The Disappearing Man

Happy Blogiversary

2012-02-27T16:06:00.000Z

Occurs to me that I've allowed a blogiversary to go entirely unnoticed. it was on the 26th February 2011 that I first made a blog entry in this experiment. Rather weirdly, the next one was on 28th, and then the experiment began in earnest on 1st March. So yesterday was my first anniversary as a blogger, if not as The Disappearing Man. That blogiversary will be Thursday of this week.

It's been an up-and-downy sort of year, I think you'd agree. From fantasising about slaughtering TV chefs to being hit on by wannabe-Klingons in the Post Office, from leaving my mark on Camden Town to falling over plant pots and breaking a toe, from sniffing the Boobies of Doom to sniffing desserts at a posh dinner. To BWI (blogging while intoxicated) in Croatia to farewell dashes to the States to moving from London to the familiar territory of my home town, and inbetween it all, the relentless misery of self-denial and exercise, and the periodic explosions of joy that come from losing a semi-shitload of weight.

Something was brought home to me yesterday. Ma has spotted a suit she thinks I should get, and asked when it was that we picked up my Master suit, and what I weighed then. It was September last year, and I weighed 17 stone 4.75 pounds. That's (roughly) two stone heavier than I am now. On the one hand, put like that, it gives you a nice warm glow...and then on the other hand, you realise it took five months to achieve that. Five long-ass months. And of course seven months to do the previous three stone.

That's ridiculously long, hard bloody slogging. I'd be lying if I told you that a very large part of me didn't wanna throw its toys out of the pram at the prospect of doing all that alllllll over again for the next twelve months. But then one has to think of the goal, I guess - freedom from diabetes if life is lived within limits, a life lived longer, and freer, and fuller, and this year could give the whole kit and caboodle to me, cos I'm technically on the downhill slope at this point...

Sigh...

Final weigh-in of year one tomorrow. Oooh, the drama - will I reach the 5.5 stone mark? Will I see my first 14 stone reading? Or will it just be another of the Inbetween-Tuesdays, of which there are so many between landmarks on this journey? Tune in tomorrow, and let's see...

Blood, by the way, at Ugh o'clock this morning was 5.2. Again, I maintain it's too bleary and sleepy at that time to properly respond to the needle. I know I am...

Led Astray

2012-02-26T20:24:00.000Z

I went in search of the Taff Trail again yesterday - this legendary walking path that everyone tells me I should get on and walk.

Which would be all very well if I could find and stay on the bloody thing!
I followed the map, got onto something that looked a bit...erm...traily, and then came to a crossroads. One road went downhill, and the other, marked with a picture of a walker on it, led up and over a hill.

Yeah, go figure. I followed the upward path. Which shortly dissolved into a mudbath. I picked my way through it warily, and, seeing that this went on as far as the eye could see, got off it as quickly as possible. There was a dead end. That didn't bode well. At the opposite end of the dead end, so to speak, was a business park. I walked around it for a while, thinking that if it had a dead end at one...erm...end of it, there had to be another way out.

There wasn't.

Against all my instincts, I turned round and walked in the third of two directions...and finally found myself on the Taff Trail...going backwards, towards my flat. I posted my lostness to facebook, looped an irritated loop and tried to find the path again. Pretty much found it. Then I got a text from Lee.

You remember Lee...he's the pal of mine with allllmost as little navigational nous as me.
"Which direction you going?" he asked.
"Well, your way..." I replied. "At least theoretically."
"I'll bring the dog and meet you on the way," he offered, rather magnanimously I thought.
True enough, he met me on the way, and we walked a while, with Chip, the dog, running away and back to us with a kind of excitement that pretty much suggested he'd never actually seen the Outdoors before.
"You up for going a bit...off-road?" he asked, as we encountered a kind of gate leading up one side of what I've since learned is called Aberdare Mountain.

It's important to remember I've learned that since I said "Sure, why not?"

Let me tell you why not.
Why not is because a) it's back to mud and stones and a freaking stream, b) because, halfway up the mountain, it'll occur to you that Chip the Dog, with his Outdoors Excitement Syndrome, still has more navigational understanding than the two human beings combined.

"Ahhh, crap," I muttered, slipping on a stone.
"Shoulda read the small print, man," said Lee. "May contain lots of mud and stones..."
"And a stream," I muttered.

"Fuck..." said Lee at one point.
"What?" I asked, looking up, alerted by the tone of his voice.
"I...erm...I think we've gone wrong."
"We did," I said. "Round about the time you asked if I wanted to go off-road, and I said yes."
He rolled his eyes."City boy..." he muttered.
"Soooo - we've gone wrong?"
He looked up and sniffed, as if taking a scent-bearing.
"Yyyyyeah, I think so," he said. "Think we should have taken a fork back there."
I sighed.
"If I start to hear banjos, I'm runnin'" I said.
"Runnin'?" he said, raising an eyebrow.
"Wellllll alright, maybe I'll kick you in the shins and walk really fast..." I conceded.
Towards the end of the walk, we came to another crossroads.
"Bugger," said Lee. "A choice is needed."
"What, combining our legendary decision-making skills?"
"Ah...well..."
"How 'bout this?" I asked. "Put Chip on the lead, and whichever way he decides is right, we'll go..."
"OK," he said.
"Alllrighty, I was actually joking, but whatever works..."

And it did. Fair play to the daft dog, he continued to have more sense than the two of us primates put together, and he got us home in pretty much perfect time.

Today, went out walking with Ma. Back down the Taff Trail for a while, then back up on the road.
"Ohh, look," she said, spotting a gate at the side of the road. The opposite side of the road to Lee's side, but still...the path went up the side of the other mountain that forms our Valley.
"Shall we go a bit off the beaten track?" said Ma.
I sighed.
"Sure, why the Hell not?" I said.
Why the Hell not in this case was simply pain. Sheer, sweet, simple, folded, like Danish pastry dough, pain. The pain of going up, right to left diagonally, followed by more up, left to right diagonally...followed by a little more up, right to left diagonally. Not quite sure where we ended up, but I'm happy to tell you there was no mud, no stream, no banjo-playing yokels that could be tempted out of their fairly smart little houses, stuck improbably on a freakin' mountainside.

Them, for some reason I can't really explain, I came home and biked for about 900 caloriesworth. Still hoping to get the tiniest possible dip into the 14-zone on Tuesday, though I'm really not holding my breath. Tomorrow - UberCommute...woohoo...

Oh, blood was high this morning, by the way - 6.4.

Just Desserts

2012-02-25T20:10:00.001Z

I've made something of a boast since I started this experiment that I haven't in fact eaten a dessert in two years. It's been the source of much whinging and bitching, as longer-term readers will know.

But now I'm forced to consider a fundamental question: What exactly constitutes a dessert?

After all, I've eaten corn bread after a meal, which is only a bread by virtue of a wink-wink convention that stops short of actually calling it corn cake (but which might be a more accurate description of that heavenly creation). I've eaten fruit salads after meals, composed of nothing but...well, fruit, clearly...but haven't classed them as desserts for some reason.

But the issue was rather forcibly brought to mind last night, because last night, I did something new. I had a banana, cut up, and covered in a low fat, low sugar, low calorie yoghurt...

After my main meal...

And suddenly, afterwards, realised that it felt like a dessert.

Now this is potentially dangerous, as anyone familiar with the madness of my perspex walls will understand. The perspex walls principle, for those who don't go back the whole year with me, is that there are things I cannot eat, not because they are intrinsically dangerous or fattening in themselves, but because they lead me on in quick succession to things which are intrinsically dangerous or fattening. I've previously used exactly this example - today I have a low fat yoghurt. Tomorrow, I go and buy an extra creamy yoghurt. The day after, I switch from yoghurt to buying a tub of custard. And by the end of the week, I'm eating four custard tarts for breakfast and a gateau for lunch.

This is not comical overstatement - this is something I have done before. It's not the low fat yoghurt that's the danger, but the place it occupies in my psyche as a dessert. Previously, I have slid down a rapid and slippery slope of equivocation - one dessert's as good or bad as another (even though my rational mind knows this is not the case), and before I know it, I'm up to my ears in whipped cream and chocolate, and so incredibly, briefly, ecstatic that I don't give a damn about anything else.

And last night I had a low fat yoghurt.

To be honest, I didn't actually think about perspex walls when we bought the yoghurts, or when I ate it. It was only afterwards that I felt the danger ot the perspex walls that have, for all their frank and unabashed mentalness, seen me right throughout the first year of this process.

I guess the question really becomes whether, as well as being the Disappearing Man for the course of this year, I might, in some ways, have actually grown too. Have I reached a place of mental safety where low-calorie 'substitute' desserts can just be themselves, without leading me inexorably to equivocation and abandonment?

I honestly don't know.

I can honestly tell you that, while there's always a low-grade atmosphere of sugar-lust around me these days, and that I would love, would truly love, to dive into a whorishly extravagant sundae right now, at at practically every waking moment of every day. But I can also honestly report that throughout the course of today, that sugar-lust hasn't been any greater than normal, my determination any weaker, or my goals for this Disappearing any less achievable. I haven't been hounded through the world in search of chocolate - as I would have been before all this began. So who knows? Perhaps I've reached a stage where, to badly bastardise Freud for you, a yoghurt is just a yoghurt...

I guess we'll see. Incidentally, last night's indulgence clearly had no impact on my blood - woke to see it was 5.5 this morning - picture perfect for a British diabetic.

Eat Your Heart Out

2012-02-24T19:08:00.001Z

Sometimes, having friends with medical degrees is really fascinating.
Got involved in a conversation with a couple of pals this morning, Jessica and Steve, both of which have had some medical training.

"Fat's yellow," said Jess at one point, when the conversation had turned (as it occasionally does when talking to medics) to cadavers and autopsies. "Looks like little corn kernels. And it's all slippery and greasy..."
"So butter undergoes no particularly impressive change from the moment you spread it on your toast to the moment you haul it round on your ass?" I asked, thinking this might be an impressive visual deterrent for me the next time I have toast for breakfast. (Y'know, because the Xenical effect is such old hat by now!).
"Pretty much," she agreed, more in jest than in medical expertise.
"Doesn't fat accumulate round the heart?" asked Steve.
"I thought it accumulated round the heart so the heart could, y'know, 'eat' it to keep pumping?"
"It accumulates in the grooves and the vessels of the heart, yeah," said Jess.
"So the groovier your heart is, the more chance you have of dying because of cardio-fat?" I asked, thinking about it.
"That must really piss off the hippies."
"How would you tell if a hippie was pissed off?" asked Jess, not unfairly.
"Mind you," she added, "the heart would eat itself to keep pumping. It'll use muscle as a fuel given the opportunity, rather than fat."
I blinked.
"So you really can 'eat your heart out?" I asked.
"Yep," said Jess.
"Well..." I said. "That's...erm...interesting."
To be honest, it was more than interesting - it gave me another great element for the Faustian story I started last night. And now, I guess, it's given me a blog on a night when all I can tell you is I walked a few miles and bikes a few hundred calories and ate some toast and fruit today, ta-dah!

Oh, and that my blood was 6.0 this morning, which was pretty much to be expected, as last night's dinner included some gorgeous corn bread. Spread with butter...

Damn 'corn kernels'!

The Faustus Factor

2012-02-23T19:00:00.002Z

Blood was 5.8 today, my little Lestats.

Nothing much of great Disappearing interest today - went to hospital with my dad, seemed to go OK, waiting for results of his CT scan now. Ate two meals, and have just biked away 700 caloriesworth of them. Walked up to the folks' place, and discovered that, since I've plugged the bike back in, I'm well out of practice at the walking lark...which bodes well for September(!).

While biking, was chatting via text to Karen Pulley.
"Why is everything that tastes nice bad for you?" she asked.
"Because there really is a god, and he's still a little pissed about that whole 'Forbidden Fruit' thing?" I suggested.
"Hmm...Maybe. On the other hand, you could say that something like that was the Devil's work. Eating our souls to death and all that..." she mused.
"Mmm...Gluttony. One of the very best sins," I murmured, drifting for really rather a long moment into a cake-shop fantasy moment. It was like Fantasia, except instead of hippos and flamingos, there were Danishes and eclairs. It was looooooovely.

Then it hit me.
What would you give to achieve your version of perfection overnight? And to maintain it, effortlessly, in spite of your actions, for the rest of your life?

Of course 'perfection' is a very dodgy idea, and walking even half a mile in perfection's shoes will show you there's no such thing, but imagine someone from whom their own bodyweight was robbing the opportunities of life - we've probably all seen programmes on these people. Imagine if an opportunity were given to them to lose the weight in an instant - no effort, no exercise, no costly and painful surgery...and then they got the 'perfect' body, and the perfect metabolism, that allowed them to continue their eating habits while suffering none of the consequences. What would they...what would we I should say, because while not extreme enough to have a show made about me, my original weight was certinaly limiting my life-opportunities...what would we be prepared to give for that? To sacrifice for it?

I mention this merely because one of the items on my list of goals for achieving before the end of March is to enter every writing competition I can, and just as with the walking, if you let it go for a while, you get painfully rusty, so with the writing (outside of a novel the plot of which you already know, I mean). So I'd been staring at my competitions spreadsheet for a few days, willing my creative juices to get flowing.

I reckon there might be meat to this story (mmmm....meeeeaty.....juices...), so may well chain myself to the computer for the rest of the night and see what comes...I guess the question really is whether Fat is a Faustian Issue?

Busy Doing Sod-Buggerall

2012-02-22T22:48:00.000Z

Blood was a practically perfect 5.5 today - smack in the centre of the safe zone, so a mini-wave of appreciation coming from me to my own corpuscles today (yes, I'm really that egotistical).

Had an interview booked in for work at 10AM, and an interview with my new bank booked in at 11. With those in mind, I did precisely sod-buggerall in terms of exercise. If I could be done with the bank by 1, there was always the chance of going on a pathways walk. So, got the work interview done (Colin McGregor, brother of Ewan and damned interesting dude in his own right, let me tellya), made it to the bank for 11...only to discover my interview with the bank was actually supposed to be at 10.

Bugger.

"Got anything else to do in town?" the teller asked. "I'll get him to call you when he's free." Him in this instance being the guy with whom I was due to meet an hour ago. I shrugged. "I'll go and have coffee across the road," I said.

I went and had coffee across the road...(You're glad you're still reading this, aren't you? It's not like I didn't tell you what kind of day it was, right there in the title!)

I stayed there for an hour and a half, phone on table, book in hand, and, as it happened, two fairly gorgeous de-caff lattes in my short-term future, one after the other. Lovely stuff. But now it was 12.30, and I really had to get back to work. I popped back into the bank to tell them I'd reschedule.
"Oh, he has been ringing you," said the teller, "but it's gone to voicemail all the time..."
I coughed a little, to dislodge the bullshit from my ears, and rearranged our appointment. An hour and a half of lunch pretty much put paid to my 'lunchtime' walking plans, so I came back home, and Got On With Stuff too dull to bother you with. I figured I might still get some biking in. Then Ma said she'd be down in a bit, and I remembered I still had some tiny domestic chores to make a big deal of doing (it's a guy thing). So did them, and had Ma round. Then I did something moderately peculiar.

I made my first ever YouTube video.

It's not up there yet - at this moment, it's been uploading for something in the region of six hours(!), and it's only six minutes long. It's also nothing to do with the Disappearing Man blog, but I wanted to take your mind - would any of you bother clicking on Youtube videos if, for instance, I did some of the better blogs as 'performance pieces'? Those of you who know me personally can probably hear my voice when you read the words any way, and those of you who don't have very little reason to give a toss (though I'm thankful when you do, obviously). Have never personally embraced the business of talking to yourself and putting it out there for the world to happily ignore, but hey - I just might...seriously, gimme your thoughts on this, they'll pretty much determine whether I bother.

Then, before I knew what was what, it was time to get over to the leisure centre for aquacising and gymming and pain and resentment and a protein-high meal and now, frankly, it's time to get off this machine (leaving a window open for the video to keep on churning its way to uploaded status), go have a coffee and snore.

Tomorrow's probably going ot be similar in terms of its busyness and its general avoidance of a great deal of exercise - my dad has a bodyscan tomorrow, and a lung function test on Friday, and I want to be there for both of them...I know what I said about getting the couple of pounds lost this week, but if I can attend both those tests, I'll happily sacrifice the exercise time and the result on Tuesday. Priorities and all that.

Take A Hike!

2012-02-21T21:26:00.000Z

Blood this morning a deeply dodgy 6.9 - making up for yesterday's 4.9 I guess.
Weigh-in results this morning: 15 stone 1.25

That's a textbook two-pound loss on last week. Also means if I can repeat last week, this week, I'll achieve my 5.5 stone 'badge', as it were, within my first year as a Disappearing Man. Which is actually a stone more than halfway. In fact, if I achieve that marker, I'll have lost 77 of the original 104 pounds I was aiming to lose in the first year (putting me fractionally less than two stone behind the curve. Given that I started without any real idea whether I'd make it through a year of this...ahem...endeavour, I'm happy enough if I can get there. Should also of course mean that within the scope of Year 2, I'll hit my target, and then be left with...(shrugs)...no more Disappearing to do. Which will be extremely weird.

Cool, but extremely weird.

In other news, followed through on my ramblings of a couple of days ago, I signed on today to do the Maggie's Night Hike on September 21st this year.

If I've done it right, there should be a now-permanent link to it on the right of this blog.

Maggie's Cancer Care Centres do a kick-ass job. If you need more than the four words with the inital capital letters to get that, check them out riiiiight here.

The Night Hike is 20 miles of walking...in one night. Nearly died trying to do that, frankly. Ended up exhausted, self-righteous and so completely blistered I didn't want to move any part of my body for about a fortnight. So...yaaaaay, let's get another steamin;' hunk of that, right?

Last time I did it, it was back in 2009. At the time, I was something like 18 stone. It was enjoyable, and in the aftermath of all the preparation for doing it, I decided to get fit and healthy, joined a gym, never went to it, ate like I lived there and put on two stone of pure flab. Sooooo that worked. You've already seen those stones - they were the early, bitchy stones.

Thing is, right now, I'm three-stone-or-thereabouts lighter than last time (as well as three fairly crucial years older), so I'm kinda wondering whether I'll still be able to pull it offf.

I'm also kinda wondering how many of you lovely lovely people (at least 40 of you read the "We're Gonna Need A Bigger Spreadsheet" entry, which is frankly mental), will either a) give me some dosh to push me through the later, entirely eeeeevil miles of this thing, or b) spread the word to people who either have more money, or biggger hearts than you do!

In the event that the link on the right doesn't work, I'm gonna have to keep posting THIS LINK in pretty much every entry....jusssst to piss you off. As a teeny tiny incentive to give me your money and force me to hurt through twenty - count 'em, that's ten...then a whoooole other ten we knew nothing about - long-ass miles, if you click the link, you'll not only get a surname, for the first time in almost a year of Disappearing, you'll also get a picture. It's a picture from before annny of this - before the extra two stone went on, before the first Night Hike, at one of the only two times in my life when a camera was pointed at me and I personally thought I looked pretty cool. C'mon, if the sheer evil agony of me walking twenty miles in a night doesn't get you all shook up, a picture of me thinking I look all that (at at least a couple of stone heavier than I am right now, awoohoo!) - that's gotta be worth the price of admission, hasn't it?

Back To Bastardville By Bus

2012-02-20T16:48:00.000Z

Bing Bing ke Bing Bing ke Bing!
"Waaaaaaaaaugh!"
Thud!
Bing Bing ke Bing Bing ke Bing!
"Shurrup!"
Bing Bing ke Bing Bing ke Bing!
"No, seriously, you evil-minded little piece of techno-crap..."
Bing Bing ke Bing Bing ke Bing!
"Bastard fiddly-buttoned little fuck!
Bing Bing ke Bing Bing ke-
"Ahhh.... "

I sat there in the dark, having finally vanquished the 'evil-minded little piece of techno-crap' - It's a term I use so often, my phone has been known to come when it's called.
I rubbed my hip. The Thud! had been the noise of me hitting the floor, having had my system shocked by the audio equivalent of a few thousand volts at a time when it really didn't deserve that sort of treatment.
"Morning," said d sleepily, entirely unphased by my antics.
"Yessss," I hissed like a Spiderman super-villain. "Yessss, it is, isn't it? Just about..."
Seriously - this bus bullshit has got to stop. Trains - they're the way of the future. Come pay day...

Blood this morning was 4.9 - although, to be fair, I think my blood was pretty much still as deeply asleep as the rest of me, so it hadn't had a chance to think about saturating with sugar just yet.
The day in London has been, if I'm honest, just fine - got a shedload of proper work done, and got introduced to TV's Maggie Philbin (Proto-geek-crush for men of a certain age in the UK). She took my magazine away with her, to throw into the nearest trashcan when she was safely outside the building. No real exercise today except a little walking here and there - hardly enough to wake up my sleepy system. And no real writing done either, except on the inside of my skull, ready to be transcribed, possibly, on the long-ass bus ride home. But nevertheless a productive day of actual business. Back to the routine of gym visits and biking and sweating and weighing-in tomorrow. Oh, and possibly some news of a follow-up to yesterday's blog, if I can pull my finger out. But for now, this is me, still practically asleep, trudging back to another damn bus to burn away four or five more hours of my existence.

Hey ho - mustn't grumble. Compared to about 93% of people, my life pretty much kicks ass right now. Time to move to QuitchaBitchin, Missouri and get on home...

We're Gonna Need A Bigger Spreadsheet...

2012-02-19T17:47:00.000Z

Breakfast out this morning, with Rebecca and Lee. Great fun, though the breakfast itself was calorie-laden and not that great.

Lunch out with d. Great fun, though the lunch itself was calorie-laden annnnd not that great.

Spent the afternoon not-writing. Instead, went through a bunch of writers magazines, creating a spreadsheet of competitions to enter. Now it's 5.30, I've done no exercise, the spreadsheet's only about half done, and I'm going away to the damn bike, because the weekend should in no way come to a close without my doing any kind of exercise. Interesting to discover though how many opportunities I've been missing up to now. There are literally dozens of opportunities to get my ego punctured out there.

It's all about this work-life-Disappearing-writing-every-other-thing balance concept. In general, as of this moment, I'm quite happy with what I've managed to get done this weekend. But I know that I won't continue to be happy with it come Tuesday morning if I don't do something now and the result then is disappointing. So - back to it I go, while admittedly, turning ideas around for at least five of those competitions, and for the scene in my novel on which I'm currently working.

Not exactly multi-tasking, I know, but of course, on the upside, I have about four hours on a bus tomorrow morning, and the same tomorrow night to devote to the actual writing of these things. Four hours...Oh gods, up at 4.30 again...sigh...

To the EvilBastardBike, DisappearingMan!

Waking Up

2012-02-18T21:04:00.000Z

"You ever thought of hibernation?" asked my pal (and mother of two) Sian (she of the Transit trips to get us here) recently. "Hibernation sounds gooooood..." she added dreamily. I had to laugh.
"Sometimes feel like I've been in hibernation for the last twelve years," I said. "Kinda befuddled and sleep-drowsy and surrounded in fat. Not that it's impaired my judgement or anything, but I feel so much more awake now than I've done at any time in the last twelve years."

I mention this mainly because today has been a kind of waking-up day. Got struck heavily yesterday by how clever some of my friends are, and how well they're doing - Sian herself, on being made redundant, has turned her situation around, launched a company, and is now pulling in business. My pal Rebecca, who I'm joining for breakfast tomorrow, is a niche broadcasting legend, and recently had the guts not only to go it alone and launch her own company, but has already hooked herself a joyfully juicy major contract to float the exploit. Wendy, who I mentioned yesterday, is a brilliant - I mean, almost clinically brilliant IT specialist, being ex-forces, and now earns absolutely squillions for her analytical (and this is not a word I use lightly) genius. d - did I mention d? How breathtaking is it, in this economy, to give up a paying job, spend nine weeks or so making a home, go on one interview and get a new job?

I have impressive friends, and I am, it seems to me, surrounded by reliably brilliant people (there are more of them than I list here, and they're all in some way special - I merely list here the ones who've made an impression this week). I don't kid myself that I'm as reliably brilliant, but the one thing people have always told me I can do whenever I want to is write. So today I've been putting the office into some sort of order, and both writing and doing some of the dull but necessary mechanics you need to do in order to sell your writing - putting together a synopsis and a letter and a CV and a this and a that (basically dressing your red-lit window!). It's time to come around from hibernation, time to take this new energy that losing half the weight has given me and put it to some sort of use.

That said, one highly productive use for all that energy would have been to have jumped on the bike, which I signally haven't done. But as part of the whole office-plus-energy thing, I've written myself a set of long, medium and short-term goals, and a set of intentions for March 2012. A few of which are decidedly Disappearing-based. I intend, by the end of March, to have hit my six-stone mark (84 pounds, for the Americans). And that whole thing I thought of a little while ago - the idea of running a mile without dying. Want to give that a go. I'm not - obviously - talking about running properly. I mean jogging, probably. But just the idea of being able to sustain something for a while without collapsing on the side of the road appeals to me.

Oh also, I'm going to start looking into the possibility of doing another Night Hike. Got a great feeling of accomplishment (and admittedly blisters!) when I did my first one, something like five years ago, when I was...roughly...three stone heavier, maybe four, than I am right now. Would be fascinating to see how much the ratio of stubborn bloody-mindedness to healthiness will have affected my ability to do, for instance, a 20-mile walk.

So, as I say, various elements of Disappearing have made themselves apparent today, but the general sense of the day has been waking up and preparing to get on with what, if I'm lucky, will be the second half of my life in an entirely different spirit to how I spent most of the first half.

Which I suppose, when you consider how I spent most of the first half, can only be a good thing.

Blood was back up to 5.8 this morning, but that'll do for me right now, still on only one type of medication for the diabetes. Woohoo!

The Metabolic Safety Net

2012-02-17T22:46:00.000Z

Vzzzzzzzzzzt!

"If that's anyone other than the Pizza Sub and Chocolate Sundae delivery fairy, you can fuck right off," I muttered. I was sweaty, and bitchy, and pedaling.
This was last week some time. The sweat blurred my vision, and I felt hopelessly out of practice at biking, despite having a heavy exercise-day.

Vzzzzzzzzzzt!
My phone went off again.
"Seriously, have food or fuck off," I muttered, but then I sighed, and picked it up.
It was Wendy.

Wendy's a pal of mine from over a decade ago. She's one of those apallingly fit people who actively enjoy the business of exercising till she drops, whippet-thin and serious about her fitness and her work and her love, and funny as Hell about everything else.
"Hey Honey" said her text. "Whatcha doin'?" said the second.
"Goddamnsonofabitch bikin'" I replied.
Vzzzzzzzzzzt!
"Y'know," she said, "you don't have to exercise every day, right?"
I stopped pedalling.
"What the Hell?" I asked, pushing against the pedals again, and wincing.
Vzzzzzzzzzzt!
"It's the metabolic safety net, innit?"
I stopped pedalling again.
"I say again...what the Hell?"
The bike told me I had shedloads of miles left to go. I whinged, and pushed on.
This time it took a few painful minutes, then
Vzzzzzzzzzzt!
"Did you have a metabolism when you started this? No you didn't. But now you're a few stone in, your metabolism's probably woken up. It kinda 'wants' to take care of you, to help digest all the food. You don't need to exercise madly every day, your metabolism'll take care of you..."

This was pretty much a trumpets-from-on-high moment. A Ten Commandments moments. A surely-that-can't-be-right moment. Certainly it didn't stope me biking at the time.

In fact, I only mention it at all because today, above all, I'm relying on the Metabolic Safety Net. Been a day of working, and visiting the folks and my brother while he's here. Went back to the restaurant from last night, and had a less-wise dinner than yesterday. Have done abbbbbsolutely nothing in the way of exercise - hence the reliance on the safety net. And a vaguely desperate hope that Wendy wasn't talking out of her ass.

Blood this morning was 5.2. So yay. Maybe the net has something to it after all...

The Shadow

2012-02-16T22:30:00.004Z

I'd been to the gym, and jussst had to pop to the post office on what was technically my lunch hour. Dropped a package off, and was making to leave. I screwed my ear-buds back in and started singing along...as I do.
"I can't do what ten people tell me to do..." Otis Redding and I seemed instinctively to agree. "So I guess I'll remain the sa-aaaaaarrrrrrrgh!!!!"
Otis and I appeared to have a disagreement about remaining the same. I decided to go down the 'having heart failure route'. It's just a choice.

It's a choice that's easier to make when, while singing away happily to yourself, you feel a hand on your shoulder out of nowhere.

The hand, as it happened, belonged to my brother.
The odds of this happening are about 360-5, because he doesn't live around here. In fact, he lives very distinctly not-here, but in a town called Thurles in Ireland. He and his wife, and their 5-year old, Rory, had arrived at something like 3AM last night though, and are here, staying with our folks, till Sunday.
"sa-aaaaaaaaargh!!!!" is perhaps not the conversation-starter he'd been expecting. He blinked at me mildly.
"'Ello," he said, smiling. It took me a few seconds to collect myself. He had a faintly grey look to him, and reminded me in that moment of no-one more than Mort, the apprentice to Death in Terry Pratchett's eponymous novel. Driving and ferrying and driving some more till three in the morning will apparently do that to you. Puts my wuss-ass UberCommute to shame, frankly.
"'Ello," I managed, when my brain had recovered from having a girder of surprise dropped across it.
"A shadow of your former self," he said.
I should explain - we tend to converse in these non-sequiturs. Often they're loaded with what we still, at 40 and 39 probably like to think are pop culture references, even though they're from decades ago. It's a kind of linguistic shorthand - not, perhaps, as creepy as the twin-thing where they finish each other's sentences, but more often than not probably bloody annoying to anyone else who happens to be there. In a weird twist of fate that I purposefully won't explain here, just to leave you pondering, we were actually friends first, for almost a decade before we became brothers, and used to delight, on weekends, in confusing the bejeesus out of local Merthyr kids by pretending, for no terribly good reason other than addiction to the musical Grease, to be from America. So we have form in terms of confusing and annoying people.

