce...
And out of nowhere, Jerry produces a cast-iron frying pan about four times the size of his entire body, swings it like a cricket bat and BAM! Tom ends up with a fact like a dollar coin with two little flat feet protruding at the bottom, and ends up waddling off, looking like a walking bottle top and wondering what the Hell just happened...

That's kinda what happened to my dad today - he had imunoglobulin infused into him today, as his haemoglobin level was down to 7...which I think translates in medical circles as "say what, motherfucker, how you walkin' around? Better sit your ass down right this second and get you some juice!"

Only thing is, once you've had the immunoglobulin, your body kinda goes "Whoah! What the fuck is this shit?! I'm shutting down while I process this stuff, alright, put the sign up, dude, we're closed for business!"

And while you may have been preparing a great big long list of "Stuff To Do", once you've been immunoglobulinned, you waddle away looking like a bottle top and wondering what the Hell just happened.

When we went to see him tonight he was asleep. He was asleep in the kind of way that cats are asleep - the kind of way that invites you to try and wake them, and then laughs its ass off at your pathetic human attempts. There was nothing doing. He did open his eyes a couple of times, but there was no recognition in them and so he closed them again and went back to the appearance, as well as the continuing reality, of sleep.

Thing is, had the same sort of cartoon frying pan experience myself this morning. All the weather reports said the heavens were going to open, so I went for a walk.

In the gym.

I went onto the treadmill and decided I'd just do my morning walk...indoors. Got my shorts on, plugged my iPod in, got my boots laced and walked on...

Two miles in, the cartoon frying pan hit me in the face. It wasn't that it was harder than walking outdoors. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

It was Just...soooooooo....duuuuuuuuuuulllllll....

Treadmills just don't work for me as Things To Walk On. Run on...sure, in a pinch, though I prefer doing that outdoors too. But walking? Hellno!It's like hitting your enthusiasm until it waddles away, looking like a bottle top and wondering...

Here's hoping for better weather tomorrow...

The Basics Range Blog

Tried to write this blog three times now.

"Seriously dude, if it's not happening, just tell the truth and be done," said d.

I was gonna tell you about my new "girlfriend" - the 4 year old next door, who would not only talk the hind legs off a donkey but would then ride it up and down our balcony to try to impress her own personal "Santa".

Tried to write that down, and ran into a brick wall of honest but actually quite unfunny dialogue.

Then I was gonna tell you about the mad woman by the lake - We all went walking round the lake in our local park after visiting dad, and encountered a demented woman who was feeding grass to the ducks, knew them by name, personality and ailment. She told us about one diminutive duckling who had grown significantly over the last three weeks, and had non-waterproof feathers. "I've already brought up my stomach contents three times getting them grass" she explained, slightly randomly. "I'm not supposed to bend," she added. We unashamedly walked away from her.

But in the end, it being a Tuesday, I guess the headline is the weigh-in. 

It's bad.

It's as bad as it's been on this Disappearing re-bound, as predicted yesterday.

It's 16 stone 7.75 - up some 3.25 pounds on a week ago today. As also detailed this week, it's going the wrong way mainly due to lifestyle factors - a tremendous amount of arse-sitting to meet editorial deadlines, and late eating after hospital visiting. These factors will alter and the direction will revert. Till then, take this Basics Range Blog and be happy, dammit! Still too much to do!!!

The Disappearing Vectors

Blood was 6.1 this morning.

Today was supposed to be all about new regimes and new hope for Dad. Turned out there was no new leaf today. Maybe Wednesday. On the other hand, he's eating better, so that's at least some positive news for the day.

Myself, I'm in a dreadful place. Got on the scales this morning, feeling, it has to be said, pretty good considering the week of little exercise and uneven eating hours.

Clearly I can feel whatever the hell I like, but good is some significant distance away. This means tomorrow will be a day of record highs on this bounce-back from Disappearing greatness. But as I've said before, this is not an inevitable slipback to the bad old days. This is just a period of Getting Through, during which the vector of my journey is challenged and reversed. Time moves, things change, and I know my vector will go back the other way, when I have time and space to put the effort to it that is needed.

Still, it's irritating to be in a state of vectorial wrongness. But like my dad, who's been in a state of vectorial wrongness by not eating, and has taken the first steps towards reversing his vector, so, eventually, I'll take the steps towards reversing my vector too. Maybe Wednesday'll see us both changing vectors properly.

Ave Sundae

Blood was 6.5 this morning - which is what happens when you eat lots of carb late at night and do precisely buggerall in terms of exercise.

Am sitting here, on a break from the increasingly pulse-pounding deadline I'm working to, and watching Raymond Blanc, the fanatically enthusiastic French chef, banging on about the connection between religion and food, and vice versa.

He's in Provence, and has grabbed a handful of little almond sweets from some poor girl with a tray and a stupid hat.
"These are like marzipan," he explains, "made from the local almonds...and I can eat them with absolutely no guilt. You know why? Because the priest has blessed these sweets - which means the Hand of God has blessed them, so they're guilt-free..."

Quite apart from some mean, factual heathen asides about what the Hands of God have been up to in recent years, this idea is enough to make me want to go to my local church, grab a priest and drag them to the nearest restaurant, to bless the bejeesus out of the biggest, sluttiest, let-him-who-eats-them-put-on-the-first-stone sundae...and then chow the fuck down...

Wonder what the cost of a Special Sundae Dispensation would be in hard currency...

Shooting The Bejeesus Out of the Grand Vizier's Hat

Blood was 5.2 this morning.

When attempting to Disappear, Discipline is king. Routine is sort of Grand Vizier, eagerly eyeing the throne for his own nefarious purposes. And Actual Enjoyment Of Food is pretty much the mouse scurrying round in the palace skirting-boards, looking for crumbs.

This week - and in fact, the week before, my Discipline level has been...faiiiirly good. Sort of Not Exactly Prince Regent, But Distant Cousin Prepared To Take The Throne If The Opportunity Occurs level. My Routine though has had something of a Hollow Point round shot through its pointy Grand Vizier's hat...and indeed its pointy Grand Vizier's brain-stem to boot.

The idea of visiting the hospital twice a day is that it breaks the monotony for the hospitalee, and you bring them Stuff and Stories from the outside world, to make their arse-numbing stay a little more bearable. What it does to your eating habits in return is interesting - the main night shift visit is from 6.30-8pm...which of course is the prime evening meal window. Recently, we haven't been having our evening meal till 8.30 or 9, which is too darned late to be doing it on a Disappearing promise.

What am I saying? Not that visiting's a pain in the arse, cos it isn't - it's what I get up every day for at the minute - every day hoping things will be just a little bit better. Just that sometimes, you can have good discipline, and it's not really gonna matter that much. Tonight, we had a bit of a home-made Indian-fest (d pulled out all the stops when we got back from visiting, and fed Ma to the gills with her beloved curry and rice.Now it's 10 o'clock, I don't have the energy left to bike and I haven't - apart from visiting time - really moved my arse off the couch all day, cos I'm up against another deadline. So - exercise - zilcho. Food intake - Yum!...No wait, that's a different measurement-scale. Food intake - HUUUUUGE...Result - probably not a great Tuesday.

While still trying to do as well as I can, I figure to be honest a trench warfare mentality needs to be adopted at times like this - when Dad's home, and better than this, I'll be doing more exercise, and eating less, at more sensible times. Till then, we're all just getting through and doing what's necessary. We'll figure out the fall-out when everything's fallen in to place a bit more.

Missing Caffeine

Or...just maybe...I'm not.

Didn't bike last night. Just couldn't. Something about this visiting lark just saps the strength out of you (says he who sits on his arse all day, as opposed to people who actually WORK for a living, then go visiting).
Crawled home, snarled and growled my way through a game of chess, crawled into bed, and that was all she wrote yesterday.

This morning I was going to go and do some gym work but had a bit of a deadline crisis when reminding myself that I have a couple of harsh ones coming up, so started work early.
"You walking?" said Ma, by text. I was halfway through typing "Nah," when I realised she wasn't actually asking if I was walking. She was asking, if I happened to be walking, for a meet-up to talk things through. I walked. We met, we walked together round the local Thomastown park, getting things a bit more straight in our brains. I went to Tescos, feeling the need for chocolate biscuits.
Didn't buy any, but roaming the aisles every now and again with the freedom to buy them if I want them seems to help. It's like when you're on a very high cliff, and you dare yourself to go right to the edge and look over - most of the times you try that, you'll end up scaring yourself and stepping back. Only occasionally does someone do that and think "Yeah, that'd be a good idea!"
Came back, sat on my arse for the rest of the day till 6.15, when we went to visit dad. he, at the moment, is taking dieting to extreme levels, so we sat with him for a while, trying to get him to Eat Stuff.