Also, as it turns out, Geraint and his wife Mary are among the most terrifyingly dedicated readers of this blog. I have no particular idea why, but they're of course very welcome.
"A shadow of your former self," he said.
"Getting there," I acknowledged. "How's work?"
He shrugged.
"Look knackered," I observed.
"3AM," he explained.
"Ah."
Then, with that kind of slow suddenness that Grand Viziers are most particularly famous for, Mary appeared at his side. I blinked, trying to remember if she'd been there all along. I decided probably not, and we said our hellos.
"Still on for tonight?" he asked - there was a plan for the whole family to get together at a local restaurant.
"D'pends on your dad," I said (an obvious clue to our intertwined family history there, Sherlock-fans).
"Seems on good form at the minute," said Geraint. Dad hasn't been terribly well these last few weeks, so the whole 'family meal' plan was being kept flexible, in case he thought that, after all, he couldn't make it.
"Right. See you tonight then," I agreed. "Gotta go - should have been back at my desk eighteen minutes ago..."

And that was that.
Tonight we all met up in a place we haven't tried since we've been home, and d discovered they do a great fish and chips (one of very few British things we hadn't yet found in the town), so that was positive. Also positive, they had a 'calorie-counting' section of their menu, so I could suck the joy out of the party by having something nutritional and calorie-controlled. Things got moderately awkward when Mary ordered a Double Chocolate Fuck-You, with extra cream, and the two of them shared it, but we managed to avoid bloodshed, and I don't think anyone noticed me chewing the heavy china coffee cup. Have to say, it was quite tasty, as these things go. I even managed not to mug Rory the 5-year-old for his Smartie ice-cream cup, despite the legendary easiness of taking candy from babies, so a good night was had, with three generations around a single table.

Have been thinking about the shadow all day though (inbetween Getting On With Stuff, obviously). It struck me what a curious expression it actually is. Given that a) I used to cast much more of a shadow, and b) I used to do a whole Hell of a lot less than I do now, I think, on balance, I used to be the shadow of my future self - and indeed, right now, I'm actually the shadow of a further future self. The weight is the darkness that followed me around, rather than me now being a refraction of that old version of myself...

Of course, as you may be beginning to suspect, it's possible I've been thinking about this waaaaaaay too freakin' hard!

Got back to a fairly disciplined routine today - swam before work (because of course there's "no excuse" not to - seriously, thanks for that one, Ma!), went gymming during lunch, and prior to my disagreement with Otis. Then biked for about a couple of hundred calories towards the latter end of the day. Not swimming tomorrow - going for a second and final (in a good way) refresher driving lesson, and lunching up with the folks and the Irish contingent. Will presumably have to bike my ass off later in the day tomorrow, but hey, it's Friday - that's what they make nights for, right?

Incidentally, blood this morning was either 5.7 or 5.5, depending on whether you believe the pre-callibration result or the post. Am starting to believe I have Wheel of Fortune blood, that changes its sugar content on a whim, whenever it's called on to perform. Hey ho - on to Friday...

Idle Mouths

2012-02-15T20:53:00.000Z

Blood was 6.2 before calllibration this morning, and just 5.5 after it. Frankly, I no longer know what to think of the blood results, though if this post-callibration result is genuine, then it's plenty welcome. Hell, if the pre-callibration result is true, it's welcome enough after flirting with the borderlines of the safe zone yesterday.

Today was d's first day in work in Wales. Which of course meant it was also the first day since I've been here that I've been left entirely to my own devices.

They say the Devil makes work for idle hands. Clearly, he makes work for idle mouths, too - had breakfast, and lunch, and then around 2PM, felt the real need for what I'm tentatively calling "Lunch-2", and inbetween, there were endless cups of coffee, fruit snacks and handfuls of trail mix. Every time I got off my ass today, I seemed intent on filling it with something or other.

Of course, today was weird and aberrant - I had to stay in all day, as we were waiting for a delivery and a service call, so a) I couldn't make it to the gym for the lunchtime session that normally marks out a Wednesday, and I pretty much bullshitted myself throughout the day to avoid getting on the bike - "Oh well, if I have the music on, I might miss the door", and "Oh well, I don't want to be interrupted after just an hour, do I?" and the like: pure, unbridled bullshit, but there it is.

So by the time d came home from her first day, I'd eaten loads and done nothing. We put that to right with appalling alacrity though - a double header of aquacise and the gym have taken up the last two hours, and now, I hurt in unfamiliar places. Going to have a dinner I don't really deserve, and then, in all likelihood, snore. Tomorrow - swimming and biking and normal, oh my...

Probably...

WIWO and V-Day

2012-02-14T19:39:00.000Z

Blood was a fairly damning 6.7 this morning, rather suggesting the first suggestion I made about it recently - that without any of the one particular med I've been taking, I'm slipping further and further towards the top end of the safe blood sugar zone.

On the other hand, as d pointed out, neither Mondays, nor the last week since Wednesday, have been particularly high-energy for me - I've done some biking, certainly, but nothing compared to the range of different mad activities of recent weeks. Should undoubtedly get my swim back on (got new goggles now!), and even vaguely wonder about paying full price for the next month at the gym (while maintaining my GP referral schedule), to really push on through.

Can't afford to do that, if I'm honest, but it sort of glistens there, all twinkly and possible on the horizon of my mind.

Things will change weirdly from tomorrow though. And why will things change weirdly from tomorrow, I hear you all entirely fail to mutter.

Well, things will change from tomorrow because, in a fairly stunning example of why she's the brains of the outfit, d has been for one job interview since she's been in Wales - and got the job. She starts tomorrow. Which means a change in our world, from lots of lovely shared time, to her getting out by 8 in the morning, leaving me here to do...whatever it is I'm supposed to do for a living. I forget, frankly.

If nothing else, that'll be an incentive to get up earlier, and get back to some sort of early morning exercise routine (yep, probably back to the swimming I should think). So while in very many ways, it's a suckass development, in terms of getting some extra cash into our lives and in terms of force-feeding me routine, it's a positive thing.

We talked about what we'd do with our day, being as it was both Valentine's Day and the last day of d's home-making freedom. In the end, she said she wanted 'a normal day,' so I've been here in my little white cupboard-room most of the day, and she's been in her kitchen. We both blew off aquacising and the gym today, and I'm telling you now, I'm not even going to bike tonight, so nehh! It's Valentine's Day, I'm having it off...so to speak.

Oh yeah - Tuesday. Woohoo. Weigh-in results this morning:
15 stone 3.75.

Down a whole revolutionary pound on last week. At this rate I won't quite make it to the 5.5 stone mark by the time the first Disappearing Year ends. Still, as I say, things change tomorrow, maybe I can pick up enough pace to get there.

Not that it'll bring me anywhere close to this guy. This is Zac Smith, apparently - bloke from Rhoose, near Cardiff, who went the other way - the surgical way - after hitting 50 stone. That's 317 kg or 700 pounds. He's had a good year, by the looks of things, dropping a shedload of weight, and starting to live again.

If the schmaltz of Valentine's Day is too much for you and you happen to live in Wales, you can catch Zac's story tonight on Week In Week Out at 22.35 on BBC 1 Wales.

I don't normally do commercials of course, but WIWO is something special - it's the first place ever to pay me money for anything even resembling journalistic work, way back in the day. So unless you get a better V-Day offer, catch Zac's story - if nothing else, it'll show you a) that Disappearing is a road we all go down in our own way and our own time, and b) that having the surgery's not a one-stop solution, and that it's still bloody hard work. It'll also show you what I think both Zac and I could tell you till the cows come home, get bored and go out again - it's so bloody worth it we could cry.

The Bookkeeper's Mars bar.

2012-02-13T17:51:00.000Z

Yep, yep, yep, yep yep...Dragon very definitely rampant in me today (is this a good moment to remember it's now the Chinese YEAR of the Dragon?...Nnnnno, notsomuch. OK, good, glad I checked).

Got on a train this morning (yes, a train - pinnacle of civilisation compared to the normal UberCommute on a bus. There will be more trains in my future), and the guy opposite me sat there, carelessly swigging on a can of Pepsi Max and eating a kind of "healthy" snack bar, including cranberries, macadamia nuts and dark chocolate. Then the prick got up and left the train, leaving half the bar carelessly behind him, in its wrapper...
I wanted to chase after him and shove the remaining bar of wonderment up his cavalier, toss-aside nose, while explaining to him that a life in which you throw away half a bar like that was a life half-lived, and therefore wasted, and that ergo he himself was a waste of chemical electrical energy and should vacate the planet forthwith to make way for someone who understood what Pleasure was all about!

Sigh...

I didn't, obviously. Wretched pinko liberal commie bastard laws we have in this country...

Popped into a store on High Street Kensington on my way into the office, mainly to browse. They had a Dunkin' Doughnuts case in there, with a Valentine's Special in. It was called a Strawberry Gloss. An ordinary ring doughnut (fuck you, America, the way you spell it is just wrong, don't mess with me today or I'll torch your ass!), in this case slightly squished into an oval shape, and then layered with bright, glistening pink goo. I swear, these people are trying to kill me. Can I just say, if you're gonna take something with a hole in the middle, make it vaguely oval and then slather it with that kind of dripping pink sweetness, you're fooling no-one, OK, Mr Subliminal? You might as well just have the courage of your bastardy and come out with it - Dunkin' Doughnuts' Valentine Vaginas, six to a box, go ahead, single guy fat fucks, make a disgusting night of it....mmmm, freakin' sweet...

Stopped in at lunchtime of course for my weekly Starbucks. A young (for which read dreadlocked and clueless) PA was getting lunch. She held up a croissant.
"Anybody know what a-mental is?" she asked the line.

Yeah, took me a second too.
"Emmenthal," I said. "It's a cheese."
"A cheese?" she asked, as if the concept was bizarre and new to her. It was almost as if I'd suggested she was about to chow down on fresh foetus-in-a-bun.
"Yeah, a cheese," I maintained. "That's the yellow stuff you can see."
"Oh..." she said. "Riiiight." She put the croissant back on the shelf as though it might explode if handled roughly, and ordered a piece of chocolate cake instead. I closed my eyes and imagined banging her head against the milk frother repeatedly. I was still lost in this vision when the guy asked me what I wanted, to the extent that I genuinely couldn't remember for a moment, and almost had to be reminded what kind of store I was in.

And then there's the bookkeeper.

Perfect nice human being, our bookkeeper. Nice in the kind of way that, even on a good day, makes you want to do him physical harm, just to see whether he'd react. Today though....today he had the temerity...the indecency...the downright mild-mannered fuck-youishness to have a Mars bar on his desk.

All...
Damn...
Day.

There it was, just fucking staring at me while I tried to get on with proper, serious, grown-up work. At one point I swear it got up and started doing the Dance of the Seven Wrappers.

He left it behind.

It's still there, on his desk, as I write this now. And I'm going to confess a big, dirty secret here. I'm tempted to go and sniff it.

Now, this crosses a dangerous, positively pathological line. Sniffing desserts is all very well and good, but you have to be up front about it. Sniffing someone's chocolate bar behind their back, when they're not even there, is pretty much on a dietary par with sniffing someone's underwear in similar circumstances - you just don't do it, and if you do, it's probably the start of a slippery slope into madness and deviancy (Really? Like you're so fucking well-adjusted anyway at the moment??)

So I'm leaving now, before I do something I really, really regret. Gong back to Paddington Station, where the only things to do are eat, shop or hate the soul-festering rest of humanity...
Daresay I'll do a little of everything. Just to take my mind off the bookkeeper's Mars bar.

Null and Void

2012-02-12T22:09:00.000Z

6.2, Twilight-fans. Getting interestingly higher day by day - can't help wondering if that's anything to do with the actual meals I'm eating each progressive day, or whether the last of the meds I was invited to drop last Monday is leaving my system and either a) it was a bad move after all, or b) I'm normalising at the higher end of the safe spectrum, which will presumably decrease over time as the weight comes off.

Went up to see my folks this afternoon, and stayed for dinner. Traditional Sunday dinner - two kinds of potato, Yorkshire pudding, pork, stuffing, gravy, all that. It was frankly gorgeous, and I ate it eagerly.

Then we came home, and I jumped straight on the bike.

It occurred to me, as I pedalled away a (by this stage) piddling little 600 caloriesworth of energy, that there's something altogether pointless about this kind of behaviour - taking in the calories only to burn them off again. It would be soooo much simpler not to eat a damn thing in the first place. Except of course, biochemistry doesn't work that way. If you stop eating, your system hordes what you've got (or so I'm told), in a kind of Hell-no, We won't go protest against weightloss. So - until there's a better way - I eat, and then burn, and eat and burn and try to find some sort of null space in the middle, where I end up just a little ahead of the game each week.

I'm sure, when my death-bed, or death-cliff, or (my personal preference), my death-5-items-or-fewer-aisle catches up with me, there'll be a moment when I resent the Hell out of biochemistry and all the time I spent trying to achieve, essentially, a null, void space from twice as much time and effort as doing nothing would have taken.

The point, as I occasionally have to remind myself, is to put off the death-aisle for as long as Disappearingly possible.

Oh, and while I remember - had a punch in the nose from my own nature tonight. Long-timers will remember my disbelief that people can leave sweet stuff on a plate, or be offered it and simply turn it down. At my folks, I followed dinner with a fruit salad, while d had strudel and ice cream.
"One scoop or two?" asked Ma.
"Oh, just the one," said d.
And from deep in the depths of my Disappearing soul, a three-headed dragon rose up and roared "ONNNNNNNEEEE????!!! DO YOU NOT REALISE IT'S IIIIIIIIICE-CREEEEEEEAM, DAMMMMNIT????!!!!"
I speared a chunk of pineapple, instead of allowing the dragon to burn through my skin and fly around the living room incinerating every ice-cream-eating body in the house.

Funny - thought I'd put all that kind of sweet-demon Hell behind me. Guess that whole "One day at a time" schtick actually never gets old after all.

Sonofabitch.

Perfect Day

2012-02-12T00:26:00.000Z

Ever had a day so thoroughly pleasant you couldn't think of a way to improve it?

That was today. Slept long and deep, breakfasted out at a cafe.
"You shouldn't eat again for the rest of the day," said d, eyeing my plate of cheese and beans on toast. She shrugged. "Just saying..."
"Ha...way to steal the joy out of the moment," I muttered, smirking at her and biting deep onto a cheesy, beany mouthful of joy.
"Thousand calories in what you're eating," she chuckled.
"Per mouthful," she added.
"Love ya," I muttered, through a beany grin.

When breakfast was done, we decided we'd been in Merthyr long enough without Having An Adventure. Went and hung out at a bus stop where there were two possible buses, each with a different destination. It's our equivalent ot flipping a coin.

The X4 to Cardiff turned up first.
"Cardiff?" I asked. d grinned at me. She's got a great grin has my girl - A Vegas grin, all bright lights and roll your dice.
We got on the bus, and headed down to Our Nation's Capital.

"Ohhhh," I said, almost immediately when we got off the bus. "They have Starbucks here, oh canwe, canwe, canwe, canwe, canwe???"
"Sure honey," said d, laughing at my six-year-oldness. Picked up a Starbucks, and felt even more that all was right with the world.
Wandered round the city, going with the flow of a shitload less people than a Saturday afternoon in London, and frankly, unashamedly, gloating about it. Wandered into John Lewis and entirely forgot why we'd done it. Examined some scones closely, which I'd recommend when you can't remember why you went in somewhere. Laughed, ate, drank, it was like being on a brand new honeymoon, and then, when we decided we'd had enough honeymooning in our new capital, we came home, and I bought fruit.

I'm not entirely sure how that plays in to the perfect dayness, but somehow it did. d had a nap, I went and biked away the breakfast and a couple of Starbucks. Had a fantastic dinner - steak and potato. And now, at something past midnight, I'm going to start writing down the scenes that have been writing themselves on the inside of my skull at intervals throughout the day - often, with d's help and encouragement.

See - perfect day.

I know, I know - Lottery win, day spent plumbing the depths of the Karma Sutra, day without vegetables, and with far more double-chocolate sundaes, yadda yadda yadda...
But here's the thing. I never entirely understood people who claimed to be people 'of simple tastes'. I figured there's nothing simple that can't be improved with strategic whipped cream and chocolate shavings. But today, the simple pleasure of spending the whole day with my girl was life affirming, love inspiring, and better than anything that money or chocolate can give you.

Mmmm...yay. Now, on with the writing....

The Point Of Existential Angst

2012-02-10T19:14:00.000Z

Blood was 5.8 this morning, my little Vampire friends.

Let me ask you this: If we take away all the existential balancing systems, like an equalising afterlife, what, ultimately is the point of any action? If we choose to do something, and not something else, to what are we accountable, other than our own eventual store of memories and experiences?

Yeah, I know, it's not exactly light-hanted banter about exercise bikes and greasy shit, is it? Stick with me though - who knows, there may even be a point to it all...

I've had a day of unexpected existential angst (which, now I come to write it out, would be a pretty kick-ass tongue-twister, but anyway...). My getting behind the wheel of a car again for the first time in a decade has, I know, given plenty of people a dose of existential today - that's why many many people in the Merthyr area decided they didn't really need to be outside today after all, and barricaded themselves behind concrete walls. Me, I drove like a stainless steel stick-puppet for about half an hour, so angsty was I about my own existence...then I relaxed and pretty much stopped caring about oncoming buses, and started to take pleasure in the experience.

Then I went to see my dad, which was highly pleasurable at first, as I haven't seen him in over a week, but the ongoing illness of one's parents is a good solid kick in the head full of existential angst too - if you've learned to rely on a view of the world that has them in it, and has their characters writ large across your sky, then their illness acts as a cloud of necessary adjustment, a shift in your worldview like the fist that shakes a snowglobe, seen by the snowman inside.

And then I heard a name from my past, and it briefly made me seethe and rage with pure unbridled self-revolving me-me-me style existential angst. The name was Simon Spanton.

Anyone? Any literary fucks among us?
Simon Spanton's a publisher. I 'met' him on the radio about 14 years ago, when I was still young and idealistic and trying to avoid gainful employment like the plague. I'd written a book, and I got picked up by local radio, for a show where they put your work in front of big-shot publishers. Spanton liked my stuff, as indeed did a few other publishers. I ended up in long discussion not with Spanton as it turned out, but with the folks at HarperCollins. The discussions were so long in fact that ultimately, the idea of a deal collapsed, and I went into journalism in retalliation, feeling that that'd show them!

It didn't, of course. Didn't show anyone anything except that when all is said and done, I'm not that good at being a journalist, because in most cases, I simply don't care long enough to sustain an investigation. And I see far too many sides to most stories, which might be all very zen and balanced and all that, but it plays merry hell with your narrative flow. The point was, I stopped writing for the best part of a decade, and have only really taken it up again in the last couple of years. I've written one massively overlong but still quite funny book which needs a good hard pruning, and I've been working on a 'simpler' one for about a year now, being stuck in Galileo's Italy for far too long.

Simon Spanton resurfaced in my life today by offering someone else a two-book deal for a high five-figure sum. Someone who, up to this point, has been very successful in their own sphere, but has no particular experience of novel-writing behind them. And perversely, that made me seethe. For about ten minutes there, it was like someone had stolen my life at the age of 24, and was living it more successfully than I was.

This of course is clearly bullshit. There's no connection between events, and - I should add - the books that Spanton's commissioned will in all likelihood be hugely funny, and I'll probably read them. It's just one of those moments of feeling overtaken that can push you face down in the dirt if you're not careful, without any intention (or indeed, any knowledge) by those you can too easily blame. I had the same feeling once about Terry Pratchett - I was writing a book with a bunch of themes, and then he published one with the same themes. I tried a different tack, and perversely, he published one along those lines too. Actually, Practchett's managed to gazump me three times like that in total. Ironic, really - on that radio show where I first met Spanton, I was described as 'like a new Terry Pratchett'. Now of course I know that'a a label given to anyone who does funny fantasy at some point. Does rather depend on the 'old Terry Pratchett' not being able to beat you to the punch by already being published though!

All of which led me down a weird way of thinking - we know the point of pleasure. Pleasure is an enticement to action, and a sensory reward for necessary action performed. Nectar is sweet to entice pollinators to do their job, for example, and there's some evidence to believe the pleasurable sensations of sexual reproduction too are merely an evolutionary enticement to get the right bits of people together to pass on genes. But what about existential angst?

If we go - rather generously - beyond the idea that existential angst is just self-indulgence personified, then what is it for, in the wider scheme of things. We understand the pleasure of eating a piece of cake, but if, then, one is wracked with guilt and loathing and - once more with feeling, everybody - existential angst about ourselves, what purpose does that serve?

Well, here I can only speak for myself, but for me, I think if pleasure is the reward or the destination, then existential angst is the accelerator pedal and fifth gear. Existential angst on the road made me determined to be as safe as I possibly could, to make sure d and I survived (didn't particularly care if the instructor survived, but his continuing existence could be seens as a fringe benefit if you like). Existential angst about my dad makes me determined to spend time with him, to make him laugh, to make him proud where I can, and at the very least, to avoid giving him additional causes for grief. Existential angst over my future as a writer has made me pound this keyboard for the last couple of hours on my own creative project, locked away here in my little white room looking out over a school, and then my town, determined, more than anything, to be done with bloody Galileo and move on. And existential angst about being a Disappearing Man will drive me back here before I sleep, to get back on my bike and peddle, determined not to let the almost-two-days of doing nothing, of letting my blisters heal and Being Normal, drag me backwards in my quest to live at least long enough to publish something!

Don't worry about a little existential angst. If you don't let it grind you down, it can be phenomenally useful.

Car Trouble

2012-02-09T20:20:00.000Z

Blood was 5.6 this morning, for those who care.

Today has been pretty much a sit-on-your-ass kinda day, as we discovered that after my UberActive day yesterday I'd given myself a foot-blister that felt (and looked, in actual fact) more like a burn than anything else.

Tomorrow though...
Tomorrow will be Interesting.

Tomorrow, you see, sees me get behind the wheel of a car for the first time in a decade or more.

That sound you hear is the sound of my friends barricading themselves in bunkers at least ten feet underground.

I have something of a volatile relationship with cars.
It took my five attempts to pass my test, each of which was marked by, if not tragedy, then at least panic and gibbering on the part of my examiner. The first time I took it, I was halfway round a roundabout when the examiner told me he'd said "turn left." Without thinking, I turned left - into the path of oncoming traffic. Oddly enough though, that's not what I failed on.

I failed because of the bus.

There was a narrow street, with parking on both sides and perversely two way traffic. I happened to think the gap was big enough for both me and the oncoming bus. The examiner took a different view, and grew at least a little greyer that day.

To be fair, it wasn't just me - it's something of a family legend that the same instructor taught my mother, my brother, and me to drive. And then dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

Once I'd passed my test (weirdly enough, the day I finally achieved it, we were burgled to buggery while I was out), my mother put me on the insurance for her ancient, automatic white Mini. It was like a bumper car! Well, it was the way I used to drive it, anyway - I actually went over a couple of roundabouts, inclusing one time in the company of my pal Rebecca - who now, oddly enough, gets paid to report on mad fucks in very fast cars, driving like weirdly responsible lunatics. Nearly killed Karen Pulley one night, when, faced with one of the many hugely steep hills in this area, she asked me how fast the Mini would go. We hit 90 going downhill, and then we hit a kerb...We were on two wheels for a moment there, skidding downhill into the path of - yep, you guess it - oncoming traffic. Fortunately, my fat fuckery saved us that night, as I leaned heavily over to one side and convinced gravity to be our friend...

It was perhaps inevitable that my first job in print journalism would turn out to be for a motoring magazine.

I got lost in almost every country in Europe. In Naples, the Mazda press team and the rest of the journalists ended up having to comb the area for me, which is the kind of thing that really loses you face in the bunfight...
Inbetween the European...well, embarrassments, frankly...I was able to borrow a range of cars direct from teh manufacturers...

Yes, seriously. They let Crazy Mini Boy loose with some proper vehicles.
I crashed a Kia at two miles an hour in a Tesco car park. Interesting conversation ensued:
"Is this your car?"
"Ermmm....no."
"Got the paperwork for it?"
"Errrm...welll...notsomuch, no."
"Well, who does the car belong to?"
"Erm...well, Kia, really..."

It's the kind of conversation almost guaranteed to get you slapped.
I scraped the bejeesus out of a Jaguar when I radically misjudged its width in a parking situation. Turned a Mitsubishi 4x4 completely over in the Highlands of Scotland, nearly killed a group of New Year revellers - also, coincidentally, in the Highlands (the Highlands appears to hate me). Annnnd so on.
Probably the most typical example of my...erm...prowess was the Porsche Boxster.

It had become something of a legend in the office that I could blag any car from any manufacturer, despite, as it turned out, never actually writing anything about the cars I borrowed..
"Betcha couldn't get a Porsche!" said my fellow journo, Louise.
"You're on," I said.
By the end of the week, I'd done it.
"Soooo, who can't get a Porsche again?" I asked, taunting her.
"I've got Wimbledon tickets," she batted back.
"LlllikeIgiveafuck," I grinned.
Then I thought again. As it happened, the woman I was with at the time lived across the country in Bristol, and she was a tennis fan.
"Hmm," I said. "Alright. I'll bring you back the Porsche, you fashion-obsessed maniac, you give met the tickets."
"Done," she agreed.

Then I buggered off - as I say, I was involved with a woman living in Bristol at the time, and I used to go across the country on a Friday night and come back on a Monday. This time, I was going across in something useless like a Subaru, getting that piece of shit picked up, and having the Porsche delivered to Bristol, then driving it back to Surrey.

Come Monday morning, it was abbbbbsolutely pissing down, and I got into the Porsche miserably. It was horrible, frankly - if you were ever thinking of buying one, don't, they suck. I drove it a couple of hundred miles in the sheeting rain at speeds at which it shouldn't have been driven. Then, on the M25 London ring road, I saw a stick on the road. I don't, to this day, know what possessed me, but I remember actively thinking "Ooh, a stick. I'm gonna drive right over that." I even swerved slightly to make sure I hit it properly.

BANG!

Ah, I thought.
Fuck, I thought.
That was no stick, I thought. I was right. It had been a metal rod with somejagged bits. And suddenly I was driving a borrowed three-wheeled Porsche at 90 miles an hour, about 60 miles away from the office of a car magazine.

Now...I know this sounds stupid now, but this is how my brain worked in those circumstances.
1) I need to change my tyre.
2) I've never changed a tyre...in my life.
3) I'm not about to start in a borrowed Porsche in the pissing down rain.

So I drove it.
I drove this poor, wretched Porsche on three wheels and a tyre shredding into uselessness, 60 miles around London and into Surrey.
When I got into the office, late, I had to explain to three seasoned motoring journalists what I'd done. One of them came out and jacked up the car, and changed the tyre, putting on its low-quality 'replacement' tyre. Then I had to call Porsche and tell them what I'd done. They weren't amused, and came and took away their car. I never did get those Wimbledon tickets either...

Anyhow - that was probably the pinnacle of my history with cars. I haven't driven one in a decade because I've been living in London. Now - mad as this is - my mother has added me back onto her insurance, so I can help, for instance, take her to appointments to get her dodgy eyes looked at.

Which means tomorrow, I'm having the first of my 'refresher' lessons.

If I make it out alive, I'll be back to my Disappearing ways tomorrow night...

The Aquacise Smirk

2012-02-08T21:52:00.000Z

"It's five o'clock, honest, I saw it written there plain as day."
d looked at me, and at the scene in front of her.
Then she looked at me again, rather more squintily.
"A...ha.." she said.

The scene in front of her was mainly kids jumping in the pool and twimming, or jumping in the pool and trying to swim, or, mainly, just jumping in the pool and sinking like pink-suited stones, and spluttering helplessly till helped.
This, it was clear to even the meanest of intelligences - by which I mean everyone's but mine - was not a GP Referral aquacise class.
I had rushed and bustled us out of the house to make sure we got there by five, because the class started at five.
I think, to be honest, the jig was up when new people started arriving, perfectly dry kids in hand, and leaving them in the instructor's care.
"Go and ask the lifeguard," said d. "I dare ya."
I did.

"Well, that'll be me not able to read English any more," I said, after miming her to come and meet me halfway round the pool. "That...could be tricky, given what I do for a living..."
"Oh I don't know..." said d with a grin.
Now of course, I could have done some lengths, leaving d in the jacuzzi-pool, but frankly - and I can't stress how important this is - fuck that for a game of soldiers! I'd biked away 300 calories before breakfast, then had the breakfast that those calories comprised of. I'd had a lunch of leftover curry and rice, then walked five miles or so in an hour and a half in the company of Ricky The Git, and Christine, a nice woman who had originally registered us on the GP Referral Programme. It had been just me and them, because they (fairly obviously, if you think about it) don't do the pathways walk unless someone turns up to do it with them, and I was the only one who did.

Now we were about to aquacise our asses off, and then go straight into the gym. I figured I deserved a little bit of jacuzzi-time too!