Sigh.

Which is how I end up at 10 o'clock, wittering to you lot and getting on a bike, before going back to deadline-work. It's days like this that make me reeeeeeallly miss the fuck out of caffeine.

Oh - blood was 6.2 this morning by the way. Normal vampiric service has been restored. Also, two Zenical pills in the system, no cataclysmic effects as of yet...said he...rather gingerly.

Preeeeeeciouuuuussss....!

When we were newly married, my dearly beloved wife had a special thing she used to do to me - y'know, as you do when you're newly married and the romance is still fresh and everything is pink and fluffy (and no, that's not a euphemism!).

She used to wait till I was drifting off to sleep, snuggle up to me, spoon style, pressing herself to my back, and reach one arm around my vast, flabby belly. She's nuzzle her lips against my ear. Then, in a soft and sibilant whisper, she'd say one word.

"Preeeeeeeecioussssssss!"

And I'd leap out of the bed and grab the nearest implement of death and destruction and start swinging away. That's why we had to move the toolbox out of my side of the bed - cos a 20 stone, half-asleep, slightly demented Welshman blindly swinging a rubber mallet around in the middle of the night's no joke to anyone, let me tell you. Mind you, I'm not sure my alternatives were better - I've zapped her with a hair dryer before now. The time I picked up the indoor airer and start waving it about like a kendo staff was a particularly low point...it happened to have a load of bras hanging on it at the time, so I looked like some sort of perverted version of Little John, trying to kick the crap out of Robin Hood.

The reason for these extreme reactions is that I have a thing about Gollum.
Gollum, for the 7 people left on the planet who haven't at least seen the movies, is a scrawny little demented ex-Hobbit in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who regards the One Ring that rules them all as his "Precious", and reacts violently towards anyone who tries to take it away from him.

To be strictly honest, I don't have a thing about Gollum. I have a thing about anything that looks harmless, that then turns out to be catastrophically dangerous - particularly if it has sharp teeth. Those little devil-baby aliens on Galaxy Quest? Can't watch 'em. Audrey II in the Little Shop of Horrors? Not keen. Carnivorous plants in science-fiction generally - fuck right off. That scene in Star Wars where they fly into a cave which...turns out not to be a cave - Arrrrrrgh! The most ludicrous example of this phobia that actually works is a scene from 1970s Doctor Who story Genesis of the Daleks where a companion gets a foot trapped in what looks like a rock, but which turns out to be a killer clam! A killer clam, let's not forget, rendered with all the effects panache and budget of the BBC in the 1970s. But I still can't look at it! Gollum was just the latest big-screen, big-budget thing which brought out my squirming reaction, and d, bless her, never tired of seeing me jump out of bed like a half-stoned Jedi, waving bits of furniture around to ward him off.

Anyway, this particular story is unique to Gollum, because Gollum had a purpose. He had a possession, that he absolutely didn't want to give up. He had his "Precious".

And now I have miiiiiiiiiine!

I went to Boots the chemist today because - as the more vampirically minded will have noticed, I haven't been posting blood sugar levels for about a week. I'd run out of testing strips, and the last time I went to the doctors, they'd left them off my prescription, so I had to go back. Finally went in to pick them up today, so normal blood-testing routine will be restored tomorrow.

"Don't s'pose there's any Zenical in?" I asked, hopelessly. There's never any Zenical in, as regular readers have heard me bitch repeatedly.
"Nooooo," said the woman behind the counter. "We've had some in, but they were all allocated, so we're out again."
"Of course," I said. "I've got three prescriptions for the stuff now..."
"Have you?" she asked, narrowing her eyes at me.
"Yeah," I said...
""'Old on," she said, and went away to the back of the dispensary for a good old fashioned rummage.
"Oh yeah," she said, coming back. "We'd put a box aside for you. Here you go..."
I grabbed the box out of her hands and clutched it to my acquisitive heart.

"Miiiiiiiiine" I either said out loud or whispered in the depths of brain....I can't, with any certainty, say which.
"You're welcome," she said, rather sniffily, and went to serve another customer.
"Preeeeeeciousssss...." my mind sibilated. "No-one's going to take the Precious, not never!" I scurried home before anyone tried and I was forced to eat them, or betray them to a giant fuck-off spider or something.

So tomorrow begins a new one-month course of Zenical. Woohoo. Man the bathrooms, re-apply the wodges, batten down the hatches and let the orange times flow. Thing is, the argument runs (if you'll pardon the expression) that after being on a regime for over a year, the pills do you no good because you'll have learned good dietary habits. Which is all fine and dandy of course but as we all know, I'm no longer being ruled by a rod of bastard-stubbornness, so the chemical cosh will once again be called for to batter me into a kind of self-obedient submission.

We start tomorrow...bwahahahahahaaaa....

In other news - walked 6 miles this morning, but had a somewhat huge lunch of leftover curry and rice, so fairly heavy on the carbs. Tonight, dammit, I bike!

Tempus Freak-It

Hmm.
Time's a weird one. You start off thinking you've got barrel-load of the stuff, then you turn round, do some stuff and wallop, that's your lot mate, ni'night...

Got up this morning fully intending to go to the gym before work.
"It's 8.15 baby," said d, yawning...
"Ah," I said. "Right...then I'll get a jump on work, and go lunchtime instead..."
Worked solidly through the morning. Lunchtime came, and I was neeeearly done, so I pushed on through. I looked up when I was done and it was 3 o'clock. Had to get back for 5, to go up to Ma's and then on to visiting. Was damned if I was gonna let the day swallow me up without doing anything, so went to the gym...
at which point I discovered exactly how out-of-practice at this stuff I was. Managed a bunch of sit ups, a pathetic amount of pushing up, and half a mile of running.

Went visiting - dad had a CT scan of his lungs and heart today to rule out an embolism. Thankfully, they were able to do so. Now we're home and it's nearly 10 o'clock and I have one more job to do before tomorrow...which means one more job before I can get on the bike...

"Dude, you wanna walk tomorrow?"
I do. The proto-blisters have responded nicely to a day of doing verrrry freakin' little, and I'm planning to try and do another ten miles in the morning...so...
"In that case, kiss the bike goodnight for the night," said d, "cos burning the candle at both ends...that just isn't gonna work honey..."

I hate that she's right. But I'd be a pretty crappy atheist if I ignored facts just because I didn't like them very much.
So this is me, not biking. But tomorrow, that trail has my name - and my boots - allll over it.

Regime Change

In the old days, when governments in other countries started putting people to death and rolling their tanks into other people's back gardens, we went to war, and perpetually bombed the arse out of their country till they thought better of it and died. These days, when people start putting people to death and looking like they might quite like to just nip next door and loot some oil, a couple of priceless artworks and maybe a recipe for a really good pizza, we don't go to war, we instigate what's called Regime Change.

Essentially, regime change means "we know it's not your fault, o people of the nation, and we're sure you'd love a bit of freedom and a Big Mac if only you had the opportunity, so we're just gonna come in and shoot your leaders in the head, if that's OK with you...and in fact, if it isn't. Sure, some of you will still get killed, but at least it'll be in the name of Freedom...and probably Halliburton, but we won't talk about that..."

Today has been a day for declaring regime change in Disappearing Land. Pretty much because the regime that was in place up to now had ceased to function effectively...if at all.

Does this mean the re-instatement of our dissident regime, the Commissariat of the Perspex Boxes?

Not really, no. The disintegration of the current regime though comes because, pretty much, there has been no regime in place since about March. There have been false starts, brief spurts of enthusiasm followed by slumps of  lethargy. The idea is to put in place a better, more logical system. More exercise, less food - the equation is actually fairly simple.

Started as I mean to go on today - walked ten miles before work. Can't do that tomorrow, as there are proto-blisters bitching on both feet, which need to be cajoled and bought off with niceness until they shut up and disappear (in case anyone's still following the regime change allegory, the proto-blisters would probably be the electorate). But I'll do something each day this week - tomorrow, maybe a double: swim and gym in the morning. I'm also planning to hit the bike again devotedly - after evening visiting hours, probably. 

My dad, incidentally - and thanks to everyone who's asked about him or sent wishes his way - is also supposed to be on a new regime, to tackle both his blood sugar and his heart rate, both of which are still elevated. As yet, they seem to be tackling the blood sugar with sliding-scale insulin, but of the fabled heart medicine, and indeed the fabled cardiologist, there has, as yet, been no sign.

But the new regime begins here, for me at least. 

Given everything I ate last week, incidentally, and everything I did and didn't do in terms of exercise, I'm happy enough with this week's weigh-in:

16 stone 4.5 - static on last week's figures. It shouldn't, of course, but as I say, given the way that last week went, that feels rather like a result!