There's an enormous aqua slide at our pool. It's never been operational while we've been there before, but tonight they turned it on.
"Oh I wanna have a go!" said d. "Come with me?"
"Sure," I said...then, as we approached the steps leading up to it, she added.
"Ohhh, I wanna see you come down. can I see you come down?"
"Sure," I said, doing the Manly Thing.
I slalomed down the thing, smashing myself into a slide-pool at the end and getting water up my nose.
"That was great!" said d.
"Right, now up you go," I said.
"What am I, fuckin' nuts?" said d.
We both slouched off to the jacuzzi, some of us a little more slouchy than others.

The Aquacise was...frankly...what exercise must be like in Hell. I've discovered Ricky's not such a git - it's just there's a face...a face people pull when they are dry and warm and on the side of the pool, watching a bunch of fat fucks and old fucks try and bend themselves repeatedly into unlikely positions. It's the Aquacise Smirk, and this evening, we took our opportunity to loathe and despise Christine for it. Nothing personal.
Then we stumbled, barely aware of our surroundings, up to the gym. We wouldn't have even done this, I'm sure, if we hadn't pre-paid for it on the way in. There was biking and pulling and a new machine from Hell's private stockpile that stetches your leg muscles almost to the point of twanging...and then there was freedom and freezing and discovering that Nandos was just there. Nandos meant protein, and protein was goooooood. And now we're home, altogether more damaged than one should be on a Wednesday, contemplating hot water bottles and snoring with a degree of delight that only those who's worked their asses off can understand.

Blood was 5.5 this morning by the way (after recalibrating. 5.0 originally), so presumably, the half-meds life is going OK. So far (all of three days in, clearly...)

Ni'night blogosphere, I'm sooo out of here...

The Final Three....and a bit

2012-02-07T10:24:00.000Z

What's that line again? Philosophical in defeat, magnanimous in victory, or somesuch thing?
Yyyyyeah, that really doesn't sound like me. Weigh-in results today:

15 stone 4.75!

I did it three times, just to make sure it wasn't just the Nazi Scales having a laugh. But apparently, the Nazi Scales don't laugh.

Ever.

So that's officially five stone, and then some. Five stone, two and a quarter, if ya wanna be picky.
What that means is that technically, I've got less than four stone left to lose. Three stone, 11 and three quarters, picky fucks.

I've come across this phenomenon before, but I have to tell you, that feels like a Hell of a lot less than four stone. Clearly, it isn't, it's a couple of pounds, but it's the psychological effect of thinking in threes, rather than fours, and that's huge.

Now, just for the sake of full disclosure I should say - the real truth probably isn't as good as this result makes it look. Mondays now, with their UberCommute, tend to be ultra-light days, calorie-wise, and today's result is probably an outlier, much in the way I think the first time I recorded 15 stone 8 was, and then the following week, I found myself back up in the 15 stone 12 area. I've done a solid couple of daily unofficial weigh-ins this week that record me as 15 stone 7, so I think it's fair to say I've officially gone through the 5 stone barrier, but I wouldn't be at all surprised, next Tuesday, to find myself higher up despite trying to have a good week.

But for now, while there's news to be obnoxious about, excuse me while I do some football-chanting:
"Fiiiiiiiiiiiiive twoandabit, Fiiiive twoandabit,
Fiiiiiiiiiiiiive twoandabit, Fiiiiiive twoandabit..."

Magnanimous in victory, my Disappearing arse!

Good Call

2012-02-06T17:09:00.000Z

No blood result today - well, not exactly anyway. Some might say the whole day has revolved around a blood result, but more of that in a minute. Basically, was out the door this morning before the birds were awake, so no real time to bleed.

The UberCommute was fine, although I had the same grumpy-assed driver as a few weeks ago, when he dropped us all unceremoniously at Heathrow. Today, I can only presume he must have got some last night, as he drove into London sweet as a nut, dropping me in Hammersmith. Just before we arrived though, I got a call.

It was my doctor's surgery. I swallowed.
"Hello," said, all trepidation and whispering - the grumpy sod had told us to keep our mobile conversations short and quiet if they happened at all, so as not to annoy him.
"Hello Anthony," said a vaguely familiar voice. It was the Diabetic Nurse d and I had been to see last week. "About your results, it is," she said, in that perverse Yoda-style delivery peculiar to the Valleys.
"Oh yes?" I asked, steeling myself. Can't be good when your nurse rings you to talk about your results...surely?
"Lovely, they were," she said. "Your long-term diabetic control is really excellent. Wondered if you'd like to stop taking one of your medications all together..."

What? Are you freakin' nuts? OF COURSE I'd like to do that!

So, as of today, I've eliminated one of my diabetic meds - the same one I've been gradually reducing over time - from four pills a day when this began to now...none. Zero. To anyone who knows what's what, I am now a Gliclazide-free body. So - mini happy dances were done on the bus coming into Hammersmith.

Of course, these things are always conditional - gotta go back for another long-term diabetic control blood test in a couple of months, to see whether my system can, as yet, actually cope with none of this particular medication, and if it can't of course, I'll go back on it. But hey - that'll be the headline on that day. Today's headline - half of what I really wanted to achieve with this Disappearing programme has been accomplished - I'm on only one diabetic medication, instead of two. Next step is to prove I can do without it, and then, as we keep on reducing the weight, to attack my dependence on the other of the other medication I take. big milestone though, this - this Disappearing lark was never really about looking thin. It was about not dying quite yet, and it was about the tantalising prospect dangled before me by my doctor back in Stratford - that if I got down to something like 11 stone, I could actually cure myself of my diabetes. Who knows? This might be a short-lived little happy dance, but today who-ah, I rule all, mini-wave in celebration of kicking one medication to the curb!

Tomorrow of course it's weigh-in day. I'm hopeful and optimistic, and will try my very best not to be pathetic and whingy if I don't get the result I'm looking for. And then it's back to the work-from-home routine - Gym taster at lunchtime. Some time this week, I need to buy new Favourite Goggles and get back to the upper-body-building funfest of early morning swimming...Ah, the joy of routine. Still - there's joy today in eliminating one little chunk of a routine that's been in place for a good few years now. Stick with me folks, this next month could be interesting...

In Apology For Lunch, And In Praise of Dinner

2012-02-05T22:25:00.001Z

Blood yesterday was 6.0 by the way. Didn't remember to take my blood this morning, because I took a glorious herbal sleeping pill last night, woke up at 10.30 this morning, and we went for brunch at the Harvester.

In an attempt not to be boring, and not to have the same thing as usual, I chose some lamb...thing. All the while, I was counting up the calories - 350 for the meat, about 110 for the potatoes, roughly 110 for a dry bread roll, 150 for a simple soup, 150 for a smoothie and so on. Worked out that the meal in total would suck up about a thousand calories of whatever my daily allotment should be. Don't actually know what that allotment is, which makes the whole thing moderately meaningless, but I generally aim for 1600 calories or less...

Ah! Just done a little quick research. Average healthy calorific intake for a man is 2500. To lose a pound a week, they say you should reduce calorific intake by 500 calories a day - so presumably for a two pound loss, you should reduce by 1000 calories, which means my half-arsed pseudo maths is frankly not bad...

Anyhow, lunch would have sucked about a thousand calories out of my day...which would have been OK, if it had been good, but it wasn't. Somehow, that annoyed me - like I say, spending the calories is fine, so long as the experience is good, but when you've spent the calories and the experience was bad, you feel short-changed, in exactly the same way as you do if you spend cash on something that turns out to be disappointing.

Came home, moved the office around as I'd intended, and then took to the bike for an hour and ten. Managed to claw back 600 calories, pedalling as though I was apologising to the calorie-gods for the travesty that had been lunch. 600 is not, all in all, as many as I wanted to pedal, but will have to do on a Sunday night, ahead of an UberCommute.
Then d served dinner.

Phenomenal stuff, this dinner. Simple ingredients, treated with stunning respect to make something far more impresive than the sum of its parts. Brined pork, flavoured with cloves, black pepper and a pinch of chilli. Cooked apples. Brussels sprouts. And mashed potato, with sweet onions and an egg mixed in to lighten it.

Can't tell you how good that was - even I, Mr Wordsmith, can't do it justice in something as clunky as words. My wife has some serious skill. And eating it, I didn't count calories, didn't care what it cost. Whatever it cost, it was beautiful.

I'm still hoping for a positive result on Tuesday, but dinner tonight was a reality check - every now and then, you have to get in touch with what makes the experience of being alive different from the experience of just surviving from day to day. Top Tip for the day - Be married to a culinary genius, it really helps you reconnect.

Going Commando In The Snow

2012-02-04T22:33:00.000Z

"Your moobs have shrunk again dear," d observed, raising her knees almost resentfully.
"That's nice dear," I panted. "Waah!" I added, swaying a little sideways.
"Focus baby," said d, going a little red in the face and breathing out hard.
"Sorry, yeah," I said, concentrating on my moves.

"Annnnd pull yourselves to the shallow end!" called Ricky, the aquacise instructor. He's a cheerful soul, is Ricky. I frequently want to slap him. I most frequently want to slap him on Saturday morning, when aquacise takes place before anyone sensible is awake.
This morning, Ricky punished us with cold water, loud music and a cheerfulness only marginally dented by the fact that he'd drunk wine the night before. We swam, and star jumped, and beggared about getting exhausted and stretchy.

It started snowing while we were jazz-handsing.
"Brr," said d and I simultaneously as we got out into the cold again and buggered off home as quickly as we could.
When we got in, I gave in to the whispering voices and did an unofficial weigh-in. That was fun. Unofficial fun goddammit, but fun nevertheless. Then I went back out for gym tasting. With Ricky The Git.

Ahem...
Now, there's a little bit of magicianry you need to understand here. To go back to the gym, I wore my gym shorts in place of underwear, and covered them with sweatpants. To do the actual gym work, I got rid of the sweatpants, and then to come home, I got out of the then-sweaty shorts, and went commando in the sweatpants.

Did I mention the snow? To make sure I didn't end up with soggy pant-bottoms, I tucked the sweats into my socks. That meant I was then walking through the snow, commando, in sweatpants that were pulling away from their useful position with every step.
"Please, gods I don't believe in, don't fuck me over today," I muttered, yanking up the pants against the demands of gravity.

Oh yeah, did I mention the snow? d had asked me to pick up some milk when I came out of the gym, so I was headed for the store before home. Except....it had snowed. Which meant half the Valley was in the store before me, panic-buying like consumerism and groceries were going out of fashion. I met d at the store, and we ended up with two big heavy bagfuls of assorted stuff. Now of course, it's in the Gentleman's Code (and also, as it happens, in the Douchebag Who Wants To Get Laid's Code) that when there are big heavy bags of groceries to be caried, the technical penis-owner is the one who gets to carry them. So now I was waddling, Chaplin-like, with a bag in each hand, trying, essentially to hula my trousers with every step so the action of each step didn't yank them over my newishly revealed hips.
"What...the...Hell?" said d, watching me.
I explained.
"Oh for God's..." she chuckled. "C'mere..."
And there, in a Merthyr arcade, she yanked up my sweater, undid the knot holding my trousers together, and re-did me.
"How you doin'?" I tried.
"Focus, dear...Fuck me," muttered d.
"Alrighty," I agreed. "Here and now?"
"Not on a bet, dear," said d. "I meant Fuck me, it's cold..."
"Mmm," I said, not quite ready to let go of the idea. "They say things work better when they're cold..."
"You maybe," said d, knotting the string in my pants extra tight as if to permanently seal the deal. "Me...notsomuch! Besides, I have one word for you..."
"Yeah?"
"Shrinkage."
"Point taken," I said, picking up the bags again.

Didn't rearrange the office as I'd planned today - we learned fairly early that our now-usual Sunday car boot sale had been all sorts of cancelled tomorrow, probably for fear of freezing people to death in the unheated chapel hall that is the venue. So we have all of tomorrow to do stuff to the apartment, and no gym appointments to attend.

Of course, all of this nonsense was on the backdrop of Merthyr Snow. Normally, on the 4th of February, we're busy dealing with Western New York Snow. Proper, ass-kicking, seriously-you-people-need-to-take-the-hint-that-weather-hates-you Snow. Because, every previous year, tomorrow, February 5th, we've tried to be over there for the celebration of d's mom's birthday. I'm not at all sure how we'll mark the occasion tomorrow. Guess we'll just take the day as it comes. I'd be lying if I said I missed the Healthcare Centre where she lived for the last handful of her years, but Lori and Dom, American food stores, American diners....goddamnsonofabitch pizza subs...Ahhh...I have a relatively new overdraft facility...hmmm...

Cupboard Living

2012-02-03T21:11:00.000Z

Blood was 5.4 this morning. d was out for the morning, so no zumba. Mainly, I've been office-bound all day (deadline week for my mag). My office is white, and smallish, and rectangular, and packed with, frankly, my stuff. And I've been pretty much in there all day, working on the mag, pondering moving furniture around this weekend, and eventually, almost resentfully, biking half an ass off. Am also, as it happens, trying not to go mental. Been bouncing round in my head thinking about weighing every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes more. Been bouncing round in my head thinking that I should be lighter by now, bitching about plateaus and why I'm not making progress and yadda yadda pity-me freakin yadda. So, probably, locking myself in a small white rectangular room wasn't the smartest thing to do.

Keeping busy though has pretty much kept the whining self-pitying, self-revolving bullshit at bay. So yay for a day of living in a really cool cupboard.

Tomorrow - back to the pool for aquacising, back to the gym for tasting, back to my cute little white cupboard to rearrange the shit out of it, and get me some systems in place for going forward.

Going away to watch some stuff now, to block the whispers in my brain.

The Ferret Dance and The Greasy Path To Hell

2012-02-02T18:52:00.000Z

Blood was 4.2 this morning...whatever that means any more.
Went aquacising again with d last night. A generally mixed-gender class of middle-aged-to-older fucks now know I have absolutely no sense of natural rhythm whatsoever, and gaze piteously at d whenever they stop water-punching and star-jumping and jazz-handsing, vaguely envisaging (or so I pananoically imagine) what our love life must be like, and mentally noting that she could do so much better.

It's an odd thing, but my demented sense of syncopation has, so far in all the world, found its best, most acceptable expression through the art of Zumba - to which I'm not going tomorrow, as d has an appointment elsewhere, and I'll be stone dead and fucked before I Zumbalone! Somehow, in the insane, sweaty, shouty Latin fug, my normal 'fat man having a spasm while trying to disengage ferrets from his fingers' dancing style makes a certain kind of moderately uninhibited sense. At all other times and in all other places...no! This is a fat fuck who doesn't dance - not because he doesn't want to, or is particularly self-conscious of looking like a dick...well, actually, let me re-phrase that...absolutely because he's not particularly self-conscious of looking like a dick. The general public feel a concerted need to be protected from my particular styler of fat fuck dancing.

But when there are moves, actual instructions of what goes where and when, I freeze. Most especially if there's more than one instruction at a time. So - standing in Aquacise, being told to put one leg forward and the opposite arm...and then hop and switch, then hop and switch, and so on...fried my brain. When the instructor added disco twists into the thing, I felt myself sinking relentlessly beneath the cool, cool water.

No pool today, because, really rather irritatingly, I lost my goggles on the way out of the pool. Think I left them in a locker, and when I went back to look for them, some other git had used the locker, locked it and gone in. Humph. d patiently reminds me that we have more than one set of goggles, but that's not really the point. They were my favourite goggles...(reverts to a pouting six-year-old, at least for the length of one day).

Did uber-cycle today though, to make up for not going anywhere near the pool. Then d came home and we went out to a local cafe for a spot of lunch. Nothing fancy - toasties and a bowl of sautee potatoes. Now, weirdly, these have never particularly registered with me as 'fried food', and so haven't been the subject of my perspex walls of dietary banishment. Then, today, d asked the waitress for some more information on them (no, really - more information on sauteed potatoes - did I mention my girl's a Foodie?!), and the waitress said "Oh, well...erm...they're just flat chips really..." (Rolls eyes - can't get proper culinary pretension in this town for love nor money...). Thing is, I still shared them. Felt guilty most of the afternoon of course, and am now awaiting the rumbling retribution of a trip to Xenical Hell, but I'm sort of working on the principle (really? A principle? You're not just making this shit up as you go along and justifying your own actions? Hmm...) that freaking out about every little thing puts the body in stress and doesn't let it lose anything anyway. Am going back on the bike a bit later, if I get a chance and can maintain the desire, but either way, the uberbiking session this morning should pretty much have made lunch calorifically null and void...I'm thinking...so...in a word...nehh!

Back to the novel tonight - Work-Life Balance and all that, ya know?

Turning Round and Spitting Twice

2012-02-01T15:28:00.000Z

Blood this morning 4.0 initially. d fiddled with my tester. Blood when sensibly re-adjusted - 5.2.

Went swimming this morning, but followed it up with no biking whatsoever, and got caught up in a good movie until it was time for work (Houdini, with Tony Curtis). Worked, then dashed out to meet a fantastic building society fixer-upper, which left me with quite a spring in my step and abbbbsolutely no time to do the 'pathways walk' I was scheduled to do this lunchtime. Working, working, working...So much working, so little bike today. About to dash out again, this time back to the doctors after getting a quick call from them. Still intending to bike tonight though dammit...And aquacise...and gym taste...Plus wanna make some serious headway on my proper writing tonight - people much busier than me with their Real Lives are suddenly publishing novels, which really rather leaves you with the 'no excuses' feeling, so I want to kick myself in my own ass and push on.

Which, in case you're wondering, is why this blog's so short - In a day that was always gonne be pretty packed, right now there's no time to turn around and spit twice.

So - consider this your one spit, I guess, and try not to judge me too harshly - gotta keep wolves from doors and want to try and Become A Novelist in the meantime. Talk about First World Problems, eh?

The Callibration Factor

2012-01-31T20:33:00.000Z

Hmm...
Well, the headline, such as it is, is that at today's weigh-in, I was:
15 stone 9.5. A whole whopping pound lighter than last Tuesday. BUT there's a hidden headline in there somewhere - for while the news was OK last Tuesday, by Wednesday - and consistently for some days - I was back up to 15 stone 12.75. But now consistently yesterday and today, I'm 15 stone 9.5, so I find the reading more believable.

That said, we went to the diabetic nurse today, and on her scales, which she claimed had been properly callibrated and were as accurate as could be, I was 15 stone 8 in January clothes - which I've previously experimented with (cos yeah, in case you're new, I really am that sad!), and which amount to two whole pounds of clothes. So...you can judge for yourself the importance of callibration, but I've always previously resisted the lure of external scales, so even though I find the Nazi Scales a little suspect int his case, the weight I'm recording is 15 stone 9.5 pounds - two litttle, poxy pounds from this ever-elusive five-freaking-stone barrier...

Next week, dammit. Next week for sure.

Oh and while we're talking about callibration, I also did a blood test at the nurse's, and it showed as 6.2 - whereas when I got home, it showed as 4.8. Again, the importance of callibration. The nurse was still pleased with me though - apparently, (these things bloody well shift!), the safe, good-control region for blood sugar in the UK now is between 4 and 7, so I'm still well within range. She mentioned that if things continue as they've been going, I will soon be able to drop one kind of medication allllltogether. Take that, Diabetes!

Didn't actually go swimming this morning though - had planned to, but I'm sleeping pathetically at the moment - an hour here, a half-hour there...so at 4.30 this morning (oh the irony - 4.30 on a Tuesday, rather than a Monday...) I turned off the alarm and rolled over. Did manage to get 500 calories of biking in before work though, and popped to the gym for the 'taster' session this lunchtime - more biking, more push-up things, some back work and an indeterminate number of ab crunches. Fairly hateful but oddly, less boring that swimming great hulking lengths back and forth. Weird day tomorrow - either swimming and biking or just double biking in the morning...mmmm...double biking in the warm and dry...followed by a lunchtime 'pathways walk', followed, after work, by an aquacise session leading straight in to a gym taster...we'll be knackered by the end of tomorrow night (but then, saying that, we did just go out for a Chinese buffet, so I think probably we'll deserve to be knackered by tomorrow night!).

Should, in all likelihood, get back on the bike right about now, but d makes the very good point that I've spent more time on a bike today than I have in her company during the entire day, so, y'know what? Nice cup of de-caff tea, feet up, heated couches on and the last remnants of the evening spent with my girl, I reckon. Catch you all on the flipside of the exercise-a-thon...

Disappearing Syndrome

2012-01-30T18:04:00.002Z

See, I think it’s a sickness.

To most people, to normal people, I’m sure “woohoo, I don’t have to get up at 4.30AM!” is an excuse to lay in bed till the last possible moment.

To me, it appears to be an excuse to get up a whole two hours later, at 6.30, pop to the pool, do my now-regulation ten lengths, then bugger off home and bike for an hour before work.

That can’t be right, surely?

Still, Monday and all – day before the weigh-in – Dum-dum-daaaaaaah!

Honestly, anyone still give a rat’s ass? Except me, I mean, and only then cos it directly affects me.

Was talking to d last night about the temptation to do an Aristotelian experiment...

For those who are just joining us, or, mysteriously, who don’t commit to memory every pearl of wisdom ever written in this blog, an Aristotelian experiment is an experiment with pleasure. Aristotle’s Ethics, which I read a while back, seemed to view pleasure with a great deal of suspicion and to argue that, more often than not, it should be avoided, because it colours your view of what is genuinely good. But, said Ari, those who completely avoided pleasure were miserable cop-outs, and couldn’t really claim to have mastered desire simply by staying the fuck away from pleasurable things. The real test, he said, was to have pleasure in very great moderation, and then master it again every day.

Tell me honestly – you wanna party with this guy, don’t you?

Anyhow – my idea of an Aristotelian experiment goes back to reading the book, because I’m one of those who has banned pleasure of a certain kind – of a culinary kind, clearly – entirely from my diet, in an effort to Disappear significantly. So Aristotle’s words rang in my brain as a kind of test, a kind of “come and have a doughnut if you think you’re hard enough!” call from across the terraces of time.

“I’m thinking of doing an Aristotelian experiment,” I said last night.

“A what?” said d. I explained it to her as I’ve just explained it to you.

“Oh...OK,” she said. “What are you thinking of having? Want a muffin? I can give you a muffin...”

Double-entendres waaaaay aside, this was a kind offer – she’s started baking seriously again recently, and people at our Sunday morning car boot sales are starting to sit up, take notice and pay money. She was offering me the last of her Morning Glory muffins (again, insert your own double entendre here if you like, safe in the knowledge that I did...).

“Nono,” I said. “Too healthy. I’m thinking of a Welsh Cake...”

I should explain – a Welsh cake is a small bake-stone cake filled with currants. Normally, that’s as far as it goes, but one of the stalls at our local market has been commended by Jamie Oliver as a food hero. They do a kind of Welsh Cake sandwich, with jam and what is essentially frosting in the middle. I’m given to understand it’s practically orgasmic.

“Ohhh, yeah, good choice,” said d.

“Oh no, wait!” I thought again. If you were going to experience pleasure, why dangle your toes in the water, when you could jump in head first.

“How about a Sundae,” I said, fantasising about any and all of the colossal, whorish desserts on offer at the local Harvester. D wasn’t as keen on that idea, but as I’ve mentioned before, I have the discretion of an 8-year-old boy when it comes to desserts. The gaudier the better, almost by default.

“Mmmmm...” I Homered. “Sunnnnndaes....”

“Yyyyeah – way to test your strength there,” said d.

The thing is – the point is - that when today dawned, and the opportunity surely arose to put this plan into action, instead of diving into a dessert head-first, I went swimming and biking, and I’m currently wondering if I have time to get another hoursworth of biking in before dinner. Seems to be some perverse kind of addiction-replacement going on again. More water, more revolutions, dammit! Give me moooooore!

Did I mention, I think it’s a sickness?

Sigh...

Tomorrow should be Interesting. Meeting with a diabetic nurse, presumably for a medication review now we’ve moved across the country. Blood remains relatively constant – on just the one pill (down from four at the start of this experiment last March), my blood this morning was constant from yesterday at 5.2. Woohoo!

Also, have another ‘gym taster’ at lunchtime tomorrow, and intend to swim before work again....annnd possibly bike too...Fightback well and truly started. Let’s see if this positively addictive behaviour is even remotely reflected in the weigh-in tomorrow morning...

Best Exercise Accessory...Ever

2012-01-29T16:59:00.000Z

Meant to mention this a couple of days ago, but blood on Friday was 4.8. Blood this morning, on a single pill, was 5.2 - still within acceptable boundaries apparently, so time to examine my meds on a more fundamental basis come Tuesday's nurse appointment, probably.

Today has been all about chaos. In trying to empty boxes, I've basically created chaos out of order in the office. Once I'm done writing this of course, I'll go and try and reverse the process, minus the boxes. I'm not sure the universe works quite like, but hey - pissing off the universe is one of the many things I'm about.

Apart from that, there's a big rumour today - that we're due a big Siberian wind, loaded with 'tumps' of snow - official Weather Channel word, by the way, when did that happen?

Now it should be pointed out that, as yet, there is no snow where we are. Further up the Valley, yes, but nowhere near us or our travel direction when I bugger off to Cardiff, and then London, in the morning. BUT - it could happen. So my boss has allowed me to opt out of the UberCommute tomorrow. Awoohoo!

Going back upstairs now, to re-excavate the bike (turned it on briefly earlier, peddled a little, felt my heart sing a song of Back In The Saddle joy and love between a man and a piece of electrical exercise equipment, got off - delayed gratification and all that. Ahhhh, it's great to be alive with an exercise bike in the shadow of a rumour of snow - it means you can eradicate the calorific memory of everything you've eaten and stay up later than 9PM. I ask you - does life get any better than that?

Oh wait - being thin enough to eat desserts, right...

Well...sonofabitch, that was a beautiful moment ruined, wasn't it?

No Excuse

2012-01-28T19:14:00.000Z

Did I mention, the fightback starts here?

Aquacise and gym today, within a couple of hours of each other. You've heard our morning banter many a time, but this morning, you featured in it.
"D'you really want to do this?" mumbled d at 7.15.
"Course I don't really want to do this," I muttered, drooling into my pillow after a crappy night's sleep. "But I really really don't want to have to report in today's blog that I didn't do it."
d laughed a somewhat hollow laugh.
"You're using the blog as a surrogate conscience now?"
"Hey, whatever works, right? After all, there's no excuse not to go, is there?..." I mouthed those words a little bitterly. They weren't originally mine, but my mother's.

My mother, bless her, has a spectacular way with language, with which she blazes through the world like a bulldozer on crack. She, after all, was the woman who introduced herself to her then-prospective daughter-in-law (who grew up in an Sicilian American family), with the immortal line "Oh, don't worry about us, love - we're just like the Mafia!"

One day this week, Ma was here in our little jewel-box, and we were discussing how much we loved being so central for everything that's everything in this town - including the leisure centre, with its gym and swimming pool.
"Oh, absolutely," she said, casually. "There's no excuse not to go now, is there?"

Let's be clear here - there's no malice in her words, and hardly any deeper meaning. But the words have rather hung around us, every time we've been lying here not wanting to do something horribly energetic. No no...there's no excuse now.

And so, against the will of our bodies, we hauled ourselves into consciousness and into the pool this morning, for a range of exercises which are theoretically supposed to be made easier by the fact they're done in water, but each and every one of which we can feel in our muscles now. I, being a sick fuck on times, went back for the lunchtime gym session, to do some biking, some back-strengthening, and some chest pressing - the practical usefulness of which I suppose will only be revealed to me if I ever get trapped beneath a broken building and have to push great hunks of masonry off myself.

Oh and you remember I said yesterday I'd ordered a new bike power cord?
Arrived TODAY! The postal service is clearly enjoying its annual January speed allotment. So now, there's even less of an excuse to not exercise every possible chance I get.
Have of course also done some office-clearing today - as I know have to unearth the bike, in order to get on it! Read some old journals we wrote, to and about each other, and came over all gooey at our certainty, which, over time, has been more than justified, I'd say.

Sigh...ignore me, just having a sentimental moment.

Tomorrow, more office-clearance, while d and Ma do another car boot sale. And undoubtedly, I'll be getting back on my own bike tomorrow...

After all, there's...

Stranger In A Strange Land

2012-01-27T23:12:00.000Z

"You might wanna follow me in here," called d from the shower.
"Mmm, yeah," I agreed, working on a feature piece for my magazine. It was early, but we didn't have time to hang about. We had an appointment at the gym.
"No, really," she called. "Don't get too engrossed, you should come and shower before we go."
"Meh," I said. "I'm gonna be showering afterwards anyway..."
"Alrighty then," she said. I'm fairly sure there was a note of "way not to get some, dude," in her tone, but I had to get the piece finished before we went.
As it happened, we just about got out in time. The snow, which had come and pretty much gone overnight had hardened, here and there, into treacherous-bastard ice, so we slipped and picked and determinedly heel-toed our way across to the leisure centre.
"Two for Introduction To Zumba please," said d when we got there, technically a minute late.
The guy at reception looked at me.
"Two?" he asked, then blinked, recovering quickly. "Righto, there you go..." He handed us our receipts and we made our way to the dance studio.

I should say, whenever I've told anyone I was joining d for Zumba, I've had two reactions. Women everywhere have gone "Oh....really?" Men have, without exception, gone "What the Hell is Zumba?"

Zumba, for those who don't know - which is to say, the men - is a kind of bizarre combination of aerobics, Salsa, line dancing, battle drill and comedy. It is, usually, an exclusively female pursuit - except, and this should be stressed - in the case of the male participants being Latin and hot. It's a dancing form of group exercise, which - as every man reading this is now saying to himself - explains why it's mainly a female thing.