The Screen Wipe

Today started at Ugh o'clock, as is usual for the London UberCommute. Got on a train at 6.35. By 10.53, d was getting antsy.
"Communication blackout," she pointed out by text. I called my mother.
She was already at the hospital. She'd been there since 7.30, having received a call at 6 o'clock to say dad had had a heart rate spike of 140 in the night, followed by an episode of diabetic hypoglycaemia, and a tumble out of bed. Talk about being outdone by your parents! I'll never bitch about the early start again!

Panicked for a while as I headed in absolutely the wrong blood direction on a train. Didn't particularly calm down till I got to work, by which time, the picture for dad was starting to look a bit brighter too. Sat at my desk.

"Right, well...you can do one of two things," I told myself and my computer screen (one of the joys of having the office to yourself is that you can witter all you like and no-one gives a fuck!).
"You can mope and ache and get nothing done and wallow in fear and consequences and woe is us..." I said.
"Or you can be a Man. A Man like dad is..." A strong man, a man who believes in getting the job done and doing everything he can. A man who never wants to anything with half a heart.
"Right," I said again. "Bollocks.
And with that, I gave my brain a mental screen wipe. Yes, I've been worried about him. Yes, I'm gonna see him tomorrow, and investigate what happened and where we go from here. But today - I did the job. Worked my ass off, and am sitting now in Starbucks with minutes to go before I catch my train back to the land where I can do...at least a little something...to help make his day the tiniest glimmer better than it would be if I didn't. It's a change of attitude I intend to carry forward into the Disappearing too. Don't actually, on reflection, think I need a whole new blog. Just a screen wipe of all the toing and froing, and a return to practical progress. So that's tomorrow. Let's grab the bugger by the throat again and employ every cliche of self-destiny we can, and get the job done.

Up The Down Escalator

You ever done that thing where you stand at the bottom of a downward-moving escalator and try and walk up it?
That's life at the moment - everything seems like an enormous, ridiculous, utterly draining waste of time...

Still, gotta laugh, haven't you?

Work - about which I'm genuinely not complaining, honest - is wave after wave of words. Dad's health feels like running to stand still and be carried irrevocably backwards. And my Disappearing...
It's been one of those weeks where nothing has been doable - between deadlines and visiting, I've done practically no exercise, and with eating out quite a bit after visiting hours, my calorie intake's been high. So this is not going to be a good week's weigh-in.

Oh in addition, there have been news stories today proclaiming that it's 30 years since the launch of the Commodore 64, and 25 years since the launch of the Lost Boys, so I couldn't feel older if my life depended on it.

So let's face a fact here - this is not gonna be me jumping up and down and happy dancing come Tuesday.
My life feels out of control in a number of directions. Hasn't really been in control since March. I remember writing the blurb for my September walk donation page. I was about 15 stone at that point, and I wrote "God knows where I'll be on this journey by September..." For the mathematics fans out there, if I'd stuck to my two-pounds-per-week rate, I'd be 13 stone round about now. In all likelihood, I'll be back up to 16 stone 7 pounds on Tuesday. Three and a half stone behind schedule.

All comes down to discipline of course - my discipline remains broken. I've had good weeks, solidly disciplined weeks. But I have the distinct feeling that to make real progress, what I need to do is shut this down.

The Disappearing Man, phase 1 took me from 20 stone 7 pounds to 14 stone 9 pounds, and then back up to (probably - let's see on Tuesday) 16 stone 7 pounds.  I have a feeling that what's necessary is a brand new beginning - new blog, new rules, new discipline, new...everything. Disappearing discipline, financial discipline, all kinds of discipline. I'm going to take tomorrow to see what my brain tells me...and then maybe come Tuesday, we might begin Disappearing 2.

Meep Meep!

You ever watch a Road Runner cartoon, where Wile. E. Coyote (is he related to Wil. I. Am, by the way? Just a thought) set a trap with an ACME anvil, and then would end up running off the edge of a cliff, and would have time to look down and realise his fate, then would plummet with cartoon over-compensation to the ground, landing with just his head above ground. Then, from nowhere, there'd be a whistling sound and he'd look up, and see the inevitable anvil hurtling down to embed itself - Ker-chunk! - in his head, and there'd be that look of "Why me?" on his long, goofy face. And once he'd plummeted to the ground, and taken an anvil to the head, and couldn't move a muscle, that evil, gloating bastard of a Road Runner would speed up, come to a dead stop, waggle its tongue at the helpless, semi-conscious coyote, go "Meep Meep!" and fuck off to pastures new.