As we were a minute or so late arriving, there was a pulsing Latin soundtrack coming from the studio, with occasional high-pitched parade-ground yell. Then we were in there, with women from wall to wall, step-step-stepping from side to side and clapping. d and I shuffled to the back, and eventually started step-step-step clapping.

The instructor was the same shouty, sweat-obsessed perkybot from our gym taster a few days ago. Within minutes she was again asking if we were sweating, except this time, she was asking the room.

Of course, Latin dance is all very well if performed by lithe, serpent-hipped people with rhythm and a bodyful of hormones. If performed by a roomful of wheezing, wobbling, unco-ordinated Welsh folk, it loses something of its sultriness. When your instructor has the thickest South Wales accent, and confidently tells you "Don' follow me...I'm a shit dancer!", it's incredibly easy to forget what it is you're there for. And when instructed to do series after series of wide overarm sweeps...your wife's advice about showering before going into the class tends to come back to you, really rather forcefully.
The overarm sweeps were to be performed to the tune of "Rollin' Down The River", on the line "Big wheels keep on turning..."
Well I'm here to tell you that when you hit yourself with a wave of your own rancid armpit-juice with every overarm sweep, the wheels get smaller and smaller in a reeeeeeal big hurry. You kind of end up with hamster wheels keeping on turning pretty quick. When you also have no co-ordination, it slows you down. But there's a good reason why Zumba is generally a womens-and-hot-men's game.

There's a lot of body-shaking involved, and a lot of dance. Both of which are almost calculated to put women at their ease in each other's company, and to make men, by contrast, entirely ill at theirs. There's an air of an Anne Summers party with music about it, and while, surprisingly, I wasn't the only man in the studio, it was like being men in Sex and the City - we were curiosities, little more. Strangers in a strange land of female instinctive understanding.

That said, d had a fantastic time, and made the instructor's day by smiling and laughing probably more than anyone else had breath for. And in her pleasure, my own found some expression. So, clueless curiosity or not, I'll be back next week for more grinding and shaking and foot-slap-clapping - but next week, you can bet your ass I'll shower first!!

As for the rest of the day, a couple of good bits - got a second pair of swimming shorts, so now there's nothing to really stop me swimming most mornings and evenings if I want to. And I did it - I finally ordered a replacement power cord for the bike, so next week, I can start to really get back on track, irrespective of weather, or money, or work or any other damn thing.

That said, we had an Indian takeaway tonight - hardly diet food! But then we're up early tomorrow for another undoubtedly-largely-female exercise class - Time to hit the pool, for the delights of Aquacise! At this point it's anyone's guess what happens on Tuesday, or what prevails - the exercise or the food. We'll just have to see. But the tide is definitely turning. One way or another, the tide is turning from the mayhem of preparing the move, and doing the move, and setting up the hosue, and setting up routines. The next four weeks - the final four weeks of my first year as a Disappearing Man - will see the tide turn forcibly back in my favour, and things will move my way again before we're done with Year One. I will break through my five stone barrier, dammit, before the 1st of March, I will be more than half the way to my goal. I just...will...

Snow Patrol

2012-01-26T18:51:00.000Z

Ever had that weird lurgi that comes on you out of the blue, kicks the crap out of you and then buggers off, leaving you feeling OK, but vaguely embarrassed about the whole episode?

"Oh, you look awwwful!" said d, coming home from the local Tesco store. I nodded.
"Good. If I felt this crappy and looked a million dollars, I'd be cross," I mumbled.
"Go and have a nap for an hour," she suggested. It was near enough lunchtime anyway, so I obeyed her without protest. She woke me in stages - it was one of those deals where when you first wake up, you feel like you'll never move again, but after an extra ten or fifteen minutes, you begin to feel, as Jerome K Jerome probably put it, that you perhaps won't die today after all, and that s spot of lunch might bring you back firmly within the realm of the living.

Had intended to go swimming this lunchtime, then got knocked on the head by this lurgi, and that put the tin hat on that for a while. When I woke up feeling relatively fine, I figured I'd just go and battle the lanes of water-traffic tonight instead. Then we looked out the window.
"Holy crap!" said d, pulling the curtains back to show me.
"Brr," I shuddered.
It was snowing. Proper snowing, so to speak, not just airy-fairy trying-to-snow. Big fast flurries of fat flakes, that seemed to be sticking.
"To Tescos, Batman!" said d. I didn't question her decision - at the first sight of snow in this country, people panic. If we waited an hour, there'd be nothing on the shelves. So we took advantage of our almost-ridiculous proximity to everything that matters in this town, and legged it. Getting there, it looked like the austerity principle of baking your own bread was really taking hold - pretty much an entire shelf of flour had vanished between d coming home and telling me I looked awful and the two of us returning, about four hours later.
"So - still going swimming dear?" asked d as we struggled back up the steps to our place.
"Yeah, cos I've always wanted to try my hand at pneumonia," I muttered. In short - bugger it all to Hell, am staying home and warm. And, thinking about it, am doing a web search as soon as I finish blethering to you lot - for a freakin power chord for this bike! It's kinda sitting there now, looking like a long-lost but equally long-suffering spaniel pup, all big wet eyes and "nobody loves me". Clearly not true - it's an evil bastard given half a chance, but getting on a bike at the gym a couple of days ago felt good, felt right, and if I could only find the chord, I wouldn't have to dice with pneumonia or feel guilty about every morsel of grub I put in my mouth, cos I could just come upstairs to the office and pedal those morsels right the Hell back off...Right, let's see...Bremshey Cardio Comfort Control leads...

Petition

2012-01-25T23:26:00.000Z

1. We the Undersigned demand the immediate conferring of Knighthoods, Damehoods, Priesthoods, GerbilFur-Lined Hoods, unendingly vast fame and fortune, 72 virgins in gimp suits or whatever the Hell floats their boats, frankly, to the scientists who today announced that fried foods aren't actually bad for you, so long as they're fried in olive or sunflower oils.

2. We further demand that all fish and chip shops in the UK now be forced to provide a 'de-caff' option, allowing customers to choose to have their battered sausages fried in traditional three-week-old dark and crusty-bitted lard, or to have them delicately dunked in dew-fresh olive oil for a 'Healthy Fry' option.

3. This 'de-caff grease' option must, in order to avoid the intolerable smugness of chefs and foodies everywhere and the creation of a two-tier dietary state, be no more expensive than the traditional 'fell-off-the-ass-of-a-zebra' lard option. This will necessitate radical action to bring down the price of the 'Healthy' oils.

4. Seriously, do what you have to do. We're not above going to war for cheap olive oil. Operation Popeye, let's go! Get a bunch of Scots Guards together, let's invade the fuck out of Sicily! I mean, obviously, go tooled up, cos we've all seen The Godfather, but still...

Signed: Fat Fucks of The World, Desperately Craving a Guilt-Free Fry-Up.

Wet, Wet, Wet

2012-01-24T20:30:00.000Z

"You really don't have to do this," said d.
"Urrrgle..." I said. Then her words sank through my skull. She hadn't read last night's blog, thankfully. If she had, she probably wouldn't have given me the 'encouragement' I was banging on about yesterday - the encouragement to take it easy, or to quit.

Without knowing that, she'd said the words, and in my semi-conscious state, they had absolutely the opposite effect to the one she probably intended. I'd been laying there, rationalising the feasibility of staying in bed, all warm and cosy, and had just about decided I liked that sort of logic when d gave me permission to do nothing, and inadvertantly got my ass out of bed.

"Ugh," I said at the view outside our front door. It was 6.30ish, so dark, and absolutely pouring with rain. I got my boots, my big coat, my scarf, my hat...
"Ugh," I said again, stepping out into it.

I've spoken before about the power of music when you're exercising. And I'm here to tell you that the Manic Street Preachers, good lads as they are, are utterly depressing when walking round your home town in the dark and the pissing-down rain at Christ o'clock in the morning. Switching eventually to the Mamas and the Papas, it was amazing how revitalised I felt. The coat was protecting me, the hat was protecting me, the boots were protecting me, and whereas with Life Becoming A Landslide and From Despair To Where, Merthyr looked bleak and dark and horrible, with a dose of California Dreaming and Dedicated To The One I Love, I would have been more than happy to carry on for a while longer. Then, while I was singing along, a car came up from behind, and aquaplaned through an enormous puddle.

I stood there, dripping, wet to the backs of my knees, and muddy water running down my face. That was it - I was done. I'd actually done what I'd set out to do anyway - an hour or so of walking, and getting home an hour before work was due to start, so I could put in some extra time, because lunchtime was going to be spent at the gym on the first of our doctor-referred exercise classes. I crept in, took off some clothes and wrung them out, and got to work.

Lunchtime came, and we went across to the gym. This first session together was a 'gym taster', which basically meant some people who were too toned and bouncy by half would press some buttons on a range of machines for us, and then shout at us to get sweaty. It's important, in situations like this, not to take it personally, or there'd be rather more gym bloodbaths in the world. We treadmilled, we static-biked, I rowed up the freakin' Nile, and d did some frankly weirdass reverse-hand-pedalling thing that seemed like the very antithesis of fun. At random intervals, these toned fucks would appear as if from nowhere and shout encouraging things at us - and indeed at the other fat fucks in the room, of which, I'm glad to say, there were many..
"Gettin' sweatttty?" asked one brunette woman, as I rowed.
"What do you think?" I panted.
"Goooood!" she yelled, grinning and moving on to positively harangue a woman with individual breasts bigger than my head.

We staggered home, soaked with sweat and feeling exhausted but highly virtuous, and had a lunch that featured d's homemade bread strongly. Homemade bread - have I got a great life, or what?!

Five o'clock came and I bolted out the door - we'd decided, while we were there at lunchtime, to bite a bullet and get month-long 'swim passes', meaning we could go and swim any damn time we liked. So I decided to go and swim when fewer people were there.

Yyyyyeah, that didn't work. Just after five o'clock? Still like a motorway of wet bodies. Managed to do 14 lengths and then got out, more bored of stopping to swerve than actually exhausted. Came home, to d's home made bread and fresh corn bread. At which point I refer you to the point about the freakin' life I lead from just two paragraphs ago.
"Go shower," said d, "you're chloriney...and sweaty, come to that." So I went to shower, having come out of a pool full of pissing-about Welsh people.

Now - dinner, and an early night - tomorrow is technically Wednesday, but from my point of view, it's Monday, day of the UberCommute.

Ugh...as I seem to have said rather a lot today, given that it's been a great day.

Oh yeah - blood was 5.0 this morning (I dropped down another pill last night, so this is pretty good), and the weight today was:
15 stone 10, dead. Not great, but much better than I was expecting - yesterday morning, I weighed in at 15 stone 12.75, so clearly, Doing Stuff has shocked the system a little. So here's to shock and awe, and bringing it on for next week...
Woohoo...

Season of the Stubborn Bastard

2012-01-23T20:21:00.000Z

And so the fight-back begins.
Doesn't mean I'll be able to avoid a faintly humiliating result in the morning, but hopefully, it means I can start to pull this thing back in the right direction this week - we went and got registered for our GP gym referrals today. We start officially tomorrow on a programme of 'at least two classes a week' at the local gym/sports centre. The first one, at lunchtime tomorrow? Gym Introduction. Basically like a low-grade personal trainer-cum-tour of the equipment, from treadmills - (walk, don't fall off, next!) to bikes (pedal till you die) to cross-trainers (again...no, seriously, don't fall off!), to rowing machines (annnd stroke....) to bits of kit far more reminiscent of the torture chambers of the Inquisition than anything the 21st century has devised.

That said, I couldn't let today - my one-month Welsh anniversary (as well, of course, as Chinese New Year. Year of the Dragon no less, surely a good Welsh omen?) - go by without finally popping my leisure centre cherry. I went over tonight at about 6.15, while this time d waited in for the return of Jason the Doors Guy. The pool, tonight, closed at 7, I was told. Bugger...but still, I was there by then, so I paid my money and went on in.

Well....erm...that was weird. It was kinda like Oxford Street, Christmas Eve....only wetter. I'd like to tell you I did ten lengths, and technically, if ya wanna be lenient to my poor Disappearing ass, I did. But what I actually did was about 30 third-of-a-lengths, a little flapping about, and quite a lot of desperately-getting-the-fuck-out-of-other-people's way. Clearly, there are good times and bad times to go a-swimming at the local pool. And clearly, while-no-one-else-can-get-there is the best of times.

Came out and had that horribly compelling craving you get after swimming - for stodge! In my case, for chip shop fish and soggy British chips drenched in vinegar, with lashings of bread and butter and ketchup for chip butties...

S'kinda evil, that, isn't it? You're doing this activity to try and redress your calorie-exercise balance, and it instantly triggers a positively visceral need in you for grease. I've said this before, but I swear, Disappearing is alllllllmost enough to make you believe in a Devil!
(B'doink, b'doink, b'doink...) Sorry, just felt the need to headbutt my desk a few times. Feel better now. Here, let me just swig some healthy water, instead of the gallon of thick, black, sweet, fizzy wonderment I'm craving...

Ahhhhhhh...

Anyhow, as I mentioned - tomorrow's results are going to suck ass. They absolutely are. I've been of course intensely neurotic about these things before, but given half an opportunity, I think this is the first time I could feel really sludgily low about this prospect. Until now, there's always been the idea of being driven on, of backward steps being just blips on the inevitable journey. But, given just the least little bit of encouragement, I could stop now. I could rest on my laurels and go "Fuck it, four and a half stone's not so bad..." and go out and get that fish and chips, that Snickers bar, that Coke.

That's not going to happen though. Am pretty much manufacturing positivity against my own will at the moment, almost directly as a result of KK's intervention this week. Must push on...must push on...Tomorrow's gonna suck, but must push on...Feels like earlier tonight - I'd done eight lengths, and thought "Right, sod it, that's me done." But then I thought "That's not really what you came here to do though, is it?" Bear in mind, I hadn't gone with any particular amount of swimming in mind to do, so this was news to me. But the idea of being able to say I'd done ten lengths appealed to me. It was sort of like a finishing line - a finishing line I could legitimately think of as being a finishing line (damn metric system...). So I flapped on through another six third-of-a-lengths, floundering frankly at almost every pause, every bank, every get-the-fuck-out-of-the-way, completely done, but stubborn-bastardy driving me on. Yeah...it's like that. It's the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, but for me, right now, it's the Season of the Stubborn Bastard.

And on we go...

The Disappearing Door

2012-01-22T20:39:00.000Z

"What is it with you and closing doors?"

I practically crawled up the stairs. It was about 12.30AM - hey, gimme a break, I'm 40 now, that's a pretty wild night! - and I'd worked for a good few hours on the office after yesterday's walk. I was keen to show off the fact that the room was...well, a functioning room...before we collapsed into bed.
"It's just tidier," I muttered.
"Did you lock this thing?"
"Hasn't got a lock dear, you're just tired."
"Err...no," she said, waggling the handle and pushing.
"It's locked," she said again.
"Can't be locked," I said. "Hasn't got a lock. Really..."
"Welllll I don't know what to tell you dear, but this," she said, unconsciously John-Cleesing, "is a locked...door."
I frowned, pushed her gently out of the way, waggled the handle.
"Erm..." I said.
"It's locked," I said.
"Yyyyep," said d.
"Can't be locked," I reiterated, spiralling into a pointless little self-argument. "It hasn't got a lock!" I waggled the handle more firmly, pushed a shoulder against the door.
"Ahem..." said d.
"Do you have a screwdriver dear?"
"Yep," I said. "Got three."
"Oh great - Where are they?"
"They're on a shelf on the bookcase on the other side of the door."
"Not helping!"
"Think you've got problems?" I muttered. "My iPod's on the other side of this door. Hell, every Dr Who DVD I own is on the other side of this door!"
Realising this was true as I said it, I took to bashing on the wood to try and get it to see reason. The door did its utmost to impress upon me the fact that I could whine all I liked, for all it cared. It wasn't budging. I could almost swear it stuck its tongue out at me.
d padded exhaustedly downstairs, rummaged around for a couple of minutes, and came back with a flat head screwdriver. The screws in the door-handle were Philips. It didn't seem the right time to point this out, so I set to work taking off the door handle. We tried the door.
Nada.
We pulled out the rod conecting both sides of the door. That didn't make it happy. Neither did it make it obliging. I screwed the door handle back on, tried it again, in that faintly hopeless way you do when you think 'maybe the last twenty minutes were a dream...' They weren't.
"Maybe the CD rack has fallen over and is just blocking the door," suggested d.
I blinked the fatigue back out of my eyes.
"Mebbe," I acknowledged. "Didn't hear anything fall though."
"Maybe..." said d.
I've learned to vaguely cringe at that "Maybe..." It inevitably precedes a suggestion that is of such appalling good sense I have to agree to it, and end up doing strategically sound but situationally stupid things for an hour or so.
She looked up. Abover the door was what d called a 'jealousy window' - but which I, being an uncultured nonce, call "a bunch of glass slats, angled to stop you seeing any damn thing. They were apparently held in place merely by a coat of paint.
I looked at d. Nodded. In all fairness, she's more than ready to equip me when she has schemes like this. She padded back downstairs again, and came back with a three-step ladder. I climbed it, and waved a flashlight through the slats.
"Well, the main one is still upright," I said.
"What about the small one? The one that's right next to the door?"
"Well...that's a small one," I said.
"Yes dear..."
"Means I won't be able to see it anyway from up here," I condescended.
"I know that honey," she said, producing a pair of small knives. I blinked.
"Err...let's not be hasty..." I said, smiling quickly, and scampering down off the ladder.
She rolled her eyes and climbed the ladder, started to scrape away at the layer of paint holding the slats in place
"Ohh, right," I said, hiding a yawn. Badly.
"This is useless," she announced a few moments later.
"Yes dear," I said.
We did a few more experiments, and determined, in the absence of hard evidence, that the door had more give at the top and bottom, and that it was the lock itself that was the fatal obstinacy.
With that much agreed between us, we went to bed.
Today, d and Ma were due to be at a car boot sale, leaving me to work in the office and do some walking. Now, we told Ma about the Door (it had acquired a capital letter for itself in the night), and then they went with Plan A - heading to the sale. Plan B for me was to wait in for the Jason the Door Guy.

In one of the most impressive deviations from London living - we called him at about 9.30, and by 12.30 on the same Sunday, he was walking through our (front) door. He set about the offending door with a couple of screwdrivers and a certain amount of brute force, and within about twenty minutes, he was walking out again, with the latch of the door, in several pieces, in his hand. He's coming back tomorrow evening to fit a replacement.

The excitement of the door (I stripped it of its capital letter because it turned out to be a wuss when faced with Jason the Door Guy and his magic screwdrivers) being over so soon, I buggered off and went walking as planned. So...nehh! Got some walking today, in spite of the door. Then, admittedly, went ot Ma's for a big Sunday Dinner.

All of which is relatively immaterial - tomorrow's the day - tomorrow I move into the office, properly, and tomorrow, we go to get assessed at the gym. The proper fight-back starts...erm...tomorrow.

Blood was 4.8 this morning, incidentally, for any remaining vampires in the crowd.

An Intervention

2012-01-21T21:52:00.000Z

"Honey?"
"Yeah?" I was three steps up on our staircase, preparing to trudge the rest of the way and throw myself into the work of turning a box-room into a functional office.
"It's blue out there."
I looked. She was right.
"You're right..." I acknowledged.
"Why don't you go for a walk while it's nice and bright?"
A couple of minutes later, I was out there, repeating my walk of earlier this week - up a steep hill, then another steep hill, then a flat bit, then another steep hill, then a long windy flat-ish bit, and finally a long long windy downhill bit to home. Couple of miles probably, but it makes you feel terribly virtuous to do something after weeks and weeks of doing Not Very Much At Freakin' All...

On which subject, pal of mine did an e-intervention for me tonight. This is Karen. Not Karen Who Shall Be Called Mae, or Karen Pulley, but Champion Slimmer Karen, who, for reasons lost (for the protection of the not entirely innocent) in the mists of teenage time, I always think of as Karen KrazyKlaws, or KK for short (yes, fellow pedants, I know that should make it KKK, but that's a whole world of unnecessary confusion, don'tcha think?).

She popped up on Facebook this evening and told me - in her stern voice no less - to pull my finger out, get off my arse and do something, cos she was sick of blogs that were basically "ate loads, did buggerall, feel wretched, boohoo, am gonna have put on weight on Tuesday, waaaaah!" The Chronicles of the Reappearing Man, in short.

She's not the only one. I'm bloody sick of them myself. While walking round the Valley today, I was musing. As ya do. It's like the whole of January has been a limbo-month, filled with work and boxes. I'd like to tell you this will all snap into place and a better, more Disappeary rhythm will kick in soon. And it occurs to me that this is pretty much in my power to do, isn't it? Getting out and doing stuff is in my power. Finding the damn bike power chord would give me a huge amount of control back over my destiny.

Come Monday, I will have been a resettled Welshman for a month. Seems weirdly fitting somehow that apparently, d and I have our gym-for-half-price induction meetings on Monday. It's the kind of meeting for which you're advised to "wear loose clothing". I'm thinking there may be sweat involved. And I've had about six weeks off from any kind of proper work-out. This could get messy. But messy in a positive, ass-kicking, setting-foot-back-inside-a-gym kinda way.

I'm done being the Reappearing Man. Time to get back on course, dammit. Tomorrow, more walking.

So tonight, just a quick thankyou to KK, for an e-kick in the ass. Limbo is done. Focus has returned. The game's afoot and all that!

Of Mice And Disappearing Men

2012-01-20T23:16:00.000Z

It was Eddie Izzard who famously looked at the great quote "The best-laid plans of mice and men aft gang aglay" - or "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go wrong" as it's translated in modernity, and asked the question...
"Exactly what mice plans was Robert Burns thinking of when he wrote that?"

I'm guessing there have been, to date, no mice making plans to lose about nine stone. Except possibly some mice in labs somewhere. That'll mean there have been no mice plans to go swimming, and no mice plans to walk for miles at the crack of dawn.

No - those are uniquely human plans, I'm thinking...
Was all set to go swimming last night. Then I opened the front door...
Now, I know I've said that this is Wales, and if you didn't do things in the pissing-down rain, nobody'd ever go outside, but I have to tell you, I looked at the drizzle, and I felt the nipple-popping chill, and I thought about being fresh out of the apparently fairly cold pool, and trudging home the couple of hundred paces...
And I closed the door and had dinner. Not as calorifically virtuous as swimming, but rather more fun.
And then there was this morning. I was exhausted and bitchy by the time we dragged our asses up the stairs last night, and the thought of getting up at 6.30 again this morning filled me with an all-consuming horror, so I chose the path of weakness again, and turned off my alarm.

"Oi!" said d. "Get up, he's here!"
"Ummmf?" I asked.
Oh. Him. Really? Already?
"Whattime'sit?"
"8.30 - get down here, he's here in a van, probably can't figure out the code, and if he can't figure out the code, he might just leave!"
I rolled into clothes and stumbled downstairs. Sure enough, there was a guy trying to get in through the main doors to our apartment block. I called out the code to him and then he was on his knees.
I should probably mention at this point, the big plan for the day was to finally get our home phone line and our braodband up and running. The phone-wizard twiddled about. Then realised he needed to drill through our external wall and lay new cable. He called in a mate with a drill. Twiddled some more.
"Right," that's me off then," he said eventually.
"Broadband?" we asked.
"Ohhh," he said, looking at his watch. "Dunno nothin' about that, mate," he claimed.
"Told you that when you walked in the door," I told him. Essentially, we had to go a little clientzilla on the guy in order to get him to do what had been agreed. Still, he did it in the end, even though his particular plans for the day ended up being an hour and a half behind schedule.

Re-sult!

Went out for a low-key, calorifically cheap lunch...and ended up with something like seven and a half dinner rolls on the side. Sooo that would be another plan gone to Hell in a mousetrap.
Got back to work, and as d had a little post-lunch doze, I made a decision. When I was done, I was gonna go walking, dammit.

Then I finished.
"I invite you to embrace your inner jammies," murmured d. Annnnd my final plan of the day crumbled into couch-loving, movie-watching, snuggled-down crumbs.

Tomorrow, the plan is to get to the freakin' bottom of my office, dammit, and possibly do Something to help the ailing recovery of my weightloss program.

Yeah, that's the plan...Anyone taking bets?...

The Only Way Is Up

2012-01-19T21:12:00.001Z

"Remember when I was bitching that there were no big hills in London?" I groaned to d at about 8.30 this morning.
"Errr yes dear..."
"You're married to a stupid man, you know that? A very stupid man," I said, clomping towards the bathroom. I hesitated at the foot of the stairs. I followed them with my eyes.
They went up.

Bastards.

"Would you really mind if I peed in the sink?" I asked, optimistically. d's eyebrow answered me, and I yanked myself. See, here's the thing - I'm sick of my own bitching about not actually doing anything, so I gurgled my way out of bed at 6.30, and decided to go for a walk before work. Decided to avoid Grandma and the Men With Dogs, which meant going Uphill.

Situated as we are at pretty much the bottom of the town, there is arguably only one genuine "downhill" road from our house. Evvvvery other direction you go, you're going up. I went up a thing called Twyn Hill (non-Welsh folk, it's pronounced sort of as Toyn, but with a rather more rounded vowel). It's like you called any hill you know a sissy, and it brought its big brother to come and sort you out. I followed it up as far as it ran. It was positively nosebleeding, and dissipated eventually into estates. I snuck a little back down, and across a long plateau, looking across what feels like a caldera. A caldera of coal, twinkling with houselights in a black, pre-dawn world. At several points along the way, even when it felt like I'd gone up as far as was humanly possible, I'd look to my right, and find - another damn hill...going up. At one of them, one where I had the opportunity to go down, it was almost as if the Valley itself was mocking me...
"Oh, gone all soft and Londony have you? Can't cope with us now, can you, you old fart? No no, that's fine, go down if you like...we'll understand..."
I went up. Up and up and up some more. Ended up on a thing called the Goat Mill Road (who knew you could mill goats?), and walked on, up to Dowlais, site of one of the Ironworks that made Merthyr one of the engines of the Industrial Revolution. I only decided to go downhill and come home when it looked as though I'd be late for work at nine if I did anything else.

So by the time I got home, and struggled up the flight of stairs to our maisonnette, I had had quite enough of Up, so the final steps to the bathroom were kind of like Merthyr laughing at me.

Still - a good long walk does make you feel terribly virtuous. I've eaten oatmeal, and a cheese toastie, and rice.
"Phew," said d over dinner. "I'm stuffed."
"But you've eaten all your meat," I said. "Was that what you were told as a kid? At least eat the meat?"
She looked at me like I was mental.
"No," she said. That's cos I'm a carnivore!"
"Ah," I said, as she handed over her plate of rice. "Guess that makes me a carbivore," I said, tucking in without much of a sense of calorific guilt.

Not long after dinner, d enjoyed a local delicacy - Welsh cakes with cream and jam. I ground about an inch of enamel off my teeth.
"Make us coffee," she grinned. "It'll help me get rid of this quicker."

I don't know whether this was subconscious, or merely stupidity, but I made us a couple of real, fully caffeinated coffees (the trigger for my tachycardia)...It was only after I'd stirred them I realised my mistake.
Suddenly all Uphills seemed jussst fine. Except the one up to the local hospital!

Blood yesterday was 4.9, in case anyone's keeping score. Blood this morning after the odyssey of Upness - 5.1. See - Uphills are bad.

So Macho

2012-01-18T19:26:00.000Z

"So..." I said, looking at the thing online. "You wanna get that delivered?"

For any women reading this blog, that is desperate 220-pound weakling-speak for "Please God, don't tell me you want me to carry this thing?!"
I watched my meaning fly daintily over d's head. It turned its own head and blew me a raspberry, just before it splatted against the living-room wall.
"No," she said, "I was thinking we'd just go and pick it up."
"Fuuuuuuuuuck!" grumbled my brain. At which point, my balls spoke up.
"Oh, sure, OK," I said, in a slightly deeper register.

Again, for any women reading, we know you understand when we say things like this. We know you're choosing to ignore us for your own purposes. We know all this, but once the balls have spoken, we find it impossible to take their words back. And yes, sadly, we know you know that too...
"Great," said d, smiling, and getting her keys.

The thing in question was...Hell I don't even know. Some wood and rattan storage...thing...for bathrooms. No straight man ever designed anything like it. Hell, no straight man ever designed anything to store bathroom products. We wouldn't have bathroom products, left to our own devices. Hell, many of us wouldn't have bathrooms.

It looked fairly formidable even in the online catalogue.
"You can always get them to show it to you before we take it home," said d. This is such a cute, intensely feminine point of view - Here honey, you can at least take a look at your hernia before you decide to get one.

As it happened, we did - but looking at it was of course absolutley immaterial - the balls had spoken; their will must be done. I looked at it. It was chunky and short, kinda like me. It was also really...freakin'...heavy, also, as it happens, like me. I lifted it in the store, and thought I was going to pass out.
"Wow," I said. "That's really pretty heavy."
"Yeah?" said d. There was jusssst a hint of (possibly unconscious) feminine wilery in her voice. My balls roared to the rescue and grabbed my vocal chords again.
"Ach, that's no problem. Just get them to string it for me, would you?"

I think the idea is probably primeval - Me Man. Man - Strong. Impress Woman With Muscles, Make Many Babies Tonight! The flaw of course is somewhere around Stage 2. That whole "Man - Strong" thing...cos your balls may know what they think works for them, but they're pretty much a two-man band, while the rest of your body (including the bit with the brain in it) is screaming "I'm too old for this shit! Ah, fuck it, I'm gonna just lay down here and have a coronary embollism..."

I stood in the store, asking the poor assistant to "maybe just add one more loop of string, just to make good and sure of it...", all the while thinking "how...the...HELL...???"
And then I picked it up. And then it's quite possible I died - sorry for the whole Sixth Sense ending, but I think quite possibly I'm a ghost right now.

Managed to get it about halfway home, struggling and sweaty and red-faced and panting, with d asking every few steps - "Can I help? Seriously, can I help in any way at all?"

Again, this is sweet, and cute, and the balls won't allow it. "We're taking care of business!" they seem to scream. "No Wombs Allowed Here, move along now madam..."
"You could put on a glove, so it doesn't cut into your hand...erm...quite so much?" she suggested. I staggered to the nearest bench, to put the thing down.
"There's a bench straight ahead," she advised.
"Sure," I muttered. "Food, water, nubile maidens, but fuck it, let's press on to the next oasis..."
I reached the next oasis and set the thing down and pulled on one glove. It should be pointed out that at this point I also had on my what-people-think-is-a-cowboy hat. A cowboy hat and one glove.
"Oh look," I muttered. "Who's Bad?!"
It was a pretty ridiculous get-up, and I wondered if I was now expected to Moonwalk home, but thankfully not.
"You could turn the other glove round and wear it on top of the first one...y'know, for protection..." d dangled.
"Fuck it, why not?" I said, fitting actions to words, and gloves on gloves on fingers.
And so I staggered on, the other half of the way home, and then up the flight of stairs to our maisonette. d opened the door for me.
"Keep going," she instructed. "No point in stopping now, migh tas well take it all the way up to the bathroom..."
"Sure," I squealed, as a vein appeared to pop in the side of my head. "Why take two instalments to do a job when you can combine them into one big heart attack."
"Exactly," said d, probably listening.
When I stumbled back down the stairs, she smiled brightly.
"So - still wanna go swimming tonight?" she asked, with the kind of open, innocent look that gets people killed in cities.
"Get into your kitchen, woman, and feed me," I said, shuddering through to the living room and parking my not-inconsiderably ass on the couch. "I just used about 3000 calories," I whinged, destroying any last vestige of primal male attractiveness that had survived the sweating and the struggling and the bitching up to this point.
"Well...good then," she said, grinning not a little. "Y'know, since you haven't moved off the couch all day..."
She's not wrong. It's been a day for proofing the scientific journal I occasionally work on. Very dull, very clever, very mind-scrambling, but hardly high on the aerobic exercise front.
I looked at her.
"Ug," I said.
"Yes dear," she said, and went to fix us dinner...

Owning Speedos

2012-01-17T19:28:00.000Z

OK, headlines are up and down. Blood, despite going down another pill (just two of this particular kind now), and having some late night carb - 4.1 this morning, good enough for me, thankyouverymuch. Weight this morning -
15 stone 10.75 - so, up a couple of pounds. Dammit.

Still - it's one of those 'can't do the time, don't do the crime' things - I've been saying all week 'out for dinner, no exercise, out for dinner, no exercise, out for dinner, no exercise...' so to expect anything other than an increase is clearly just wishful thinking. In a way of course, I've gone back a couple of weeks during the last seven days. I still think though that when - and it's an imminent when - we start getting back to a more active lifestyle, it'll shock my system into sudden, hopefully significant losses again. d's doing a car boot sale with my mother for the next couple of Saturdays, and apparently I'm not required to flog stuff, so - much walking in the Valleys for Tony.
"Hey honey - how d'you feel about going swimming tonight?"
I don't know why, but I was struck with the idea this afternoon.
"Sure," said d. "Why not?"

Why not was because Ma turned up with some fairly sage advice. Even recent readers will know that my current swimming shorts were pre-Disappearing, and don't currently fit. I also have something of a morbid fear, when swimming, about hitting my head on the side of the pool, so I tend to swim for four or five strokes, then pop up, panicking, and bob about like a big fat spluttering cork. Science has of course devised a solution for this kind of stupidity, in the form of goggles. So when Ma turned up with her discount card for a local sporting goods store, we piled in the car and went there...instead of anywhere where the goods might be sportingly employed.

So now I own goggles. And a pair of Speedos.

Don't vomit yet - they're not what you're thinking. They happen to be made by Speedo, but they're still shorts, not the second-scrotum nightmares that are most closely associated with the name.

Oddly enough though, I still find owning them vaguely significant. It's like...
When you get beyond a certain weight, there's a kind of self-devaluation that happens. A sort of self-exclusion from the right to own certain things, or do certain things, because you know you're just going to look awful and embarrassing owning them or doing them. Speedos are pretty much one of those things. Hell, anything that trades on its sports credentials qualify, in all probability. But on the way down - here's a tip to all Disappearers - you get that sense of sporting value back. Clearly, it happens in stages, cos there's still no way I'd wear the second-scrotum Speedos yet, but as I get down, there seems to be a little voice of self-righteous vindication at the back of my head going "Fuck you, fashionistas. I'll wear what I like..."

Feels good.

Now of course all I have to do is put them to some sort of use. Maybe tomorrow night? (Still no bike cord yet. May have to just bite the bullet and buy one!)

Hell's Monday

2012-01-16T17:07:00.001Z

For those of you who think that Mondays generally are forged in a special pit of aspic-dripping awfulness in the netherest of netherhells, I'm pretty sure I'll get a 'Testify!" out of today's entry.

Up at 4.30, having decided at midnight that actually going to bed was just feeding our delusions, and that really, sleeping on the heated couches probably wasn't that bad an idea. Turned on the TV, to have our vulnerable brains stoved in by anodyne Irish TV host Eamon Holmes and "TV Scrabble."

Out the door at 5.15, cab down to Cardiff. Froze briefly to death at Cardiff Bus Station, elbowed a couple of people in the throat to assure pole position on the bus.

Froze more leisurely to death on the bus. Hardier souls than I asked the driver to turn on the heating.
"It is on," he frankly lied.
"No really," said one poor Indian guy who was turning an altogether unlikely shade of blue. "I travel on buses every week, and this is nor normal!"
"'T'is for these buses sir," said the driver, and that was that.
Got to signs for Chippenham (about a fifth of the way), and ground to an unceremonious halt. Gridlock. Three lanes of motorway reduced to one lane, due to an accident between junctions 16 and 17. We sat there for an hour and a half with the engine off. At one point, the driver buggered off to take a leak, and, as we'd all by that point begun to suspect, nothing of consequence happened to the traffic in his absence.

When, finally, we inched past the accident, we began to pick up speed again, only to be met with "long delays between junctions 10 and 11" signs. Several of my fingers and possibly my penis gave up the ghost then and dropped off from frostbite (which explains why this blog comes to you late in the day...I always type with my penis....Ohhhh, the old ones are the best.....here's hoping...). As it happened, junctions 10 and 11 passed by in relative obscurity. It was as we approached London that things got peculiar again. The driver made an announcement.
"The maximum number of hours a driver's allowed to drive," he said, "is four and a half. As of this moment, I've done four hours, twenty minutes. That means I can't take you into Central London. I'm going to drop you off at Heathrow Airport."
Ignoring the ensuing chorus of "What-the-fuck"'s, he continued.
"A representative will meet you at Heathrow and lead you to another coach, to take you the rest of the way," he explained, and a chorus of Eskimo groans went up from al parts of the bus simultaneously.
We got to Heathrow, and clearly, no-one had told them about the need to provide us with a replacement bus and driver. I was two hours later than expected at this point, on only the second day I've done this uber-commute. Keen not to piss off my boss too much too early, I decided to give up the bus and jump on a tube. It was only when I reached the automatic ticket machine that I realised that d still had both my cards, from when I'd given them to her yesterday to do shopping and pick me up some cash for my morning cab.

Bugger. Fortunately, I'm changing my bank at the minute, so I have a card and an account with an overdraft facility, so I used that in the relative emergency of this (by then) afternoon, and now technically owe myself £8! Finally staggered into the office by about 12.30.

And weirdly enough, am finishing this blog at 5PM on the dot, which means I now have to haul my ass to Victoria to get the bus home. Here's hoping that I don't have the same kind of palaver on the way back, or I might miss my connection up the Valley, and tomorrow's blog will come from the pile of Welshman-granita in Cardiff bust station.

Hmm...wonder if flab's easier to lose if it's freeze-dried...

Cowboys and Slayers and Favourite Things

2012-01-15T19:13:00.001Z

Good day. Sian brought our god-daughters, Brianna and Epona, round to visit. Fun times with the youngsters, and we went out for lunch (yep - AGAIN!).
We explained to Sian about my "I always face North" mental block, and she lost it completely, laughing so hard I thought French Fries would come down her nose.
"That makes sense of everything!" she gasped, having been with me on many, many occasions when I've turned right, thinking it was right, and turning out wrong. It was like she heard the universe click into place on discovering this single piece of information - just as d and I did when we discovered it.

Our 'heated couches' discovered a whole new bunch of adherents today - we seem to be spreading the word, one ass at a time - Lee and Rebecca didn't want to leave this week (and Reb posted the idea on her Facebook page as a result - did I mention she's a celebrity?). Today, two children and a fully-grown 8-stone woman were highly tempted to curl up like cats and just purr away their afternoons on our couches. The secret, incidentally - double underbed mattress-warmers (not electric blankets), spread on the bottom and back of the couches, then covered in faux-fur throwns that envelop the couches completely. Switch on. Purr.

Epona definitely stole the title of 'Speaker of the Best Line of the Day,' though. Just as she was getting into the car to go home, she looked at me, in my Disappearing Coat, and scarf, and what-other-people-see-as-a-cowboy hat, and grinned.
"You look like a Slayer," she said, waving goodbye. I fell about, in laughter and also, relatively speaking, thrill. Not sure it was necessarily meant as a compliment, but given that until recently, I looked like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, I'm happy to take 'Slayer chic' as a positive improvement!

We went to Tesco for some baiscs, and as we were coming down the escalator, d nudged me.
"Idiots coming from the South," she muttered.
"What?" I asked.
"Scuse me!" called the leader of a group of teenage girls behind us - Ah! Behind us=South, of course.
"You a cowboy?" she asked, the thicknes of her Valleys accent adding an extra-special veneer to the stupidity.
I turned.
"Yes..." I said, dropping any ounce of Welsh out of my own accent, and aiming for a Jeevesian contempt.
"Really?!" she asked.
I raised the hat.
"Yee...ha..." I said, bringing my best cut-class out to play. The girls burst into giggles, and we fucked very definitely off.

Home now, watching a programme that poses the question: What are the best things you've ever eaten?
Of course, to make the programme work, they break the foods up into 'types'. Just watched 'messy food' and now there's 'best barbecue'...

Gets you thinking though. Best things I've ever eaten...mmmm...

Can't put these into any particular order, but I'm thinking...Goulash by one of my old friends from Austria...my wife's macaroni cheese...first time d cooked lobster. Onion soup and honey bread from the Outback steakhouse. One bite of prime rib at Aunt Millys, just off the Indian Reservation in Irving New York. Cheese and potato pie by a woman I only ever knew as Mrs Bliss when I was age...probably-10. Meat loaf, dammit, d-style. A fantastic little goats-cheese and balsamic onion...creation from one of the restaurants we managed to close in Stratford. Parisian patisseries. Roman pasta. Ohhh! Pizza subs from CJs in Westfield, NY. Risotto - by d.

Plenty more, most of them in all probability made by d (my brain is not what it was!). I also have a feeling that some of my favourite things are yet to hit me. Watching Food TV kinda gives you that idea. What are some of yours, folks? What haven't I tried yet that I really should, when I reach my so-called 'target weight'? What meals would you recommend if you had, say, a week to live, or a life to properly enjoy?

Perspectives

2012-01-14T23:30:00.001Z

Bleurgh...
Feel physically ill at this point. Too...much...foooooooood.

Good food, don't get me wrong. Last night's Chinese, coupled with tonight's Indian, showed me there are great places to eat in this town (even if the service tonight was Victoria-Wood comical!). It's just that I'm not used to eating this much this regularly now, and I feel pretty much like the woman who's on my TV screen right now.

Which doesn't help when she's 'the world's fattest woman,' weighing in at over 74 stone, or more than half a tonne!

Must stop eating like this. Must stop soon! I can practically feel my colon begging for mercy!

Mind you, at the moment, my everything's begging for mercy, and so it d's. But that's because (fanfare please!) - we now have three bookcases built and in situ. We built two of them before going out to eat, and they went together quite quickly. The third one we built after a carb-heavy, sugar-heavy Indian meal (curse you, sweet peshwari naan!), and it was interesting to see the effect it had on us - our co-ordination was off, our ability to perform simple tasks was shot, the air was notsomuch blue as positively toxic, and the damn thing took us about two hours to screw and hammer together.

Clearly, the sugariness of the meal played a critical part in this - two diabetics, hopped up on sweetened coconut, is about the same as two healthy people on weed - mellow, giggly, staring into the middle distance for long periods, distracted, very thirsty etc etc...I guess the only difference is that at no stage in the procedutre did we feel the need to down tools and eat candy.

Also, it becomes screeeeamingly apparent that Tuesday's result is gonna be a bit of a shocker. May well have pushed myself back up to the 16 stone mark with this week of limited exercise and regular eating out. If so, y'know what, that's fine - that's the price you pay for the choices you make, I guess. But soon, dammit...soon, the fight-back begins in earnest.

I guess, when you think about it, it's all in the perspective you use, isn't it? Last time I weighed-in, I'd lost a total of 69 pounds or thereabouts. If you compare that to my pal Sian, who helped us move in here, and who's popping in tomorrow with our goddaughters (the last time we saw them was the memorable occasion in Camden Town), that's a bit more than half her body-weight! I told my pal Jake in Australia what I'd lost so far this week, and he yelped "Damn, man, that's as much as both my legs!" On the other hand, the woman on my TV screen apparently has buttocks that weigh about 120 each (amounting to roughly 240 pounds of pure ass).

So, I've either lost half a Sian, two Jake-legs or a quarter-ass of the fattest woman alive. Except of course, by the time Tuesday comes around, I probably won't have.

But I will have an office I can use, probably for the first time - Awoohoo!

Prepare the Urban Workout

2012-01-14T00:21:00.000Z

Ok fine, so score one for the Old Biddy. Woke up at 7 this morning, felt an ache in my hips and thought "Sod it, she can have the lake to herself," then snored some more.

Blood was 4.6 this morning, despite having reduced by one pill and taken onboard some inadvisable late-night carbs last night. So - that seems to work - will continue with the reduced pillage and see what happens.

Did buggerall but work most of the day, and had a great night out with Lee and Rebecca. First time I've seen Rebecca since we came home, and it was pleasingly positive - she kept saying she could see the difference in me and yadda yadda yadda. Did I mention, my friends are fab?

Sadly, made the mistake of a 'mid-week weigh' this morning. Not good, not even remotely. And then we met up tonight for - guess what? - Chinese buffet. And tomorrow night we're out with Ma at one of the only Indian restaurants in this town. So the ahcnces of pulling off a weigh-day upset are looking fairly miniscule...

I know, I know, you've heard this all before and then something goes right. Might this time too, but am not counting on it. By the end of January though, goddammit it, I will have broken the five-stone barrier. This weekend is not about walking my ass off, it's about working my ass of - getting the office set up, and finding that freakin' power cord to the bike! My aim - which d, being the family realist, says is hopelessly ambitious - is to have the office habitable as an office by the end of Sunday. So - lots of toting, shifting, building, re-shifting, the occasional burst of alphabetising...just because...and the like.

Can we say: Urban Workout?

Orbits

2012-01-12T20:19:00.000Z

Blood was 3.8 this morning - danger-zoney low. I think tonight I'll only take one of my two remaining pills, and see what happens to the numbers tomorrow.

Got up around seven this morning and left d in bed. I walked up to our local park - Cyfarthfa (don't try and pronounce that unless you're Welsh, you'll sprain at least one vital tongue muscle) - and spent an hour or so walking around its lake. Ma reckons that once around the lake is half-a-mile. I have my doubts that it's quite that far, but it's no pushover either. When I arrived, at 7.23, I was the only walker in the place and it was very dark, the idea of dawn coming slowly in the Valleys, because the Sun has to filter down the slopes to get to us.

After I'd done a couple of laps, I passed a doughty older woman with an umbrella, going in the opposite direction. She nodded to me, I tipped my hat to her and on we went, like atoms circling the centre of the lake, each in our own orbit. We went round another couple of times, tipping hats and nodding and even occasionally sharing a smile or a word. I didn't want to make her feel obliged to say anything to me though, so I kind of deliberately snubbed her once, and then felt like a mean metropolitan bastard for snubbing a woman who'd been perfectly nice to me at every opportunity afforded her by the limited and frankly bizarre nature of our relationship so far. So then - being British - I had to over-compensate and be extra smiley to her on the next trip round. In fact, I started smiling when I saw her coming round the bend, a couple of hundred yards away. And I had to keep it up until she drew close enough to interpret the smile.

Nothing! She blanked me! Clearly, she'd thought we were developing a nice, civilised, hat-tipping, head-nodding, ships-passing-in-the-night kind of relationship, and then wallop! I'd dropped my eyes, I'd broken the social contract between us, and now she was gonna make me suffer for it.

I was still reeling from that when a man with a dog overtook me. I was taken aback. It was like:
"Hold on a minute - where the fuck did he come from?"
I'd gotten so used to the rotational nature of my morning so far, crossing the path of the older woman at two specific points for every lap, it was as if my brain couldn't cope with the idea of any extra variables.

So now there were three of us, plus the dog. Two of us and the dog were going one way round the lake, the older woman who's just dealt me the social death-blow was going the other - clearly, she was the rebel. Right, I thought...Two and a dog onto one...

But, sad as I know this is, another thought bubbled up through my clueless brain...
"I've just got to lap this bastard with the dog once before we take out the old lady. I've got seniority here, pal, you can't come swanning in with your four-legged friend and just own the lake!"

So I did - I put on a burst of speed, passed him once - no acknowledgement, not yet - we're not brothers in arms till you see me next, alright? I passed the old woman again, and this time she smiled!
Fuck! Now I had no idea how to play the social dynamic at all. I returned the smile, thinking "just you wait, grandma, I've got a bastard with a dog on my side of the cycle..."
I hadn't gone more than fifty paces beyond her, and had yet to catch Man With Dog, when a whole new variable entered the scenario. Bigger Man With Fuck-Off Enormous Dog! Going the old biddy's way! Sonofabitch! I sang at him. I don't know why - partly a panic reaction, partly defending my diminishing territory, I think. It probably wouldn't have been quite so weird if the song on my iPod at the time hadn't been The Addams Family Theme.

You've probably never had a fat bloke in a damp hat suddenly sing "They're CREEPy and they're kooky!" at you for no discernible reason while you're out walking your dog, I shouldn't think, but try and imagine you have and picture the look of consternation that would cross your face. Then double it. More importantly, try and imagine the look that would cross your dog's face, in apparent contravention of biological possibility, in those circumstances. The dog might have been big, but clearly it was a wuss-ass. It nearly fell in the lake. Anyhow, I didn't have time to think about them right now - I had Original Man With Original Dog to catch. I didn't exactly run, but I did put on one of those camp-as-tits competitive-walker wiggles, cutting a corner or two to catch him on the back straight. Of course to do that, I had to cross the Brolley Nazi's path once more.
"Windy, isn't it?" she said, with offensive cheerfulness.
"Ah, fuck off Grandma!" - I didn't say it, but the monologue was coursing in my head. I may, just possibly, have clicked my fingers at her, twice, in time with the Addams Family, the details are a little blurred now. But did I catch Original Man With Original Dog? - Fuck yes! I'm not an obsessive, scary dickhead for nothing, you know. I actually slowed down once I knew 'victory' was assured, so I could sing all the way up to him, and at him, and past him. We'd moved on to the Mad About You theme by that point, so he heard me first.
"Tell me why-" I demanded, at least vaguely in tune. "-I love you like I do!"
He looked round, but didn't quite know what to make of this new addition to his day.
"Tell me whoooo!" I sang as I passed him, "can stop my heart as much as you..." And off I went.
I encountered Big Man With Big Dog again of course. I didn't say that Original Man With Original Dog had challenged him to a fight, but you can do a lot with a tilt of the head and an eyebrow when people are watching your every move in case you suddenly sing at them again. And then finally, I encountered the Old Biddy again.
"That's me for today, I think," I said to her cheerfully. I think she got the message.
"You and me - same time, same place tomorrow, bitch - I've got my eye on you..."

It's entirely possible I should 'get out more.' But then again, on the basis of what I've just revealed to you, it's equally possible I should stay the Hell indoors for the safety of myself and others.

Bookshelves for the office arrive tomorrow. Absolutely nowhere productive to put them at the moment. So...that'll be Interesting...

Dressing For Dinner

2012-01-11T21:13:00.000Z

Blood this morning was 4.4 - blood control still being good, clearly, despite the rest of me being bad (neither of us could be arsed with the 'eating at home' thing last night, so popped out to the Chinese Buffet again). Today has been largely sedentary (bike cord still in hiding, dammit!), but on the upside - PAYDAY!!!

Payday meant we were able to take our GP referral forms over to the gym tonight.
"Right," said the chunky lad behind the counter. "What this means is you'll go on the programme..."
He said this with the kind of emphasis that meant it should have been "The Programme" - some vast govenrment conspiracy to wipe out Fat Fucks or chemically sterilise us or somesuch.
"The Programme?" I asked, unconsciously capitalising.
"Yeah," he said. "The Programme," he acknowledged my emphasis. "That means you agree to attend two classes a week for sixteen weeks. At the end of the sixteen weeks, you'll be assessed, and if you're accepted, you'll get your membership for half price."
"Rrrright," we said, hanging on to comprehension by our fingernails.
""Here's a list of our classes," he said. "All the ones for GP Referral are marked."
Again, he kind of made that sound like we'd have special third-hand State-owned gym clothes with embroided burger-badges on them to mark us out for death by aerobics, or at the very least social ridicule. Not so much "Unclean!" as "Unfittttt!"

"OK," we said. "And, erm..."
"They'll call you next week," he explained. "They'll arrange your classes with you."
"Right," we said. It was only as we were walking out the door, having gotten so close to the gym and yet remaining so far from its exercisey goodness, that the questions arose in us.
"After sixteen weeks, is the assesment to find out if we're fit enough to be allowed in the gym, or unfit enough to qualify for government assistance?" I asked d. She shrugged.
"Guess we'll find out in sixteen weeks," she said.
"Dinner?" I asked - as it happens, the gym/leisure centre is surrounded by restaurants, and we have a payday tradition of going for a celebratory meal, in honour of having survived for another month(!).
"Dinner," d agreed. We decided on a local Harvester, and went in. d's vaguely in love with the Harvester, because they have an unlimited salad bar and an apparently unending supply of dressings. Equally, she's irritated with Pizza Hut, because they have an apparently killer honey mustard dressing, but are always out of the damn stuff.
We had our meal - including several mini bowlfuls of salad for d - and then she brought me a plate.

An almost entirely empty plate.

Now, those of you who've been with this blog from the start will remember my anti-mayo rant. This was actually merely symptomatic of a loathing for all dressings. Blue cheese - I don't think so. Honey mustard - nice enough in their own worlds, but why you'd mess with them and add the stuff of dressings is beyond me. Thousand Island - get to fuck!

There was dressing on the plate.
"Try it," she said. "I think you'll like it..."
Now, as it happens, there's probably never been a better time to try a line like that on me. I'm undergoing a bizarre period of personal growth, determined to shake off some of my own cynicism, my own pre-conceptions of 'what I do', and 'what I like'. I sprung this on d last night at the Chinese Buffet - she's had a long-standing aim to get me to go horse riding and I'v refused because a) I was officially too heavy for most riding schools, and b) horses are the devil's children, and they know what they're about. But as part of this new spirit of finding new Stuff to be into, I said I'd go riding with her if she wanted. What was probably more - what, in fact, made her clamp her hand to her mouth and say "Really??" three times, as if I was ill, I agreed to go golfing with her. Golf, here in the UK, is the pursuit of the middle-class and higher, and I'm resolutely working class (or even slacker class, given half a chance), so I've categorically said I will never 'betray my roots' and play golf. I say shit like that, hoping to come off all Che Guevarra, and instead coming off all 'wanky tosspiece'. So last night, I told her if she wanted to play golf, I would play golf with her.

The dressing sat on the plate - all red and suspicious. I looked into d's eyes, and figured "Ah, screw it," and dipped in a finger.

"Yum!" I said.
"Yay!" said d. "Now if I could just get you to have some on a bit of lettuce..."
I'm not about to let a challenge like that go unanswered. I got up, got a single piece of lettuce, a single miniscule cube of beetroot, some onion flakes, and a dribble of dressing on a plate, came back and consumed them in one bite.
"Yay!" said d again. "The first salad of 2012!"
Hadn't thought of it like that, but she's right. Look at me, I eat dressing now...

Part of this whole new spirit is to Do More Stuff Together - this being a crucial part of the work-from-Wales plan, and so, dear reader, you find me perched on a stool in my darling's kitchen, as she prepares a chicken and leek pie for tomorrow, and as, together, we've pootled about with our brand new, seriously kick-ass soup maker, making leek and potato soup. Seems to work. Seems to promise the potential to make my own freakin' lunch in future. Seems like a good new plan...

Before Breakfast

2012-01-10T12:41:00.000Z

There's a fragment of a saying of which I'm fond - "...before breakfast." Think it originates in Valleys fighting-talk - "I've fought bigger than you before breakfast".

This morning, we got seemingly quite a lot done before breakfast - popped along to register with our new doctor - delightfully straightforward, if I'm honest. She saw us together, went through our meds, gave us details to book appointments with the diabetic nurse and, in d's case, the asthma nurse. She also quickly filled in forms for our gym referrals, so yay! Not sure how much we'll save on our memberships now, but will toddle along after work today and find the Hell out, frankly.

Then we went up to the local Job Centre - spoke to a very friendly guy with more than a little of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons about him, and he gave us details to help d with her jobseeking now she's here, and also, possibly, to help me with something called tax credit. People-who-don't-know-what-tax-credit-is-say-'pa-huh?' No idea, frankly, but will investigate today.

Went down to our local McDonalds for breakfast - hey, I have my corporate addiction to Starbucks, d was starting to Jones and froth at the mouth for a McDonalds breakfast! But it feels like we ticked a lot of boxes this morning before our first calories hit the system. Look at us, we're Doing Stuff...

And could soon be doing even more. Rabidly addicted Disappearing Fans (see what I did there), if any such creature existed, would probably recall that way back in the first couple of entries, I said I wouldn't run, and I wouldn't play badminton, because of the potential impact on my left ankle, which is full of metal from a mugging fifteen years ago. However, Karen Pulley sent me a text yesterday afternoon. I'd been awake for a faintly ridiculous number of hours by then, and was on a bus heading back to the Valleys.
"Have you ever played badminton?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Shedloads when I was younger. It was how I lost all my weight the first time. Why?"
"Cos I'm interested in playing some," she explained. Said I'd check with the doc today, but that I was well up for it, and so was d.
This morning, I broached the subject with the new doc.
"Would I be OK to do potentially high-impact stuff like badminton?" I said.
She looked at me as though I'd asked whether it'd be ok to wrestle aliens in custard.
"Yeah, of course...could do with the exercise," she said, and moved right the Hell along. So this is me, and this is d, preparing to shuttle cocks, or cock shuttles or whatever the Hell you do - I said I'd played a lot, but it was further back than my memory currently extends, dammit! If we keep this up, we might even wear sweatbands with no sense of irony...

Y'know, I'd like to say that'd never happen, but recently, every time I say something will never happen, it happens almost immediately and with a vengeance, as if to prove to me I have absolutely no idea what the Hell I'm talking about. Which of course should be clear to anyone reading this blog.

Oh wait - Tuesday! You'll be wanting your weigh-in figures, won't you? Well, I still haven't cracked the five stone barrier, but I am slowly inching my way there.
15 stone 8.75 this morning. All of 0.75 lighter than I was this time last week. That said, given that we've had the decadent couple of days in Cardiff for d's birthday this week, this is positively ridiculously good progress from my point of view, so notsomuch on the weeping and wailing and woe-is-meing. 1.25 pounds - should be able to crack that in the week we join the gym, right? Hell, should be able to do that before breakfast tomorrow...

The Hunt

2012-01-09T16:43:00.000Z

Y'know, some days, some things are just not meant to be...

Of course, the good thing about being an atheist is that you probably don't believe in things not being 'meant to be', so you persevere with the stubbornness of a whack upside the head, and end up getting what you want eventually.

This was, as I've been whinging about for a week now, the first uber-commute day. As I write this, I've been up for twelve hours, and I'm feeling fine. We'll have to see how I feel by the time I get home in about another six and a half, I guess...

The cabbie turned up promptly at 05.15 this morning, and we had a good laugh all the way down to Cardiff. I learned one lesson from this morning - do not eat hot buttered toast at 5 in the morning if you have a longish commute ahead of you - by Cardiff, we were at the dearly beloved 'meaningful fart' stage, and I stole use of the bathrooms on platform 2 of Cardiff Central train station to change wodges before meaningful became disastrous. Still, after that, my system was relatively well behaved all the way to London.

Did I mention there are no Starbucks in Merthyr?
We passed one on the final approach to Victoria Coach Station this morning, and the world of sugar-free, low-fat, decaffeinated pointlessness shimmered before my eyes. I determined to find my way back to the Starbucks we'd passed.

Then a nasty little conscientious voice whispered in my ear:
"If you do that, you'll be late..."