This has been a Wile. E. Coyote kinda day.

Dad was great when we saw him yesterday - engaged, with a good colour, eating and drinking and following conversations. There was even some of his old dry grin.

Ma got there this afternoon for the 3 o'clock visiting session, only to be told something had happened in the night. Dad's heart rate had spiked to 199 bpm.

Lemme just put that into some kinda context. I'm 40. I've undertaken a year and a half of weight loss. I have biked, and run, and rowed, and swum, and spun dammit. I've never achieved a heart rate of 199 bpm. He was a 69 year old man, laying in a bed, clocking those kinds of numbers.

Oddly enough, no-one seems concerned about this except us. They didn't bring in cardiology, they didn't call any of us, nothing.
Now, today, he's back to being drained and exhausted, and he can't eat or drink anything, because he's both nauseated and barely conscious for two sentences.
"Why did no-one call us?" we asked the nurses on the desk.
"Ohhh...we sorted it. His heart's down to 114 now," they said. Average heart rate - 80 bpm...you can do the math on that, right? We looked down to see the cliff had ended three seconds before.
"Why did no-one from coronary care come and see him?"
They shrugged.
We plummeted to the ground and weighted for the inevitable anvil.
"Can we get a doctor to check him over?" we asked.
"Doctor's just gone off shift," they said. "If we think he needs seeing to, we'll put him right...honest."
Meep...freakin'...Meep!

Whumpf!

I don't cook.

This should be understood from the outset. I have cooked in the past, but it's not a thing I do well or with any panache, and it's therefore not something I do for myself.
In the wonderful, bad old days when I was a student, our kitchen blew up on the third day, and I survived an entire year of college on delivery pizza and ice-cream bars.
Given my druthers, I'd live on stuff on toast and ice-cream or cereal.

But this lunchtime I wanted to do something that was non-toast-based. I dug out some small pizzas from our behemoth freezer. Then I approached the cooker. Seemed perfectly straightforward. Turn a dial, insert pizza, wait till cooked, remove.

I'm basically a caveman, but I figured I could cope with that. I turned on the over, cranked the dial, turned away to make myself a coffee, and heard a quiet "Whumpf" behind me.
I turned back, only to see a big, bright mushroom cloud reaching up to the top of the oven and rolling around the interior. I turned it off, pulled out the baking tray...my pizzas had been replaced by a couple of blackened, charred discs of carbonised dust. For a second, I thought about using them to do a moody black and white portrait of my wife for the office wall, but in the end I decided...
"Fuck it, it's food."

Or rather, of course, "eat it, it's food".

"You used the oven?"
The incredulity in d's voice bored on panic.
"Yeah...tell me, who fitted the thermonuclear device?"
"Oh that," she said. "Yeah, that can be tricky. Let me guess...you put the pizzas in the top part of the bottom over, rather than the bottom part of the top oven, right?"
"There's a top oven?" I asked.
"Yyyeah it's that thing that looks like a salamander."
"A lizard?"
"No, ya dink. A salamander...it's what you British weirdos call a grill."
"Oh, that. That's an oven too?"
"Yes. Look, you're missing the point..."
"Err yeah, top of the 'bottom' oven then..."
"Yyyyeah, thought so. For some reason the top of the bottom oven is about 3000 Kelvins hotter than the middle of the bottom oven. And for reasons I'm not entirely sure about, the bottom of the bottom oven is pretty close to Absolute Zero."
"Really?"
"Yeah...I think it probably exists in a slightly different space-time continuum or something."
I should never have let her watch the last season of Doctor Who.
"Is that right?" I asked. "So we've got a neutron bomb in the bottom oven. Any other kitchen secrets I should know? Does the toaster work by telepathy? Is the refrigerator bigger on the inside? If I turn on the food processor, will a tiny three dimensional princess pop up and go "Help me Tony-wan...?"
"This is why you don't cook, isn't it?"
"No dear, it really isn't..."

Another not-terribly-good day, Disappearing-wise. Combination of tight deadlines and...well, fundamental laziness, probably, but let's not underplay the importance of tight deadlines, dammit! May, just conceivably, bike later, one we've been hospital visiting and out for a meal with some family who are down from Esher to see my dad tonight.