As it happens, I was already later than I'd hoped, due in large part to the Hammersmith Flyover being, as I think they say in technical circles, 'well and truly fucked.' So I forsook the dream of frothy pointlessness and walked on determinedly, actually finding my way to Knightsbridge without any hint of hassle. From a previous lost-getting adventure, I knew there was another Starbucks somewhere around Harrods, but the whisper came back and kicked me in the earhole:
"Late...late and lost, in all probability...on the first day..."
I stiffened my resolve (which I'm reliably informed is not the euphemism it sounds like) and walked on to the office.

Lunchtime came...shortly after my arrival, really speaking. It was probably taking the piss a little to leave the office, but I couldn't resist it - I walked down the Exhibition Road to where I knew there was a Starbucks by South Kensington station. I walked in, gave my order, was just about to hand over my money for my bucket of pointlessness, when there was a bang. And a kerfuffle.
Their milk frother had apparently given up the ghost and died. The guy behind the counter said the closest Starbucks that wasn't the one in which we were standing was at Sloane Square. Fuck that - unfamiliar territory. So I walked back up the Exhibition Road and down Kensington High Street, to another stalwart of my London years. And finally, there, I got myself the frothy wonder, the vision of which had sustained me all morning.

Meh.

It was OK, and I drank it down greedily enough, but somehow I couldn't shake the feeling it wasn't quite as good as the stuff we can now brew up in our own kitchen in our little jewel-box by the Taff...

Tomorrow of course is Tuesday - weigh-in day. It's also 'sign on with a new doctor and try and persuade them to save us money on our gym memberships' day. Wednesday, I'm told, is pay day, which means it's also 'join the gym by hook or by crook' day. Still haven't found the power cord to the exercise bike...it's sitting there, sulking at me again, piled with office detritus. You can almost hear the violin in its vicinity.

'Nobody knows the trouble I've seen...." it seems to croon, endlessly to itself, bereft of sweaty ass to ride it, and aching legs to push it on in its never-ending journey to nowhere. Hopefully though, payday also will mean that Saturday is 'haul a bunch of bookcases into the office' day, which should see the infrastructure of that room completed and the last of its boxes removed. If the cord doesn't then make itself known to us, it might be time to take drastic measures and Send Off For A New One...

Oh, little tweak of the nipples of joy last night - managed to touch my toes, for the first time....I think, ever. Not, of course, from a standing position - I simply don't think my body is evolved to do such a thing, or rather, it is evolved to let me touch my toes....by the provision of knees. But sitting in the bath, I discovered that I was touching my toes with just a little knee-bend. I straightened up and managed to still do it. True, I think I felt something snap in my shoulder as a result, but hey - progress is pain, people...

Which reminds me - nearly time to get the hell out of here and start the return commute...

Funky Town

2012-01-08T16:20:00.000Z

Meh...
Today is just funky, in the sense of being 'in a funk', rather than in the 'hot disco stylings' sense of the word.
Which is all very well if you know the source of your funk, but if you don't - if it just descends on you mid-morning and refuses to fuck back off as a good funk should, it's just wasted time being funky that could otherwise have been usefully filled by Cracking the Grand Unified Theory, or Securing World Peace, or Finishing The Next Great British Novel, or Making Love To A Beautiful Woman (NB - helps to be married to one. If you're just picking people up on the street, you're liable to spend at least some of your non-funky time getting slapped. Well, you are around here anyway).

Hell, it's time wasted being funky that could have been better applied cataloguing your spice jars, or unpicking that hideous sweater grandma got you for Christmas and burying the evidence. In fact, even sitting around in your underwear, scratching yourself and watching Big Brother is time probably better spent than beggaring about in a big old pointless funk.

It's not, as I may have mentioned somewhere in that couple of paragraphs of verbal diarrhoea (and yes, my fellow geeks, I too am now pondering whether it's still verbal diarrhoea if you write it down. Probably not, I suspect. Literary diarrhoea?), as though I even had any particular reason to feel funky. Walked up to Ma's this morning in 17 minutes, which, considering the consistent, unremitting uphillness of the journey, wasn't bad. Walked a dog that doesn't belong to either of us, for something to do. Went back to the local park, and walked four times around a surprisingly large lake, to give the legs a bit of a workout. Shifted a bureau - as you do, it's a Sunday thing. Think it's in the new Aprocrypha to the Bible: "And on the seveth day, God rested...and then realised he still had to shift that bureau under the stairs...And the Lord said 'Bugger." Checked on my dad, went shopping, threw some of yesterday's empty boxes into storage, and pretty much snapped at every poor unsuspecting person who crossed my path.

Why? Not even remotely sure.
Could, I guess, have something to do with the impending Monday - first in a line of Mondays when I'll have to be out the door at 5.15AM, to essentially cram a weeksworth of London commuting into the space of one day. Not sure though - I've known this was coming since we started this move, and it's one of the two prices by which the move has been made achievable. Most of me therefore wants to slap down this argument in a fit of 'quitchabitchin' irritation.

Could also, possibly, have something to do with the fact that I woke up this morning having had a porno dream. Yeah, I know, where's the bad, right? Guaranteed, if you asked a thousand men whether they minded having a porno dream, you'd be able to count on one, presumably unoccupied, hand, the number who bitched about it. But then most men, when they have a porno dream, don't dream of trying to write the SCRIPT for one, working on the characters, the pro-feminist sub-plot (porn with good politics, fight the power, Sisters!), the arc...of the story development over three or four movies, and feeling the pressure of the deadline approaching. Essentially, most men, when they have porno dreams, don't fast forward through the good bits!

Oh and in case you're wondering, yes, I did manage to get the pro-feminist dialectic in there before the deadline expired. I like to kid myself I'm a professional, even if only in my dreams...If there was a Joseph in the house, firstly, I'd nick his Technicolour Dreamcoat, cos that thing was cool. Secondly, I'd tell him that if he closes his eyes and draws back the curtain, the only thing he'll see for certain is the back of his own eyelids, and thirdly, I think, I'd get an interpretation from him about overthinking everything to the point of robbing it of any spontaneity or joy. This is something I do (I'm thinking you may have noticed?), and right now, it's robbing me not only of joy, but of sleep, of rest, of contentment, of focus and of any awareness of the world outside my own damned buzzing brain.

Y'know what it's like? It's like those science shows as a kid, where they explained that your brain is so amazing that, to hit a baseball with a baseball bat, it does fantastically advanced mathematics about the speed of the oncoming ball, its pitch, direction, spin and aim, then it does fantastically advanced mathematics about where to move the bat to, with what degree of force, based on desired outcomes of a) hitting the ball, b) hitting it in a particular direction and c) aiming to miss any of the other players and not be called out...and then it sends the right electrical impulses to the right muscles to co-ordinate this activity, based on neuronic pathways that have been formed by previous attempts to do this kind of activity - but it doesn't make you THINK about doing any of it. Doesn't bother you with all the calculation, so as far as you're concerned, you just swing the bat and hit the ball into the outfield.

Right now, I'm stuck in a place where I'm trying to do all the math! Can't seem to help it. Everything that should just be natural, that should be rational or instinctive, I'm analysing the piss out of, trying to understand the deeper meanings of things. And of course, as the TV scientist would probably have gone on to explain, if you try and do all the math, your brain's too busy with all the calculation to send the electrical impulses to the muscles, and you feel the pitch whistle by you, and you're out. That's me right now.

Which I guess is probably a better explanation of a funky day than "Meh, I have to get up early in the morning..."

So...I don't know what to tell you. At nearly 4PM, I've ruined a perfectly good and happy Sunday for myself, and probably everyone who's come into contact with me, for no terribly good or cogent reason beyond the confines of my brain. Part of me now wants to bitchslap myself silly. Part of me on the other hand wants to take my lollipop and go and sit in a corner and sulk, so nehh! And yet another part of me wants to Crack The Grand Unified Theory, Write The Next Great British Novel or Make Love To A Beautiful Woman...

I'm in overanalytical mode, I think the Grand Unified Theory's pretty safe for another day.
d's in the kitchen, busily creating order out of chaos. Besides, in this overthinking mode, I'm probably no good to any beautiful woman!

Soooo...

It was a dark and stormy night...

The Bump

2012-01-07T21:07:00.000Z

Today started off with a bump.
Got a letter last night from British Gas, forwarded from London, saying that because they'd estimated our bills for years, we now owed them a shedload of money, thankyouverymuch.
Then I made the mistake of getting on the Nazi Scales. Suffice it to say that yep, the couple of days away have had a head-kicking effect. Don't care though - the days were fabulous, and I know I can get things back on track.
Devised a budget today by which to get us by on a month-by-month basis, which was sobering, though not of course that terrifying.

I guess on the whole, today was a day for coming down to Earth with a bit of a bump. On the other hand, got back on with unpacking my office, set up the Bose, discovered I can only use it on minimal settings without shaking the building to bits, which is kinda fun, in a Crocodile Dundee, "that's not a hi-fi...THIS is a hi-fi" way. And it's got that feeling to it when you come back from a truly, truly kick-ass holiday - Mannnnn that was good, but it's great to be back in our own space and time, and be moving forward with the reality of life.

So - not so much a bump as a pat on the ass, I guess. Have tried to keep my food intake light and mainly fruit-based today, with some beautiful porky protein thrown in. But other than the box-work, have done nothing energetic to speak of today.

Oh yeah, not for nothing, but this has also been a feature of today - people occasionally ask d and I about the nature of our relationship. We argue ridiculously rarely, but we disagree about plenty of things, I'd say. She's a general optimist and a political pessimist, I'm exactly the opposite. She's got a level of faith, me, notsomuch. She's generally quite polite and respectful of others, whereas I'm basically a brat. But we've always had a resonance, built through talking over a long distance.

Today, we happened to be watching a TV show where rich people dilly-dally and choose between six houses to move to. It was weird, but we had almost exactly the same reactions to practicaly everything to do with living-spaces.
"Ach - nasty beams!"
"Ick - horrible horrible tiles..."
"Hate you, hate you, hate you, you rich, poncey fucks..."

And seconds ago, we had a bizarrely resonant moment. Watching Miami Ink, a reality show based in a tattoo parlour (for the very first time, I should add), we both watched a Navy guy get a ship tattooed on his back, with a mermaid lolling in the foreground. As one, we piped up -
"Mermaid needs a nipple, dude!"

That, ladies and gentlemen is emotional and pedantic synchonicity, and that's the kind of thing that seven years of marriage are made of. Well, that and the fact that d's just noticed a moulding has popped off, and trudged out to get the toolkit, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't know a moulding if it hit me in the face, and wouldn't have the first idea how to pop one back on if my life depended on it...

Ahhh synchronicity is sweet...

6th January - Getting Gooey

2012-01-06T23:02:00.000Z

Yesterday was d's birthday. We woke up in our own time, and thankfully, her toe was moderately less swollen than it had been at midnight, so we pretty much resumed a version of our original, loose-fitting plan. Got up, had a hotel breakfast that, frankly, was about three meals in one, and went in to Cardiff. I wanted to get d some stuff...as plans go, it didn't entirely work - she ended up getting me a Bose iPod dock that had been gloriously marked down in John Lewis. I love birthdays. Especially those where the people whose birthday it is end up giving me stuff! Not sure I understand how that works, but...Re-freakin'-sult!

Oh, there was a ring...thing, too. Long time ago, pretty much about the time I started this experiment in fact, d got a hankering for sparkly things, for pretty much the first time in our marriage. She pointed out a ring in the local Samuels jewellers, and the woman who worked there gave me the details, and her ring size.
Naturally of course, being a bloke, I 'lost' the details pretty quickly...as in 'lost them into my wallet'...and a couple of weeks before we took off from London, I went and bought her the ring, and got it sized for her. The very day she buggered off to Wales with all our furniture, I was in that store when it opened. I've been holding on to the ring ever since, hiding it since we got to Wales.

She cried. Re-freakin'-sult!

So anyway - did the day in Cardiff (with d seeking out every spotlight or store light she could find, and glittering). Then, with a little help from a couple of frantic texts to people who've been telling us about it for months now, we found a place called the New York Deli for hot-dog lunch. Re-freakin'-sult number three!

Came back, swam some more, and d got into a very special outfit for dinner. It was the outfit she was in eight years ago for her first birthday in London, when she was over on her first visit to see me (when, ironically enough, she was hugely lurgied), and I'd managed to surprise her with tickets to Phantom of the Opera...ahem, row 1 - looking right up the Phantom's nose and getting a chandelier dropped on our heads. Eight years on, she still rocked that outfit. I mean, she looked goooooood. We went to dinner. Yum.
Finished the evening with a great call to Lori, d's 'sister' in the States, and a bottle of fizzy pink sparkling wine (s'kind of our signature). And then...
Well, then it was today.

Now, I should have mentioned. When we arrived, since it was a spa, we toyed with the idea of actually...y'know...doing spa treatments. So today, we checked out, and went over to the spa. We'd been booked into the Couples' Room. d was getting a back, head and facial massage, and we added a leg and foot massage just for fun. Me? Well, I defied a thousand years of Valleys Bloke evolution and had a 'Holistic back, neck, head and facial', and joined her with the leg and foot...thing. We got very gooey, courtesy of Lucia (small, young, answered almost every statement with a drawl of "Ohhhh wooooowwww," or "Ohhhhh my goooooood") and Sue (older, whitish sci-fi-bobbed hair, sheep's voice, stern demeanour, blinking tic).

Now, it's fair to say, this represented progress for us both. A handful of years ago, I actually got d a spa day as a Christmas present. Her face didn't fall, cos she's good at hiding her disappointment, but I knew I'd reeeeeallly blown it. She's always hated the idea of strangers touching her. And for me...it was an extension of a thing I learned yesterday. Being 'the fat kid', I've never been remotely comfortable in communal changing rooms. Longer-term readers will remember that even in Croatia, surrounded by don't-give-a-fuck Europeans of varying attractiveness-levels, I couldn't take off my T-shirt and get in the pool. But yesterday...I stopped caring. I was me, getting in, doing things, not giving a damn. And that was also, pretty much, how I approached getting gooey today. I wanted to share the experience with my wife, so nehh - here you go, this is my body, this is our money...handle me!

d said something similar too - she's over the whole 'strangers touching her' thing, I think. So that was the culmination of our day, getting gooey together...

Except it wasn't, quite. They had a special on deep hair conditioning, and so I went to the Relaxation Room for a while. When she came out, she was not only gorgeous, she was amazing, straight-haired, fantastically gorgeous.

Sooooo...yeah. Great day.

Not expecting to break the five stone barrier this Tuesday. Not even really expecting to maintain last week's result, because this has been a calorifically heavy couple of days. But - getting together with Ma (and our mutual pal's dog, apparently) for big walking on Sunday. So who knows?

Back home now though, so back to the office for box-unpacking tomorrow probably - and Monday, I start the one-day-a-week early-as-fuck London commuting. Never a dull moment, eh?

5th January - Darkness Falls

2012-01-06T21:45:00.000Z

"Errrr...honey?"
"Yeah?"
"One thing we forgot," I said. I held out my swimming shorts from my body.

My 20-stone swimming shorts.
"Ah," said d, seeing the chasm between cloth and body. "Well...there's a photo for the blog."
"Yyyyeah..."

We were staying at the St David's Hotel and Spa, and it was the night of the 4th. We'd battled through ridiculous wind and icy drizzle to get there. Then we stopped battling and got a cab, cos...well, battling was just silly. Signed in, got into our room, d went crazy for the flowers I'd arranged (Oh yeah, Ladeez - old skool!), we revelled in our balcony, mainly from indoors cos of the aforementioned ridiculous wind and icy drizzle, then decided to hit the pool-cum-jacuzzi.

"Wow," she said, coming over and quite literally yanking my string. I yelped, as the corsetry-effect kicked in.
"Why Mammy, you're no fun at all!" I whimpered, as she tied me in to my shorts, before going back to pulling on her fabulously-gorgeous red Baywatch swimsuit. I pondered my weirdly flab-hourglass shape, then tried an experiment - I shook and shimmied as though I had rhythm. My tight-tied swimming shorts gave up the ghost and shimmied their way to my ankles.
"Damn," I said, pulling them back up. d helped me re-tie them up around my heart, so I looked at least twice the numpty I had before, but they didn't dare shimmy when I shimmied. We hit the jacuzzi.

Fab. Just fab. Managed to do a few laps of actual swimming inbetween sitting on my ass getting bubbled within an inch of my life, and tried out the sauna. Me liiiiike.

"Ah, dammit!" I whinged, having bumped into a wardrobe in the dark.

"What's the matter?" asked d from the bathroom.

"Too damn dark in this room," I muttered. "Dunno where anything is...bumped my hip on the wardrobe!"

"Ah, ya big wuss," she called, alluringly. "You can always open the closet door - the little light comes on!"

I opened it. It did. It was like looking into a fridge, except more wooden. And empty. And somehow hope-sucking, but anyway...

"Oh yeah," I said. I stared at the illuminated innards of the wardrobe for a few seconds. What I was waiting for, I'm not sure. The opening of the service entrance to Narnia, possibly. I closed the door and the light went out. I shrugged in the dark and got under the covers of the enormo-bed that we'd paid for.

d came out of the bathroom. Took three steps.

"GODDAMMNsonofa-!" she yelped. Normally, I'd have known it was serious by the fact that she went ultra-sonic on the word "bitch!" but I couldn't help but laugh.

"Dark, isn't it, dear?" I muttered dryly.

She didn't answer me.

"Oh oh," I said.

"....Eeeeeeeeeeoooooowwwww!" said d, descending back into audibility. I rolled out of bed, and hit the light switch.

"Oh Jeez..." I said, looking at d's foot, gripped between her hands. It looked like she'd torn her toenail off at the root.

"Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy-" she nodded, the pain making her incoherent for a few moments.

"Need...ice..." she said when she could trust her voice. "And...bandages," - which, for the Brits among you, meant plasters.

Never wonder whether the Girl Scouts are worth their training. Even through the pain, my girl MacGuyvered herself an ice pack from a tea towel, some ice from a bucket, a self-sealing plastic bag, and a big towel. By which time, it was two minutes past midnight.

Through the snot of her lurgi and the pain in her foot, d looked like a sorry article. I kissed her.

"Happy birthday, baby..."

She smiled a little.

Then she turned out the light.

Vindication!

2012-01-04T15:40:00.000Z

Ha!
Had my pal Lee around last night. Lee's not a Disappearer, he's just cool. It was also fun to realise, as I relax into this 'being-40' lark, and he looks it squarely in the eye in April, how scarily similar we still are in some ways.

Lee I've known since school, and we always have fun conversations. I mentioned my wandering walk up to Cwm Cadlan and back, and he told me this story...

"I was walking the dog one night not long ago, and I went down the Taff Trail. From Pentrebach (one stop on the Valley Lines train from Merthyr towards Cardiff), I went down to Aberfan. Pouring with rain mind, me and the dog just out for a walk...Went on to Merthyr Vale, thought 'Oh, I'll carry on...'. Went past Quaker's Yard. Now, I've been down to Quaker's Yard before, but never really past it. It's about eight miles. Still absolutely sheeting it down with rain, and my shoes are bubbling by this time. My feet are starting to rub raw, so I thought...'Tell you what, I'll just on a little bit further...then I can get to Ponty (Pontypridd - about the mid-point between Merthyr and Cardiff), then I can get a train back...So me and the dog, trudging on, looking like drowned rats..."

He broke off at this point as a thought occurred to him.
"Rats can swim, can't they?"
"Yyyyyeah," I agreed, seeing immediately where he was going.
"Well, why do people say they're like 'drowned rats' when they're soaking then?"
"Good question," I acknowledged. "People are weird," I explained.
"True," he agreed, seeming to ruminate on the idea. He was in danger of getting lost in thought.
"So - you and the dog..." I prompted. He snapped back to life.
"Soooo yeah, me and the dog, trudging on down to Ponty, the dog's looking at me by this point, like 'Are you 'avin' a laugh or what?'. My feet are really rubbing themselves raw with every step, can't see for rain..."
"Typical Welsh Summer then was it?" I asked.
"Zactly," he nodded.
"Got down to Ponty," he said.
"...?" I asked.
"...annnnnd that was when I remembered I hadn't brought my wallet," he finished. "Had to beg a friend to come and pick us up..."

What I especially loved about this story, what makes me hugely glad to be back in the Valleys among my very personal kind of stupidity, is that it was only when he got down to Quaker's Yard that the idea of getting the train back occurred to him. Every stop he mentioned, with the exception of Aberfan, was a stop on the Valley Lines, so salvation could have been his at almost any point along what was ultimately a twelve-mile walk in the pissing-down Welsh Summer. But noooo...he kept on going, seeing whether he could make it to the next stop. This is EXACTLY the same logic which led me up to Cwm Bloody Cadlan this week, constantly hoping to find civilisation around the next corner, while all the while getting further and further away from the civilisation I already knew was back behind me in Cefn.

So there you go - it's not just me.

It may, very conceivably, be just us, but still, idiocy loves company just as much as misery does.
Speaking of which, my cynical little black heart has been warmed, since the Cwm Cadlan story, by the number of people who have volunteered to go walking with me. Pulley of course has plans to take me hither and yon cross some of our country routes. My pal Rebecca (who's an international jet-setter and celebrity), has also said she'd be up for a good long stroll now and then. And this afternoon, my pal John also volunteered his walking companionship, more as an aide-de-get-the-fuck-out-of-the-house than an aide-de-Disappearing (John's a Beanpole Man, frankly, not a scarp of Disappearable meat on the bugger!). Lee, notsomuch on the walking-volunteerism - other stories of the evening involved him getting staggeringly lost WHILE FOLLOWING Google Maps on his phone, so the chances are, putting the two of us together on an Adventure might cause a kind of critical mass of geographical fuckwittery, and the universe might implode. As it is, it's entirely possible that most of my volunteers are really just trying to avoid reading headlines of "DISAPPEARING MAN...DISAPPEARS...WHILE OUT WALKING". But still - this is very kind of them, considering everything, and I'm grateful.

Oh - note for the vampires - blood was 4.3 this morning. Now then, away, to the joys of Cardiff Bay, in my not-a-little-like-Captain-Jack-Harkness coat, for two days of celebrating the d'ness, almost in spite of her continuing lurgi.

Catch you on the flipside, Groovers!

Loving The Nazis For New Year

2012-01-03T12:22:00.000Z

Sooooo.....yeahhhh....

There may be something to Pulley's palaver about the Nazi Scales and their floating five pounds, cos I'm fairly sure it's not medically advisable to have achieved this morning's first official weigh-in of 2012 figures.
Which are:
15 stone, 9.5 pounds!

Given that just before Christmas, I was 16 stone 1.25, and on New Year's Eve, they weighed me at 15 stone 13.75, that would be a 4.some-odd pound loss in about three days. Allllthough I guess, the day before New Year's Eve, I was 15 stone 11, which would make today's figures a reasonable loss...

Anyhow, until anyone tells me different, they're the scales I have available, and I have to trust in their judgments, even when their judgements seem far too good to be true. Sooooooo yeahhhh - two little pounds away from the five-stone barrier. More early-morning walking, here I come (though ideally, sticking to roads with pavements).

Although, thinking about it, this may not be my most energetically taxing week. Am off to Cardiff tomorrow night (d-lurgi permitting) for a two-night celebration of her birthday-cum-welcome to our new nearest-City. Not even sure I'm taking the computer with me, to be honest, so, as with our holiday in Amroth, might do tomorrow's entry, then do two when I get back on the 6th.

If it's any consolation, it's a spa hotel we're going to, so they'll have a gym, so I'll probably try and get some gymming done while we're away...
Whaddaya mean, that's not what celebrating your wife's birthday's about? Humpf...

So anyway, loving the Nazi Scales right about now, and basking in their benificence on this cold-as-buggery, gale-force-windy day.

Oh and the blood was down to 4.1 this morning. Hmm...

One Of Our Reservoirs Is Missing

2012-01-02T20:10:00.000Z

“Whaddaya mean ‘What reservoir?’”

As texts go, it sounded rather exasperated.

“Haven’t passed a reservoir anywhere,” I explained.

“Must have,” texted Pulley. “There’s no way of getting from where you were to where you say you are WITHOUT passing the reservoir...”

“No way!” she reiterated.

It always amazes me, at this point, when people make statements like that. Trust me when I tell you it’s perfectly possible to be self-involved enough to miss...anything. I’ve missed Big Ben before now.

“Have you walked over the Dam?” she asked.

Dam? What Dam??

The thing is, physics and geography, being their usual bastard selves, do rather concur with her. The route I took on what turned out to be rather a mammoth walk, should have seen me pass a reservoir...and Hell, probably even a viaduct. Should have walked over a Dam, apparently, but damned if I did.

I started out, as planned, on the ‘Taff Trail’...then...well I don’t really know what to tell you, I took one of those Turnings of mine that looked right...or at least looked North...and then I was heading along a road with a cemetery on either side (the Valley of the Shadow of Death?)...annnd then I was walking along the A470. For those who don’t know, of which I imagine there are now many, the A470 is the main road linking Cardiff and Merthyr, and then, as I discovered today, it buggers off all the way up to Brecon. (Brecon, likewise, is either an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or a desolate hole, depending on your point of view. The SAS train there, and, when Doctor Who needed a place to depict somewhere called The Death Zone, they chose Brecon. Any questions?). Thing is, the A470 heading up to Brecon has no pavements, so, technically, I was walking into the path of oncoming traffic. Of course, the logical thing to do at that point would have been to turn the fuck around and come home. Which of course means what I did was to keep walking...and walking...and walking...hoping for a turn-off with pavements, leading to some sort of civilisation.

I ended up in a place called Cwm Cadlan. No idea, so don’t ask. All I now know about the place is it’s quite a way away from where I started out, and there’s apparently a freakin’ reservoir, inevitably, between me and it. Which I managed to miss.

Twice.

Because one thing that came muscle-strainingly into focus today is that London miles are not Merthyr miles. Quite apart from anything else, in London, you could walk five miles and then jump on a Tube to take you quickly where you needed to be.

No damn Tubes in Cwm Cadlam, I can tell you – no, you have to turn your ass around and walk the whole way back again...With the result that a couple of hours walking by city standards ends up taking, as it did me today, about five bloody hours.

So – this is how I go into the first Tuesday of 2012; my first weigh-in, and co-incidentally, the start of my career as a work-from-homer. Oh and incidentally, Pulley has also called into question the veracity of the Nazi Scales. Turns out she has exactly the same scales, and yesterday, they weighed her five pounds HEAVIER at the start of the day than they did at the end of the day. That simply doesn’t happen if your scales are right...

Hmm...Will treat mine nicely and deferentially in the morning (perhaps, possibly, not calling them Nazi Scales might be a start), and if they bitchslap me, I might just bitchslap them back right in their little digital teeth. Five pounds! I’m not putting on an entirely imaginary five pounds for any set of scales...I can miss reservoirs, but not that much of a discrepancy!

Oh, and my blood was 4.6 this morning.

The Subtle Art of Self-Pleasure

2012-01-01T22:13:00.000Z

Now, those who've been paying attention will know of my ongoing love/hate relationship with Starbucks, and its ongoing part in my Disappearing story.

There are no Starbucks here in Merthyr. Lots of cafes, to be sure, and some who even understand the complexities of a de-caff skinny latte, but...shrugs...somehow it's not quite the same.

d, being who she is, and knowing me better than anyone, foresaw this difficulty, and gave me, for Christmas, my very own fancy-pants milk-frothing proper espresso-cappucino dewberry-maker. We hadn't used it so far, because the kitchen is one of those rooms, like my office, that's still a work in progress, but tonight, to celebrate the dawn of this year of new potential, we broke it in. Have to say, if anything is gonna ease the Starbucks pangs, it's this machine.

It's an amazing palaver though - buttons to heat the water, paddles to compress your little spoonful of coffee, twisty things to slot into place, tight as can be, buttons to press to surge the water through and give you a smattering of gorgeous espresso, then nozzles to pull and knobs to turn to spurt some steam, and then you dip the nozzle and swizzle and swill till the milk grows double, then pour one into the other and away you go...

Except, as with all complicated pleasures, there you don't quite go, for then there are buttons to unpress, twisty things to untwist and unhook, capsules of soaked coffee to dump and rinse, nozzles to wipe down and spurt through for cleanliness, and nooks and crannies to wipe clean, so they don't go manky. Then, in an extra special twist, there are trays to remove and wipe down, and jugs to wash and dry, and then, maybe, away you go, with a cup of coffee that costs you £2.75 in a Starbucks but here at the point of need is free as your effort can make it.

That's the thing about pleasures - you have to make sure the happiness you get from them is more than worth the effort you expend to attain them. Now, in London, if you were to ask me whether it was worth doing all this when, for the price of £2.75 I could get a trained barista to do it for me, I'd answer you with a derisive snort and probably a hand gesture. But here, as we prepare to shift from 'setting up our life' mode to 'battening down hatches and living on a reduced income' mode, when I'll be able to simply nip down from the office, make myself a coffee of a Starbuckian taste and quality, and then bog off back upstairs, you bet your ass it'll be worth the effort.

Haven't Disappeared much at all today - ate a hearty, welcome-to-the-new-year breakfeast, and a faintly colossal late lunch. But d assures me that this is OK, as it's 'the end of the holidays', and that, in real terms, dietary austerity should actually start tomorrow.

Hmm...

Still haven't found the power cord for the Bike. Have a feeling that, if d doesn't object, and reasonable weather permitting, I might pop out tomorrow in proper boots and a proper coat and hat and investigate the Taff Trail. This, from all reports, is a walking or cycling path that follows the river Taff (which is the river that flows just acros the road from our flat). Apparently it runs all the way to Cardiff in one direction (which is 26 miles, and which under no circumstances am I planning to walk tomorrow). Not entirely sure how far it runs in the other direction...Of course technically, this information is just one Google-search away, but think it might be rather more fun to just walk it, or at least some of it, and then come home and Google it, to see how far I've gone.

So - maybe 2012 starts properly on the 2nd of January. Or maybe it doesn't - my mate Karen (Pulley) has begun her own Disappearing efforts today, joining me on the Xenical Run, and talking of walks over some undoubtedly godforsaken hilly bit of the countryside, to which I have to somewhat perversely confess I'm looking dreadfully forward - London's roads are one thing, but much in the way of up and down, there is not.

Oh also - I'm in conversation with my pal Sian. Sian, as I may have mentioned at some point...runs.
I mean, she runs properly - marathons for fun, endurance marathons for, she claims, even more fun.

She is of course stark raving mad, bless her, but at a moment like this, she's phenomenally useful. Because, though I swore it would be impossible at the start of this experiment, I'm thinking, in a vague way, of running myself.

Not, of course, marathons or anything as mad as that. But maybe a little running, for endurance, for strenght, for the sheer lung-bursting what-the-Hellness of it. Sian's given me a basic introductory idea of stop-start running for reeeeeal beginners. Who knows? It might come to nothing when the metal in my ankle resists. But I'm prepared at this point to try new things, and running might just be one of them.
It might even come to be a pleasure.

Oh and finally, talking about the metal in my ankle, it occurred to me this morning that it's fifteen years today since it entered my life and my body, in the wake of that mugging I mentioned a couple of days ago. It's been through a lot since then, carried me at twenty stone or more. Time to see whether it can be trusted to take me, at this lesser weight, through the pounding of a run, maybe?

The Janus Principle

2011-12-31T20:31:00.001Z

And here we are, ten full months in to what started out as a twelve-month project, and is now likely to be at least a twenty-four-month project. d read last night's entry and chuckled.
"Official weigh-ins, unofficial weigh-ins...you know it makes no difference to anyone but you, right?"
"Oh yeah," I agreed. "Still..."
The reason I even thought about giving an official weigh-in figure today was...well, firstly for the official feeling of "this is what I've done in ten full months of 2011", aned secondly, because I did an "unofficial" weigh-in yesterday morning when perhaps radically empty (Chinese Buffet+Xenical - good combo if you want to impersonate a flume). And the result was fantastically good - 15 stone 11 pounds! Sooo, figured this little egotist, if I do an "official" weigh-in the day after, I'll look superbly good, having lost four pounds or more since Tuesday!

Yyyyeah. Had pizza yesterday. Woke up this morning, and my official ten-month result is 15 stone 13.75. One tiny ogrefart into the world of Fifteens, but hey - good enough to please me. Definitively 4.5 stone in ten months. Awoohoo.

So - how was your 2011? Mine was fairly mental - as you of course know. Looking back, it feels like longer than ten months. Feels like a lifetime, in fact, since I whittered on about diaries and how we used to use them, but now we blog our most intimate thoughts for the world to see. What have we done since then...begun walking, plugged in the exercise bike, ramped each one up, to five miles a morning and ten or twenty miles a day, shat ourselves absolutley stupid in Camden Town, lost a few stones, fallen down some stairs, seen the Olympic venue, gotten hopelessly lost more times than we can count, gone on holiday, broken a toe, had more blisters than seems possible, lost a few more stones, gotten sick of human beings and the grind of London, moved house across country and unpacked more boxes than we ever seem to have packed.

And that was 2011.

So what are my Resolutions for 2012?

Well, let's see:
1. I will not die in 2012 #fuckyouMayancalendarboy
2. Having lost 4.5 stones in ten months, I will lose at least the same amount in, say, eight months of 2012 - hitting my ideal weight and BMI by the end of August 2012.
3. I will avoid the flappy-skin syndrome of most heavy weight-losers by increasing the range of my exedrcise to include muscle-building work.
4. I will not freak out when I put on weight in muscle mass, reminding myself that 'muscle weighs more than fat nehh nehh nehh...'
5. I will attempt to re-integrate normality into my life, doing Aristotelian experiments with pleasure from time to time.
6. I will take the time to see some of my pals and particularly Karen Pulley, who has said she wants to join the Disappearing Wagon in 2012.
7. I will attempt not to bore the arse off you lot, while staying entirely honest to what the Hell happens in my life from day to day.

Will that do us, maybe? (Shrugs). Probably for now. How do you want to spend your 2012?

Hermitville

2011-12-30T16:52:00.000Z

Meant to mention - blood two days ago was 4.5, blood this morning is 4.8 - so even in the absence of my regular exercise regime, blood control seems to be maintaining itself.

There's a theme developing in this blog - got up, did stuff in the flat, ate loads, did no exercise, popped around the town, snored. It's a little like living in Hermitville, I know. I'd say bear with me - as soon as we can move for boxes and furniture, we can get some routines back - next week I'll be seeing the doc, hopefully saving money on the gym subscription, and the Disappearing Man can get back to being about the weightloss struggle, rather than the 'can't move for crap we hauled down the M4 and new crap we've bought' struggle.

Today - bins and bikes and bookcases...and a drowning dishwasher...have been the stand-out feature; popped to town because there's a faintly ludicrous degree of climate-change consciousness at work in the local council, given its industrial and coal-fired heritage, meaning that garbage disposal becomes something of a fine art - there are different bins for all the different sorts of refuse you can possibly imagine, including food waste, so we needed a couple of new bins. Worked through my office this morning, as a matter of necessity, because the delightful folks at John Lewis called to say my desk is arriving tonight, and at the time there was nowhere for it to go. So - shedloads of boxes disappeared from the office and ended up in the bedroom, making it An Interesting Challenge to get into bed tonight. But part of the joy of doing this is that The Bike was uncovered...albeit briefly, before I piled it with crap so as to give the desk-deliverers somewhere to go.

Bookcases is a simple one - we have Too Many Books. And Too Many DVDs, come to that. Much of the stuff I uncovered while carving a path through the office attested to these two facts, so I need to buy some bookcases. Perversely, the ones I need aren't available for home delivery, and Ma, blessed as she is with many things, counts a cute and tiny car among them, so it's probably a non-starter for transporting six-foot flat-packed bookcases. Gave the delivery guy who moved us here a call, and he quoted £40 to get three bookcases from the local retail park home and into place. Tempting, to be honest, because a) we have no car that's big enough to do the job, and b) d's less than convinced about our ability to hump them up two flights of stairs when they get here. Since we can't actually afford the bookcases till I next get paid in any case, I have time to mull this one, but it means a certain amount of stasis will set in up in the office. Hopefully though, once the desk is in situ, I can re-uncover the bike, and maybe even get back to using it either tonight or tomorrow...Otherwise I might start taking off for long walks. In the pissing-down rain. I know, I know, I said I wasn't going to do that when I started this experiment but a) this is Wales, for God's sake, if rain stopped play, nobody'd ever get anything done, and b) I have a good coat now...

Oh yeah, and there's this - I'm thinking of mayyyybe doing an Official Weigh-In tomorrow morning, on the principle of a 'Review of 2011' - get a very final reading of what we've managed since March. Not entirely committed to this though - after all, there's an official weigh-in on Tuesday in any case...Will see how I feel in the morning...the last morning of this weird year.

Am a little curious - what do YOU think my Resolutions for 2012 should be? Comment or let me know somehow, and I might well post some of 'em up. Hell, you know what I'm like, I might even adopt some of 'em!

Back To The Future

2011-12-29T19:32:00.000Z

"Ugh..."
I'd been laying awake for an indeterminate amount of time that felt like hours, with my stomach roiling. Eventually, I'd stumbled into the bathroom. While there, I heard d get up and potter about, positively brimming with positivity and 'greet the day' smiliness.
"Ugh.."
I shuffled back to the bedroom, utterly convinced it was still the middle of the night. Then I blinked.
d had made the bed, replacing all the 'shams' - which apparently are pillows that only look like pillows, but are not, under any circumstances, to be used as pillows - and was smiling at the day, just as I'd predicted.
"What the-"
"It's eight o'clock honey. Stuff to do!"
"Unff..." I said, pulling back the covers and crumbling back into bed, pulling the duvet over my head.
She gave me an hour extra, but I was still feeling like a grumpy six-year-old when I finally crawled out of my pit.
Turned into a day of furniture moving, box destoying, more furniture moving when it turned out the floor to which we'd moved the furniture originally was the wrong floor...y'know, as ya do...

We popped to the new doctors and registered (Drugs man...need the druuuugs....), and it was there that something peculiar happened. Because we'd also filled in the gym membership forms already, and I hadn't really noticed a particular box.
"Oh, you know they do a GP referral for the gym?" said Ma, who had come with us (it was technically her furniture that we'd been moving).
I blinked...It was like going back in time. Waaaaaay back in London, a couple of years ago, before he mentioned the possibility of getting my belly ripped open and truncated to stop me from dying, my doc had referred me to a local East End gym, for free. The point about which is that it always took me so long to get home to the East End after work, I never got there and my referral lapsed. When, at the start of this Disappearing experiment, I mentioned the possibility of taking this referral up again, the doc told me sadly that the programme had been cut, and so was no longer available.

So landing here in Wales and realising that the cut hadn't been across the board, and that I (or even we) might be able to still get a GP referral to the gym, was another feather in the cap of living in Wales. It does however mean that I won't be able to register with the gym until I've spoken to the Welsh doc next week. Still - if it saves us most of the dosh of our subscription, who's counting. And I begin work properly on clearing out my office tonight - in other words, working my way towards The Bike again...so here's hoping the future is gymmy and relatively cheap!

Welcome Home

2011-12-28T19:54:00.000Z

May have mentioned this at some point, but used to get the crap kicked out of me on a regular basis as a kid. Partly, this was because I was 'the fat kid', partly it was because I was, perversely, 'a posh kid' (had more of a 'received pronunciation' than was normal in the Valleys, and partly, it was because I was a smartarse who didn't know when to keep his gob shut.

Then I went away to college, and came back fatter, and posher, and eeeeeven more of a smartarse, and having walked the late night streets in Southampton, and Glasgow, and the East End of London, I decided to go out for new year with friends in Merthyr.

We laughed, we drank, we got separated, I ran out of money, and ended up walking up the length of the town to get home to my folks' place. I got about three quarters of the way home, when a bloke came walking quickly up behind me, turned me round and picked a fight. I did that fatal thing that you should never do when someone picks a fight with you. I laughed. He kicked the crap out of me. I decided to stop laughing, and decided to give falling down a try instead. That, he decided, was altogether more appropriate. I passed out in the early January frost. That, I'm assuming, pleased him even more because eventually he must have gone away.

I woke up when a couple asked me if I was alright. It was a complicated question. Something in my left ankle was altogether less than alright. It bent in a whole new range of exciting and dramatic directions which it hadn't previously considered. Of course, when it did that, there was a shooting, sparkly pain that rocketed throughout my system, but hey, you can't have everything.

The bloke of the couple told me to get up. I mentioned that something was wrong with my ankle, so if it was all the same to him, I'd just lay here and die of frostbite. No, he said, I'd better get up or he'd kick my fucking head in. I sighed, tried to get up, put a little weight on the ankle, fell over again, and something altogether new went crack. Then, apparently disappointed, he made good on his promise and kicked my fucking head in.

Next time I woke up, a local policeman told me to get up. I rolled my eyes. Told him the story of the evening so far, and - rather than telling me to get up or he'd kick my fucking head in - he got me to the local hospital, where a whole other set of adventures awaited me.

I mention all this tonight for a simple reason. So far, our return home to Merthyr has been pretty fairytale. Tonight, dammit, we fulfilled last night's urge and went for a Chinese buffet meal at the local restaurant. When we came out, there were a bunch of pissed-up lads rolling through the streets, one of them announcing to all the world he was gonna 'have a piss right here..."

They yelled at us, as drunken fuckwits do. We ignored them, as non-drunken citizens do. And then we walked away. We were a few yards away, at the lip of an alleyway, when I felt him coming, fast, behind us. A hand slapped down on my head beneath my cowboy hat (did I mention - I wear a cowboy hat now...cowboy hats are cool...Have owned it for several years, but it didn't quite work until I lost some of the weight. Now...I still don't know if it works for other people, but it works for me and feels like me, so there it is). The hand grabbed at my hat, and d and I both spun around, yelling.
"Sssssanicehat, that!" yelled the drunk, as I grabbed the hat and took it off him.
Then he buggered off back to his pisshead mates, and we went on our way, not going actually down the alleyway until we were sure they weren't following.
"Welcome home, honey," muttered d as we got back to the flat.
"Some things don't change, I guess..." I explained.
"Oh I dunno," said d. "You're still walking, aren't you?"
She has a point of course. Merthyr still has drunken fuckwits who think it's OK to approach total strangers. But apparently, if you're in the company of a yelling American, you're safer than you would be without one.

Then again, in my case, if you're not in the company of an American, you're not home in any case...

Big Disappearing day tomorrow - tomorrow we put in the forms to join a new doctors' surgery, and the leisure centre, with its gym and pool, the visualising of which made Disappearing from home seem a real possibility.

The Start of a Beautiful Recipe

2011-12-27T21:25:00.000Z

One and a quarter pounds.

That's the verdict from the first court of the Nazi Scales - I've put on one and a quarter pounds, which means today's weigh-in shows me as:
16 stone, 1.25.

Which, all in all, is nowhere near as bad as it could have been, or as I'd been forecasting to myself.

Another day of unboxing today. We're making order out of rectangular chaos day by day, like weird Cubist gods and goddesses - I found myself able to get to our dining table today, and had an apple in celebration.

No particular improvement in my dad, for those who've been kind enough to ask or send good wishes.

And then tonight, our little jewel-house had its first proper visitor. I mean, we've had family already of course - they practically put it together - and of course my pal Sian was here when we loaded it up with the boxes we're now doing our damnedest to get rid of - but the first visitor who's not blood, but who's been here since our arrival, was Karen (Pulley) this evening.

It was fabulous to see her, here, in this environment - we had friends in London of course, but never felt confident enough of our decor and our space to have people just dropping by. So it's kind of underlined our joy earlier this week in having decor in the first place, having someone in to share it. Plus of course, it was great to introduce d to Karen - they're fairly similar in a lot of ways, not the least is a shared love of cooking and food. After lighting the occasional blue touch-paper, I mainly sat back and watched as their friendship, already generated via Facebook, blossomed beatifully over talk of types of people and goats cheese tarts and lamb tagines-cum-casseroles and the like.

Frankly, all the talk of food left me ravenous, and ready to cast the one and a quarter pound limited damages to the four winds of a slap-up Chinese buffet...
When Karen left to deliver a trifle (I didn't ask...it seemed somehow entirely reasonable at the time), d and I donned our 'serious Winter gear' and headed out. There are two Chinese buffets within easy walking distance, but neither of them were open, two days after Christmas. I felt somehow personally chagrined at that.
"We're not in London any more, Toto," muttered d sardonically. It's difficult ot pull off sardonic through chattering teeth and below-breath imprecations to any god who's listening, but she managed it nicely. We returned home for hot turkey sandwiches and equally hot baths. All in all of course, this was far the more sensible Disappearing strategy, and it's about time I found one. Quite apart from anything else, this weightloss blog hasn't been remotely involved with weightloss for far too long now! So here's to a Disappearing future, and the beginning of a beautiful recipe for a friendship flan, co-produced by the woman I love and one of my oldest friends.

Did I mention - kicks ass to be home...

Unboxing Day

2011-12-26T23:06:00.000Z

So...many...boxes...
The world has turned beige today among a wall of cardboard.
Let's put this into some sort of context - packing the boxes we have, took us months. In the last handful of days, we've unpacked several weeksworth - d's got floorspace in the kitchen, I've got bookshelves that are full of box-guts in the living room. The bedroom's taking a distinct shape (and, did I mention, kicks spa-ass), and we took joint baths tonight in the humungo-tub (real old-fashioned, gloriously sized, cast-iron).

So - life in Merthyr - pretty freakin' sweet. This of course comes on the day when there was a tube strike in London, a stabbing in the sales on Oxford Street, and a fairly record quarter-of-a-million shoppers at the Westfield Mall in Stratford.

Ahhhh...the Welsh Life...

In Disappearing terms, though, everything I have is braced for the morning - the final Tuesday of 2011, the first weigh-in on the Nazi scales. Had a big lunch at the local Harvester, and quite a big dinner at Franky & Benny's, so essentially, I've had a complete carb-fest the day before my weigh-in - talk about being out of out of practice at this shit...

In a weird way, am kinda looking forward to a hideous result tomorrow, to break that level of self-congratulatory contentment that I've been in for a little while, and get me bitchslapped back to semi-neurotic determination for the start of the new year. Not, of course, that breaking my self-congratulatory contentment is gonna be easy on the day of a quarter-million shoppers, abbbbsolutely none of whom make the slightest difference to me.

Still, fairly confident of having put on about five pounds. Less than that will be good enough, frankly...

Carrot Hand-Jobs, Nazi Scales and An Inconvenient Truth

2011-12-25T21:59:00.000Z

"I'm thinking if you just give it a straight stroke, rather than twisting at the end..." said d.
I blinked at her. I looked at the gloves I was wearing - huge blue rubber gloves with what looked essentially like pebble-dashed cat-litter embedded in them.
"You're suggesting I give the carrots a hand-job dear?"
She rolled her eyes at me.
"If you like, dear," she said. The gloves were a gift - Tater Mitts - essentially, gloves of death for potato skins, and, as I was set on proving, for carrot skins too - that were supposed to make dinner prep much easier, and as a bonus, would scrape the face off any domestic intruder with a non-lethal use of force.

Getting instructions from your wife on the best up-and-down motion to remove a layer of skin from something carrot-shaped is an experience that a) I hope you never have, and b) has a tendency to make you rather nervous by bedtime, but I have to report that the Tater Mitts worked as advertised, and a gorgeous Christmas lunch ensued.

I had jussst about tipped myself back to neurosis this morning, by checking out my weight on my mother's analogue scales, and then scowling more than somewhat at the probably-accurate reading they gave me.

Then, when it came to unwrap presents, one of my big gifts was something that I'd actually asked for - a shit-hot, brand new, Weight-Watchers approved set of uber Nazi scales.

These are scales that can measure you in any damn increments you like - Kg, pounds, stones and pounds...Fairly sure there's a setting on them that will measure you in Drachma, and another that measures you in farts.
"You weigh...169 farts..." - If that's not a setting that currently exists, I reckon I might patent it, cos it's good, semi-solid information that would be of use to any Disappearer...
Anyhow, the essential point is that these are scales that take themselves waaay too freakin' seriously, and therefore, they're likely to be hard taskmasters when I step on them in just two days time. I haven't dared take them out of their box yet, because even though I asked for them, I'm happy to admit I find them a little intimidating. It's gonna be like stepping on a Dalek, probably. "You-Will-Lose-Weight-Or-Your-Lardy-Arse-Will-Be-EXTERMINATED!"

But the point, I guess, is that normal service will be resumed for the final Tuesday of 2011, and I'll probably have slipped back over the 16 stone border. This will be what it will be, and we'll move on and shake the shit out of my now-complacent system in the first week of January.

The real shock of today was my dad.
I've seen him have highs, and I've seen him have lows. I've seen him have diabetic hypos, and had to half-carry him through London streets, and then force feed him sweets to come around. But I don't think I've ever seen him quite as utterly disengaged as he was today.
He sat there, staring into space, for most of the day, until after dinner, when he fell asleep entirely. Nothing could jolly him along, nothing could spark his interest or enthusiasm. He wouldn't come open presents, he wouldn't come join us at the table for starters, when dinner was served he ate in silence, and then went to sleep...

Don't in any way get me wrong - this is not a bitchfest. It's a concernfest. Among all the personal, seflish reasons for wanting to come home this year was always embedded the kernel of concern for my dad, and the desire to help him, and help my mum to make his life a little easier. Today was an eye-openener, inasmuch as it drove home the fact that when pain or some condition makes someone drift away, for even a day, there is little or nothing that can be done to help, to break the stainless-steel soap bubble and make a connection.

Still - don't get me wrong in this either - my dad's not drifting endlessly away, I'm not sounding some sort of hideous knell. He just had a bad day as far as I know. The rest of our day was a thing of warmth and wonder - being home, and not having to leave home and go back to the chaos of a London tube ride, was amazing, and a source of great contentment to us both. This feels so much like a new beginning, it's difficult to focus on greyness and grimness. and most of our time was bright and beautiful. Just bright and beautiful tinged with conern - like a microcosm of the reasons we made this move in the first place.

Seems like the way to go forward.

A Thing of Beauty

2011-12-24T23:36:00.001Z

Merrrrrrrrrrry Christmas!!!!

What? No….whaddaya mean that’s not till tomorrow? Feels like Christmas in my house, I can tell you. Got home last night to Merthyr, and our little place is magical. Small and perfect, like a Faberge egg, if Faberge eggs came with lots and lots of boxes.

d, clearly, and probably Ma too, have been working their assess off while I’ve been – and let’s make no bones about this – sitting on my ass on an air mattress for a week. For the first time in eight years, we have colour schemes! We’ve never had colour schemes – we haven’t been allowed by our landlady to vary the colours of our walls. Which presumably is why, at about 5.30 yesterday morning, as I went from room to room trying to conjure up memories to dwell on and generate some melancholy about moving out…nada. We’ve had happy memories of course, but in terms of the flat in Stratford…meh.

But we have colour schemes now. Our living room is red and brown and stripy and modern and with a beautiful rug to tie the whole thing together. Our bedroom is kinda like a spa – all pale sea colours and more space than we really know what to do with. I realise of course it’s very middle-aged to suddenly think your house is the bees’ knees, but now, ours really is.

Today, we had a wow-ish kind of day. Went out to a local café for a kickass breakfast (the kitchen, and my office, are currently serving as box-rooms. They’re awesome, but they’re awesomely full of boxes), then strolled into town to do some last minute Christmas shopping - drapes for the living room, mattress pads to turn our couches into heated chaises from which, frankly, we’ll probably never want to move (Ahhh, work-from-home, come to me my proud beauty…), cushions, and our Christmas tree.

We’ve never done a Christmas tree either. In fact, weird as this sounds, tomorrow will be the first Christmas Day since we’ve been married when we’ve slept in our own beds – we’re usually at my folks’ place, and indeed will be tomorrow too, but we’ll be home in our own place before the Doctor Who Christmas Special….so decorating our own Christmas tree was a beautiful ‘together’ moment that was still new to us. But the point is, just being in this new place feels like togetherness, and home, and everything we’ve been craving and never had the time to do in London.

In Disappearing terms – hey whaddaya want from me, it’s Christmas! This is weird – it’s the first year I’ll have done a Disappearing Christmas, and I’d be lying if I said I was going to be some miserly ascetic; indeed last night when I arrived in Merthyr, we went out to a Chinese buffet, and I ate without fear. I’m going to eat my Christmas Dinner, and enjoy it too, but Disappearing knows nothing about Christmas; I’m gonna do my by-now-usual thing – little bits of the good stuff, no desserts.

In case anyone’s wondering, I’ve clearly given up the idea of losing the next half-stone by New Year – in fact, if I can maintain my weight at 16 stone, I’ll be more than happy, I’ll be bloody ecstatic. But the whole point of New Years, I guess, is that you can shake yourself down and get a new lease of energy on your projects.

So I guess today really isn’t Christmas Day. It’s more like New Year’s Day – day one of the rest of our lives, to overuse a cliché. But of course, that’s why clichés become clichés – because they perfectly capture the mood of moments. And that’s what today feels like – a brand new page, and a thing of beauty.

Oh yeah, talking about things of beauty, and shaking, and new vigour and purpose, I reckon I need some of that, because I've found myself not actually caring very much about Disappearing of late. I should say, I've changed pretty radically during the course of this experiment so far. My tastes have changed, my clothes have changed, my sense of self has changed. Which means recently, people have been telling me they like what they see - I have 'a look' now, apparently, and people seem to respond well to it. Which is fantastic of course, but seems to have given me a comfy bed of complacency to wallow on. Because of course, for the first time in a long time, I like the way I look too, and the subconscious impulse runs through me - "Ahhh, it's OK...what do I want to carry this on for...?"

So come the new year, I definitely need to leave out thing-of-beauty maisonette and kick my own ass again. We're only half way through this thing, we're not, not, absolutely bloody not there yet...Think I need to slap that on a Post-It note on reflective surface in the new place. Still lots to do, but for now, of course - Merry Christmas!

Schrodinger's Disappearing Cat

2011-12-23T12:42:00.000Z

It occurred to me at 5-something this morning, having stayed up all night, mainly to do final packing, partly to remind myself how rock 'n' roll I was, and also, partly, to give a chance for any second thoughts to surface in the grim December small hours, like prodding an emotional gum-ulcer, that I couldn't remember where I lived.

I mean, while actually sitting in a flat in which I've lived for about six or seven years, I had no concept of where it actually was.

Now I know I'm Significantly Geographically Challenged, but that's saying something. I found myself trying to work it out from the design cues around me but, of course, there weren't any. I was in a box the colour of porridge, and I couldn't have told you whether I was already in Wales waiting to move away, or in London waiting to move to Wales, or somewhere else entirely, waiting to so...something else. If you'd pushed me for an answer right about then, I'd have chosen c).

Mind you, my general discombobulation probably wasn't helped by the fact that, having decided to ride home in triumphant style and splashed out on a first class train ticket, it transpired, at about 11 o'clock last night, that our hordes-of-locusts removals men had accidentally...moved my ticket. To Wales. It's sitting there now, in one of many many boxes, sneering at me. I got into the office early this morning (as Virgin came and took away my modem yesterday), and called up the train company. To be fair, their attitude of "What a dickhead! Merry fucking Christmas, asshole!" is perhaps at least moderately justified - I did, after all, put a vitally important train ticket down during a house move. I'm surprised I didn't qualify for a festive kick in the knackers while I was about it. Mind you, I still have to go through Paddington station, so I guess there's still time...

Indeed, I ended up having to pay more money for a scum-we-wouldn't-deign-to-clean-out-of-the-buffet class ticket this afternoon, because now of course, having taken my house keys round to the letting agent at the crack of still-bloody-dark this morning, I am now officially homeless for about twelve hours. I mean, granted, there's homeless and homeless - I'm not about to pop the cap off a Super lager and go looking for Arthur, but at least technically, I exist in non-space and non-time right now. I'm neither a Welshman nor a Londoner, although I daresay there are quantum physicists who'd be able to prove that I'm actually both simultaneously, illustrating the inherent absurdities of our linear concepts of time, space and self-identity.

Well, this is one Schrodinger's Cat who's taking to his paws right about now, in a nod to sharply accented determinism. This is the Disappearing Man....Disappearing - but don't worry, I haven't popped out of the space-time continuum altogether. I'm just dabbling with faster-than-light travel for an afternoon. Well, faster than sound travel...oh wait, this is British rail we're talking about...Faster than a leek that's been pushed uphill by an asthmatic Daddy-Long-Legs using sprouts as primitive wheels...

Yeah, faster than the speed of leek, baby - we're on the Valley Lines now...See you on the Welsh side, innit mun...

Arthur Christmas

2011-12-22T18:41:00.000Z

Well, that was subtle...

No sooner do I have one of my (increasingly rare, actually) atheistic rants, than the universe, with its typical perversity, sends Arthur crashing into my life.

Thanks for that, universe. Remind me to kick you in the crotch next time I see you...

Things were going well this morning - I popped to Argos when they opened at 8.30, to return some unopened archive boxes that we hadn't used in the move, then headed straight to the doctors. The doc who started me on this whole experiment by offering me elective bariatric surgery sorted me out with three whole months worth of Xenical, which should tide me over nicely till I get set up with a practice in Merthyr. I went and collected them from Linda, our friend at the pharmacist, (and of course, the other pharmacy-folk too). Had a bit of a chat there, and then started to make my way home.

There was Christmas music seeping out of a shop doorway. "Mary's Boy Child," by Boney M.
"...And man will live forever more, because of Christmas Day," they sang, in optimistic defiance of biology.
That's when Arthur introduced himself.
He did it with a shout. A friendly shout, as these things go, but nevertheless, a shout. Normally of course, when strangers start shouting at you in the street, you quicken your pace and develop serenely selective deafness. But there was something about the interposition of the Christmas carol and Arthur's shouting that stopped me in my tracks. I turned round.

Fucking Boney M!

Arthur was drunk. Well, either Arthur was drunk, or the world was sailing on a very rough sea and the rest of us were just too wrapped up in ourselves to notice. He swayed and staggered madly, drunkenly, in imminent danger of crashing to the ground with every step, waving a can of Skol Super lager around as he came. (Translation for the Americans. British lager is just like beer, only vastly more potent than anything of which you can get tall, frosty skeins in the States. Ours is warmer, and frequently of more mysterious origin, and absolutely nowhere near as much fun to drink, but the key point is - stronger. Super lager is basically a ball pein hammer to the skull, with a couple of shots of heroin into the eyeballs as a chaser. Arthur was very, very drunk...).