Still got four days before I have to weigh again...Hmm...Something should be done...Whether it will or not rather depends on the deadlines getting looser. So this is me...buggering off back to do some more editing before visiting time. Catch ya tomorrow, fans and groupies!

50 Shades of Green

"Take your hat!"
I looked at the sky. It was bright and blue, with fluffy sheep-clouds scudding across it.
"Nah, it'll be fine baby," I said, stomping off down the Taff Trail at 7.30 this morning.

I got about a mile down the trail when the heavens opened.
"Bugger this for a game of soldiers," I muttered, and ran back. Of course, the good thing about that is that I ran about a mile back.

Been busy sitting on my arse for the rest of the day - no biking.
Went up to see dad tonight. He's much better - blood sugar, colour, Potassium level, level of thereness, everything is better. Still has feet like water balloons, but they're not hurting him, so yay.
"Ah!" I said.
"What?" said Ma and d simultaneously.
"I knew I'd seen the green of your kitchen somewhere," I said.
"Where?"
"There...the strip across the doors of the ward, look..."
They looked.
Then they looked back at me. Kinda like I was on mind-altering drugs.
"That's blue!" said d."
"Green!" I insisted...cos it was (Yeah, screw it, I've got a blog, and I'm not afraid to use it - green, green, green, green, green!).
She pointed at Ma's green sweater.
"What colour's this?" she asked.
"Greeeeeen!"
"No dear...this is teal."
"That's what I said," I said. "Green."
"Teal's not green," she claimed.
"Well it's not blue!" I said.
""Yyyyyeah, kind of is. It's blue-green," she asserted.
"GREEEN!"

The next hour was the kind of game you'd play with a two year old. We were pointing at things, naming colours.

It's fair to say that...erm...most of mine were freakin' green! Most of hers, she claims, were blue. Except about half of them were really green!

"Dude, seriously, you need to get to the optician. You've got the green-eyed monster!"
"What the freak ever baby, it's green!"

We both turned to Ma.
"Erm...welcome to gibber," we said, almost in unison. "Green!" I pointed out a tree.
"Yes dear, well done."
"Gibber?"
"Yeah...we kinda do this every night," said d. "Not usually so...erm..."
"Green!"
"Errr...blue, but whatever dude."
"So gibber is...?"
"Lunacy. Nonsense. Silliness. Flapdoodle."
"Green!" I said, pointing at a car coming the other way.
"So you're just being silly?" said Ma, not entirely sure she grasped the concept.
"Yeah," said d. "About half an hour a night, end of the night, we gibber."
"Keeps us laughing together," I added.
"You're bonkers, the pair of you," said Ma.
"Greeeen! Green! Green! Yeah...that's kinda the point," I agreed.

We are, as advertised, completely bonkers. And eight years in, it's working pretty well for us. Let's see if anyone's still using 50 Shades of Grey eight years from now!

The Chips Are Always Tastier On The Other Person's Plate

Message to men everywhere:
If you've ever wondered why the most significant woman in your life says she doesn't want chips (or fries), and then spends half an hour merrily picking them off your plate - two things. Firstly, it is a well-known fact that food taken from someone else's plate has no calories, and secondly, as I discovered tonight, the chips are always tastier on the other person's plate. Even if you've had your own, there's something altogether more delicious about an illicit chip.

It's been a truly...bizarre day.
I've been watching too much Smash, clearly, cos this morning I woke from a dream of a brand new musical. The songs have been bouncing round my head all day.
Been working of course, but Ma wanted a hand to shift some furniture at 11.30. Dad had gone up to hospital to have two units of blood and some steroids. I'd been back home less than five minutes when Ma rang.
"Just heard from the hospital. He's had some sort of...heart...thing."
We went up. What he'd had was tachycardia, apparently brought on by high blood sugar.

That was a slap in the face and a knee in the crotch, frankly. That's exactly what I had a few months before beginning this experiment. His is as a result of the steroids he's been prescribed to battle his leukaemia.

Sigh....and so the sliding puzzle gets a new square added to it.

Needless to say, my day went pretty much to Hell around the locus of all this, so I've broken my non-Monday biking streak. Damn.
Will be walking early tomorrow morning though, so will try and get back on the right side of the exercise-food ratio. Once visiting time was over, Ma and d and I went for a meal, and I ended up stealing chips off d's plate, and y'know what, I'm not about to throw myself in a lake of self-pity or self-loathing over it.That was the day that was, and tomorrow, said he, channelling Scarlett again, is another day. Let's see what it brings.