Arthur crashed up and into me. He was tall, and dressed in a leather jacket and despair. His face was bristly but not unpleasant.
"I'm drunk now," he explained unnecessarily, "but I'm not gonna be drunk tomorrow. Is there somewhere that can help me with this?"
'This' wasn't the problem of sobriety. This was his teeth. Or rather, his non-teeth - he leered into my face and pulled his lips up and open, revealing that most of his upper front teeth were missing, the remainder were black, and he had one broken shard left of one of his very front teeth. I held my breath, trying to ignore the lager-and-god-knows-what-else stench till he put his teeth away again. He grabbed my hand earnestly with his spittle-covered fingers.
"Err...yes," I said. "There's a doctors just down that road there," I pointed. "They have a dentist, I think..."
"They say I don't live here," said Arthur, who spoke with an eastern European accent - Russian, I'd guess, given his sentence-constructions - "they'd tell me to fuck off..."
I thought he was probably right, but I was just keen to do my bit in this unlooked-for conversation, and get the fuck on with my day. Shit to do, Arthur buddy - I'm outta this town tomorrow...
Arthur, a little unexpectedly, began to cry.
"Christmas Eve!" he wailed. "24th December, last year!"
This was a bit cryptic for my tastes.
"Can I tell you what happened?!" he pleaded.
I thought about it - I had a guy coming to take back my cable box at 12, it was probably 10...something, and a seriously drunk eastern European guy was clasping desperately at my hand, asking to tell me his life story. I sighed.
"Sure," I agreed, which I think it's fairly obvious was code for "Whatever the fuck you need to do, dude, just don't kill me. I have one day left in this city, dammit..."

"Middle of night," he said, setting the scene. "We were in a squat. There is knock on door. I go to answer it. Man there....Bastard. He puts his foot like this-"

Arthur stamped heavily and sideways, showing the classic 'foot-in-the-door' technique.

"...So door cannot be closing, yes?"
"Right," I agreed, nodding that I understood.
"He come in, call others, and they follow. They beat me up, man...." Again, he stamped, this time more graphically, acting out a thorough kicking.
"Then...last thing I know, he get a brick, and..." He mimed the overarm motion for me. The man had slammed him in the face with a brick.
"So-" And again he showed me his non-teeth.
"I am on floor, switched off," he said, using a phrase that worked. "This is nothing!" he roared suddenly at the world, daring it to do more to him, but his defiance lasted only a second. Arthur slid down onto the pavement, still clutching my hand. And the tears came harder.
"I am on the floor, switched off," he said again. "I can do nothing!"
The memory of impotence caused him pain, it was obvious.
"My girlfriend!" he explained.
"I can do nothing! My girlfriend, she's four months pregnant..." The tears became a wail, and I reached down to rub his back, like you would a kid with a scraped knee.
"They raped my girlfriend!!" he managed through tears and snot and slurring. "The baby...she lost the baby...and I can do nothing!"
I continued trying to do 'comforting contact' with this obviously deeply scarred man, but there's something about not believing in a higher power that leaves your range of responses to the world's atrocities somewhat limited...or maybe I'm just crap with people. It was territory we were about to come on to in a big way.
"I know there is a Jesus," said Arthur. "There is a Jesus, and these bastards, he will make them pay for this...forever...Jesus loves everybody, no matter what you've done, if you're a murderer or what. Jesus loves you..." He seemed a little confused between Jesus the Shepherd and Jesus the Terminator, but to be fair, he's not alone in that, and has more reason than most.
"Can I pray?" he asked. "It's really important to me," he affirmed. He still had my hand, so it wasn't like I could leave, and of course I'd never stop anyone doing something to make them feel better. So there we were, me standing, bending, him kneeling at my feet, kissing my hand, mumbling in probably-Russian and occasionally beating his breast, looking for all the world like a king blessing a medieval knight, or more appropriately, a Pop blessing a pilgrim.

Ohhhh crap, I thought to myself. This is becoming A Thing for the day...

When Arthur had finished praying, he asked me my name and I told him it was Tony.
"Artur," said Arthur, holding tightly to my hand. "You a good person, Tony..."
Yeah, right...I thought. It's weird, but because so many people think you can only be a moral person if you believe in a deity, there's an unspoken determination among atheists to out-moral them wherever possible. This wasn't exactly what I was thinking, but it did go through my head that if I just walked away now, I'd be pretty much letting the side down.
"Is there somewhere that can help me with this?" he asked, doing the leery teeth-showing thing again. We'd come round full circle.
"There is, yes," I said....and it was like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the eighties. Do you a) tell him again where to get help? b) take him to get help? c) Pull away, knowing he won't remember you ten minutes from now. I sighed.
"C'mon Arthur," I said, taking hold of his arm. "Let's see if we can get you some help..."

I knew of course, rationally, that he needed to dry out before anyone would be able to help him, and that even then, it would be at an Emergency Room where they'd be able to give him something to stabilise him. But I remembered, a couple of doctor's visits ago, an old lady had been brought in by someone who'd just encountered her on the streets, and they'd got her an ambulance to take her to hospital. So I walked Arthur back to my doctors. We had only gone a couple of hundred yards when he wailed.
"Can I tell you what happened?!"
"You've told me Arthur...but sure," I said, aware by now that it made no difference. His mind was tormenting him with the images of that Christmas Eve from Hell, round and round and round. He had to speak the words to relieve the pressure in his brain. Plus of course, Super lager=ball pein hammer - he had little in the way of short-term memory left, everything was focused on the long-term trauma.

Eventually, I got him into the surgery, and sat him down. I explained to the receptionist what the situation was, and she seemed keen to help me. She spoke to a doctor - not to my doctor, but to an officious little prick, frankly, who kept on about Arthur not being a patient of theirs, and needing an Emergency Room.
"I know that," I told him. "Can I get him a cab from here?" (I hadn't brought my phone out with me...I was only gonna be gone about half an hour...)
"Yes, you can do that," said the Prick-Doctor, "but really, we can't..."
"He's gone," said the Receptionist.
"What?" I said. "Who'd gone?"
"Oh god, he's wandering into traffic," she observed.
I looked round. Arthur had left the surgery and was indeed playing chicken with the traffic.
"Fuck," I said. It seemed to cover everything.
And again, the Choose Your Own Adventure options flashed up in my head. He'd left. He'd gone out of my life as suddenly as he'd come into it. That was an end to it...right?
"Fuck," I said again, for emphasis, and took off, running up the road to catch him. He'd just opened another can of super lager. This was not gonna be good.
"What's your name?" he asked again. I told him it was Tony.
"Tony Tony Tony," he said. "Always Tony." He sounded like he disapproved, but I wasn't having any of that.
"I've been with you for a little while now Arthur," I said. "Not changing my name for you or anyone."
He laughed, briefly.
"You wanna drink?" he asked.
"Nono, I'm fine," I said, taking his arm again. I was planning to lead him up to the main road, where we might spot a passing cab, the driver of which I'd have to speak to very nicely to get him to take us to the local hospital. Then I spotted a better bet. A local minicab office.
"C'mon Arthur," I said, beginning to get stuck in my own little conversational time-warp.
"Where we goin'?"
"Going to hospital, get you some help for those teeth, eh?"
"Nnno, I not goin' there," he declared. "'m'drunk..."
"Yes you are," I agreed.
"Can I tell you what happened?!" he wailed, and the cycle started again. This time when the events of last Christmas had run to their conclusion, he said he was going "up there" - gesturing to our local church. Seemed to make sense - he said they had bingo, and food and stuff. Forgive me, it's been a while and this is a major cosmopolitan city - I figured they could have! I also figured that, having picked a destination-point, Arthur at least knew roughly where he was.

Can anyone spot the flaw in this logic?

As we stagger-walked past the church, I was confused.
"Where we going, Arthur? Thought you wanted to go in here?"
"Nooo, wanna see my girlfriend," he explained. This gave us problems. I wasn't even sure, from his story, that the girlfriend was still alive!

"Do you believe in Jesus?" he asked suddenly, seeming suspicious of my sticking with him.
Oh crap! People who remember my conversation with the "you ain't from round here" guy in the States will recall that I never lie about this, no matter what the provocation. It's about as close to martyrdom as you can get being an atheist.
"No...not personally," I told him.
"Ohhh man, but there has to be a Jesus!" he exclaimed. "Look what happened to me. I'm a good person, man. It makes no sense if there's no Jesus! Otherwise, you tell me why it happened?!"
I didn't want to hurt him by pointing out that it happened because some people are just evil fucks, and other people aren't. I'd never rob him of that belief.
"Wanna pray!" he declared again. But this time, he didn't drop to his need, just clasped my hand and swung his head in close to mine, dribbling a little beery saliva and rather more snot onto my shirt.
"Can't remember the words in English," he said, almost craftily. "My Heavenly Father..."
He waited, expecting me to finish it for him. I wouldn't have, even if I knew the prayer he particularly meant. I mean, the Lord's Prayer is "Our Father..." - but that only occurs to me now, writing it back.
"My Heavenly Father..." he prompted again. I shook my head.
"I don't know the words either, Arthur...C'mon, let's keep walking..."
"Oh man...you pray for me....Please..." He looked at me intensely. "Pray for me..." Then the fire went out in him, and he staggered forward again.
We ended up walking past my flat, with me increasingly desperately trying to flag down passing cabs. There was nothing up the way we were going that seemed to offer any hope of a refuge for Arthur.

When suddenly, refuge cycled up behind us. Two community support officers on frankly dorky -looking bikes cycled up to talk to us.
I told them about Arthur, as much as I knew. Asked them whether we could get him to hospital.
"Yeah," said one of them. "We will. You can leave him with us."
I didn't really want to. I wanted to be sure he got help.
"Go on sir," said the officer. "We'll look after him."

I told him these guys would make sure he got his teeth seen to - which, on reflection, was probably about as much of a lie as it would have been if I'd told him the Lord lived in my shoebox - and took my leave of Arthur. And oddly, I haven't felt able to mention him to anyone till I wrote him down.

I want to make it clear - I didn't tell you all this to make myself look big and Samaritan-like. Quite the reverse in fact. If anything, it was an object lesson in how not having recourse to an easy leveller of playing-fields makes you unable to answer questions like "why did this happen to me?" with any answer that brings comfort. Doesn't make you wrong, of course, just comfort-impoverished, which I'm not sure isn't actually worse than being wrong.

The reason I haven't mentioned him to anyone till now is rather more pat. He asked me to pray for him.

I can't do that, I don't have faith in anything that would receive those prayers and intercede for Arthur's shattered life and consciousness. What I have faith in is human beings. Of course, I'm not blind - human beings were responsible for the acts that brought this man to the point where he staggered into my life today. We have such phenomenal potential, just by being alive, to be the best of people, or the worst. If you can't pray to a god to bring someone peace, all you can do is share their story with other people, to show the consequences of actions, to show a warning of what we can be, and to make a plea for our positive potential. All I can do is pray to you guys. Spare Arthur, in his brain-sized cell in his private Hell, a thought this Christmas. I know we're all feeling the bitchslap of economic implosion, but if you can do something - any damn thing - to bring light into someone's life - do it. I'm gonna do something myself, though I have no idea what. Maybe the person I can help will come staggering into my life just like Arthur did (I have no illusions I helped him at all). Or maybe I'll have to work a bit harder next time...

Ticking Off Lists

2011-12-22T00:21:00.001Z

D'you think God had a To-Do list for that whole 'Create a world in Seven Days' thing he's occasionally credited with by at least some people?

I'm just wondering, because, having finished the fun-fest that was The House of Atreus by Aeschylus, with all its kid-slaughter, human-pie references, spousal murder, matricide and suchlike, I figured I'd pop across the pantheons, and give Genesis a go again. I've read the Bible a few times in my life, but never for its literary or entertainment value. Have to say, even compared to all that crazy shit in Aeschylus, Genesis is pretty freakin OUT THERE...what with the nice-enough but clearly inaccurate description of what might have happened to get us to where we...y'know...exist, and the stories of the talking snake, and the huuuuuge fuck-off flood that, and let's not make light of this, kills every damn thing on the planet except for a floating zoo...and presumably fish(? - how are fish less sinful than earthworms? Just asking...), the guy who offered a rampaging mob his virgin daughters to rape if they'd leave him the fuck alone...those same daughters getitng the old man drunk and sneaking in to have incestuous sex with him, the gifting of slave-girls to husbands by wives, just so they can 'have kids' together...the guy who wore goats-skin to look like his hairy-assed older brother, and got himself blessed by his father in his place...

Did I mention, this is just Book One of the Bible? We haven't even got to the Ten Commandments yet, let alone the fun-fest that is Leviticus...But the point I'm trying to make here is not some atheistic ranting one...no, honest, it isn't...
The point is that "And on the Seventh Day He Rested" schtick...

Really? Cos I gotta tell you, if God used To-Do Lists, and still gave himself the whooooooole seventh day off, I'm thinking there's some shit that got missed, back in the day, and he's just never mentioned it. I know in culinary circles, that's called "Standing Behind Your Dish" - you don't ever mention the ingredients that you meant to put in that would have made it freakin' awesome. Whatever stage you get to, you act like it's what you intended, and hope you get away with it. I reckon that's what God did.

I started this week with a single, simple To-Do List.OK, it wasn't exactly: Day 1, create Heavens and Earth...But not only does it keep growing, no matter what I lop off it, but, as I've mentioned before, it's started spawning junior lists. And not doing things in order is clearly fatal. Right now, if I'd been God (and who among us doesn't secretly believe that they are?), I'd have made the zebras, and LED lights, and corned beef, but I probably wouldn't have separated the waters into earth-waters and sky waters yet, or got around to making the Moon, or created cows, which of course, once you've created corned beef is problematic.

It's getting increasingly insane. This afternoon before i left the office, as I'm here at home tomorrow, visiting the doctor, and waiting in for an engineer, I actually wrote myself a specialised To-Do List of stuff that can be done at home, and then, as if that wasn't mental enough, I wrote myself a To-Do List for tonight - everything from "Put on coat, scarf, hat...Leave office. Get coffee and cash....etc through to...write blog, check memory stick, turn Word docs into pdfs. Sleep.

I don't know when I think I'm going to cross this last one off - triumphantly on waking up in the morning presumably. I wouldn't mind, but when I got home and crossed of "get home" I found that, having spoken to d, the list had actually grown three new items. And because they needed inserting at awkward points, I actually ended up re-doing tonight's list, for, apparently, the most efficient route through the flat, so that the things I'd done would all line up nicely and I could do them with the minimum of doubling back.

Wonder what was on the Divine To-Do List that got shuffled under the carpet when the Seventh Day Deadline' came up sooner than he'd expected. Comedian Eddie Izzard mentions 'Tell Them The Planet's Round' and 'Abolish Slavery' as big ones, and he's probably right. "Stop them taking life so freakin' seriously", I like to think might have been another one.

I've only been doing these days of To-Do Listing like a bastard since d left on Sunday - what's that, Day 4 - and I'm already bloody knackered. If I'd been God, we've had a five day week.

Which reminds me - I can hardly see the screen any more for yawning.
And On the Fifth Day He Rested...
Need to follow the example of the big Guy before I'm found slumped over my keyboard, dribbling incoherently.

Hmm...

The Duck-Billed Platypus is finally making sense at last...

Blood was 5.4 today by the way. 5.6 yesterday. Not technically the Seventh Day yet, but fuck it - time for this creative deity to rest...

Welsh Tourist Walking

2011-12-21T00:57:00.000Z

London took me aback today, and really made me smile.

Having to find my way to the South Kensington post office at lunchtime (which I did, thankyouverymuch Kathy! ;o)), I stayed in that area for lunch, finding a nice little cafe I haven't known was there for about six years. Had a very tasty and very filling panini, and caught myself thinking "Well, this is a great little find - I'll have to come back here..." before realising that no, I really won't. I don't live here anymore. I don't live in London. I'm Welsh Tourist Walking.

That rocked me back on my heels for a bit. Then, as I found my way back up to my office (and again, may I say - did that just fine and dandy!), I kinda fell in love with London all over again, but in a slightly different way. A way that only works if you listen, if you don't shut yourself off behind walls of music. I heard a youngish man with two small kids pik up a traffic cone and blow through it like a trumpet, or an elephant's flatulence, to make them scandalised and giggly. Heard the squeals of youngsters and the whoah-whoooahing of adults who had taken the opportunity of it being December to go ice-skating down by the British Museum. Saw a couple kissing, right there in the street, as though the self-important Kensingtoniands weren't even there. Saw a couple of young women wearing fur-lines sparkly red Christmas Deely-Boppers with no hint of self-consciousness. It made me smile broadly, probably unnerving the bejeesus out of my...fellow...tourists.

You know what it's like? It's like the last time we saw my mother-in-law. As good fortune or providence, depeding on your interpretation, would have it, we were able to leave her in the company of friends and family, and it was a happy last impression to have of her. We knew that it was false of course, that she'd wake up in the morning and we'd be gone, and she'd go on until she couldn't go on any more. But in our minds, she'll always be there in that final snapshot, surrounded by smiles and good people. Today, I saw a truth like that - London is going to continue just fine and dandy without me. People will still skate by the Museum, and do silly things to amuse their kids or young siblings. They'll still jab each other, and stab each other, and mug and rape and kill each other, and they'll go on being born, and raised, and finding whatever is out there for them, even if that's nothing, in this city. But pretty much my final snapshot of it as part of it turned out to be overwhelmingly positive and Christmassy, like a Richard Curtis movie version of the real city beneath.

Of course, having found a great little cafe to have lunches I won't have, the Disappearing Day continued in much the same vein. Chatting to Karen Pulley, she mentioned a place in Covent Garden that did great Sunday lunches.
"Yyyyeah," I mentioned, "the time to tell me this would have been last week, when I still had a Sunday left in the city..."

This evening, I met up with Karen Who Shall Be Called Mae for our final meet-up while I live here. We went for dinner at her local Italian, which appeared to have a menu consisting of "27 Varieties of Carb A", followed by "36 Varieties of Carb B", and to have an attitude to portion size that wouldn't have been out of place in the Elephant House at London Zoo. The garlic bread starter - was a pizza. The pizza...was about the circumference of a human head. Fortunately in one respect, I chose the wrong Carb B, a pizza laden with chili flakes, which meant I couldn't eat that much of it.
"See, you should have discovered this place earlier," she opined.
"Nom," I agreed, putting away the starter at an unseemly rate of knots. "S'alright, I'll have something different next ti-"
"Oh,"I said, chewing mechanically. "Right." I sighed. If I'd had a bell, I'd have rung it round about then.
Unclean! Unclean! Welsh Tourist Walkin' here, Welsh Tourist Walkin'...

It's time to go Home...

The Father Christmas Feeling

2011-12-19T23:01:00.000Z

Blood was 6.1 this morning after a five mile walk in vaguely uncomfortable shoes. Kind of expected that, cos I broke, and had a couple of handfuls of trail mix at about eleven last night. Still, at least I did the walking - gods only know what the blood would have been before the walk (I work on the principle that a morning blood-test isn't worth doing till I get to my desk, because Hell, none of the rest of me is awake till then, there's no reason my blood should rush to the surface just cos I stab a needle into my thumb. My blood's like the rest of me, it needs coaxing into operation early in the morning...)

Good-ish day, when you consider that neither d nor I do terribly well when we're out of each other's immediate orbit for too long (and yes, frankly, overnight is too damn long!) - we're one of those absolutely nauseating couples that way. I got quite a lot done today, but have discovered that as time is closing in, my To-Do Lists have entered their spawning season - I can barely get half way through one before two more lists have popped into existence. What's more, by the time I've actually managed to cross an item off any one list, at least three extra items have been born on that list, and a couple on at least one other...

The whole thing, added to the fact of getting up and coming home in darkness, gives a sense of rapidly encroaching twilight to the week - the sudden running out of the daylight-time of my London life. We did a lot of farewells while d was here, and I'm having to do final visits to a couple of places this week, but with d already working on setting up the new flat in Wales, it feels like I'm running to beat a Solstice sunset, or and endless series of Christmas lists and deadlines...

It occurs to me that this is probably what Father Christmas feels like in these precious last few weeks, wondering where he gets a pony from for little Louise at 24 hours notice, and whether Timmy Johnson can be persuaded he wasn't quite good enough this year, simply because lumps of coal are a hell of a lot easier to come by in this economic climate than Sony Playstations...

In purely Disappearing terms, probably not that bad a day - as mentioned, five miles of walking in uncomfortable shoes, a record three Starbucks (which pretty much, between them, negate the five miles of walking!), brocolli soup for lunch - seriously? Broccoli, as a soup? Which demented vegetarian ever thought that was a good idea?? (shrugs...one with a shitload of brocolli to use up, I guess...), and beans on toast for dinner. You know that technique where if you eat slowly, and make a meal last for 20 minutes, you feel fuller for longer, because your eyes are not only very often 'bigger than your belly,' as the phrase has it, but your brain, frankly, is also very often slower than your gut. It takes about 20 minutes for the signal "Hey, Schmucko - I'm full!" to travel the distance from your stomach to your brain.

Think about that. As a species, we have the hand-eye co-ordination to play cricket, for God's sake (though noticeably not the intellectual capacity to explain why we do so to the satisfaction of an impartial observer). And yet it takes 20 minutes for your brain to work out that if you keep shovelling food into your mouth, at some point fairly soon, your body's gonna be full.

Can I just mention, once more, that Intelligent Design is a crock of horse-shit?
Thank you...

Anyhow, the technique would appear to work quite well - smallish meal really, but very filling, because I ate it while reading some of The House of Atreus by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. It's all fathers sacrificing their daughters on alters, and then wives stabbing their husbands to death for sacrificing their daughters on alters, and then, just when you thought it couldn't get weird enough, there are dreams of women giving birth to snakes, and breastfeeding them, till they sink their fangs in and suckle blood out of their nipples...oh and then the wife's two remaining kids get together with a plan to stab Mommy Dearest in the chest, and slit the throat of her new, possibly gay-man, lover (hence the 'possibly'!)...

...which is a great way of making sure you chew your beans on toast slowly, it has to be said. Actually, looked at one way, it's a great way of realising you're not that hungry after all.

Mind you, I could just be thinking about this too hard. With all the dashing about and list-spawning, it's entirely possible I was just savouring 20 minutes of doing pretty much buggerall but reading ancient Greek gorenography and eating some beans on toast! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got an elf strike in sector 7Q and Rudolf's come down with reindeer-flu...

The Inverted Weekend

2011-12-18T18:24:00.000Z

Well that was weird.

All day yesterday, d and I kept telling each other how it felt like Sunday already, because we'd both been home on Friday, packing our little hearts out. Today, frankly, has felt suspiciously Saturday-ish all day long.

And when I say long, I mean long. We stumbled to our air mattress about 1AM, to catch some sleep. Set the alarm for 5AM, and woke up naturally before it went off. d was already pottering about, doing the final things that needed doing. As it turned out, that was just as well, cos the removal men, who had said they were going to be here at 6, and then had changed that to 7, turned up almost as originally planned at 6.15! By that point it wasn't exactly a case of being dressed as vicars and nuns and offering plates of small oily fish to people at random, but we were running around, doing what seemed to be an ever-expanding number of those apparently last, final-honest things. The guys were hefty Valleys blokes, with cheery dispositions and a fine line in whatever the Welsh equivalent of the Irish craic is...chrachhhhh probably, with significant amount of phlegm-expulsion as part of the pronunciation.

Anyhow, these guys turned up with a big big van, and almost equally big big muscles, and went through the flat like a small but dedicated plague of locusts - within about 45 minutes, they were done, we were down to bare carpets, and I was waving d off around the corner.

I wandered through the empty flat, looking for something to do or somewhere to sit that wasn't inflatable. Plugged in the iPod and listened to Christmas songs for a while. Yes, voluntarily. Not at all sure what that was about.

Possibly, as my pal Mae suggested, to add to or test my Grumpy Git personna. Strangely enough, it had the opposite effect - I came over all excited and Christmassy. This, clearly, couldn't be allowed to go on. I developed a plan - I would go to Oxford Street.

Oxford Street on Christmas Week, which this nearly is, is where they put all the people who are destined for Hell but can't get in yet, due to the queues. But today - calm. Quiet. Eerie. You could walk about ten abreast up most of the street, should you have that many friends with a masochistic bent. I'm guessing this is the meaning of all those panicky headlines I'm seeing about the death of the British high street, as we all either buy nothing at all but an extra lump of coal for our Christmas dinner, or buy online. Whatever we're doing, Oxford Street was nowhere near bad enough to dim my festive spirit. Came home to the empty flat. That, finally, felt weird.

There's a sensation when you give up a job and are working your notice period of being Dead Man Walking - or I guess Lame Duck Waddling, in political terms. Right now I feel like Grumpy Welshman Squatting - as though the place stopped belonging to us at about 7 o'clock this morning, and now I'm just taking the piss, letting myself in and out of someone else's house and dossing on their floor.

Of course, technically, that's always true when you rent. But it's always felt like our place - it's been where we've come "Home" to. And now it isn't. Now it's just some weirdly empty, anodyne walls, and an air mattress, and me.

(Shrug).

d got the movers sorted out at the other end of course, and, if she's got any sense, will be going to bed soon - s'been a very exhausting few weeks since we got the news that we could move Home to Wales.

In actual Disappearing terms, a pretty good day - had a couple of big de-caffs throughout the course of the day, oosome beans on toast, a packet of baked crisps and three Weetabix. Not by any means a stellar day, but compared to yesterday's pizzafest, not bad either. Have already set my alarm for the morning, for 6AM. Time to get back on the walking jag.

Well, I say time - thankfully, it's not time for another 11 and a half hours. Right now it's time to settle into the mattress with a movie and a bottle of water, I reckon. Tomorrow it's time to get back on the walking jag.

Maybe...

A Love Letter From The Olden Days

2011-12-17T22:55:00.001Z

It's the day before d leaves. That's meant lots of packing, and a meet-up for a meal in Romford, with some of her old workmates who've become pals. Yuen and Matt, Caroline and Russell, Leon and Niki (with their daughter Sadie and friend), plus Paige the newbie.
Good fun at an Italian restuarant for several hours. We talked about all sorts of things, but mainly, and wonderfully, about d. As most of the people around the table had worked with her at some point, it was a love letter from various points of the past, to the present, with happy wishes for the future.

I didn't exactly fall off the Disappearing wagon (resisted the lure of the desserts, despite the frankly whorish concoctions on offer). But in some ways, today was like a love letter from the olden days in a culinary sense too - ate potato skins and pizza, with gusto and abandon as we talked and laughed and remembered all the wonders that make up my wife. I figure it's pointless fretting about this right now - I have next week free from the tyranny of bathroom scales, in which to undo any damage of an Ordinary Day, and hopefully even make some progress on that Early Resolution.

It was interesting, and somehow I felt privileged, to see her through some other eyes today - highly recommend it as an exercise, by the way - see someone you love through the eyes of other people they've impressed. You'll see things you always suspected, shining brightly through in shards of mirror you've never possessed. And it'll make you even more grateful, and wondering, that they're in your life at all.

Yuen looked fabulous, and somehow radiant, and smiley as she always does. Matt (a fellow Who fan), talked about having an inside source that mentioned Ice Warriors coming in Season Seven (and you probably heard it here first. And didn't give a toss...). Caroline joked about coming to terms with 'being the new d' - she took over d's job as of last week. Russell told me I could probably stop being diabetic if I got my weight down to about eleven stone (Hello - welcome to the party, man!), and mentioned that maybe, some time in the future, we'd move again (Shame - I quite liked him up until that point...). Niki told us tales from her work, which is fascinating, but which I'm not going to share here on the grounds that they're her tales, not mine. Leon, I think it's fair to say, did his level best to embarrass the bejeesus out of his daughter and her pal (Sterling work, good man!). And Paige, bless her, who was perhaps ironically the last to arrive, turned up at a vital moment and saved the day with her mathematical skill and the calculator on her phone. Oh and while I think about it, Caroline also shared with us the pure joy of a website called www.deathclock.com. Go ahead, go there, I dare ya - it'll scare the bejeesus out of you. That wasn't so much a love letter from the olden days as a bitchslap from the future - according to 'normal' estimates, I'm due to die on August 3rd 2042, at the age of almost-but-not-quite 71. d on the other hand is scheduled to pop off the planet on March 19th 2039. I reckon if I have to piss about on the planet for three years in her absence, I'll probably die of sheer boredom anyhow, but yyyyeah...thanks for that one Caroline...

One cute little side effect of looking on that site though is that I've just had to calculate my BMI again. And apparently I'm now on the Very Overweight/Obese border. I know, not exactly party time perhaps, but as I mentioned riiiiight back at the start of this thing, I was originally in the Holy Fuck, How Are You Still Walking Around, You Fat Fuck? category, so I've come through the wilds of morbid obesity, through the flatlands of ordinary obesity, and now am flirting in the forests of just being very overweight. So, that's worth a miniature awoohoo all on its own.

We said fairly emotional farewells to the gang, promising to keep in touch, and then we came home and worked our asses off. Then we stopped, and I wrote this while watching How To Train Your Dragon...(shrugs)...just Because...And now it's 10.50, which means there are just about eight hours left before the men come to take my girl Home. And soooooooo much still left to do. So this is me, buggering off to Do Some Of It, and then hold my honey till the morning dark. Love letters from the olden days are all very well, but sometimes, all you have is right this minute, and you have to make the most of it.

Ni-night.

PS - Almost forgot to say, Caroline, please send the link for this to Leon? Thanks! t

Bombsitery

2011-12-16T20:38:00.000Z

See, I reckon the UN is missing a trick.

There's been all this research over the years into "smart bombs" but all they do, ultimately, is dissassemble molecules. If they wanted to develop a really smart bomb, it would find its way to your door, knock politely and wait till you let it in, then pack up everything you own into storage boxes, mark them as Fragile where necessary, and then pack them onto the back of a truck for you. Notsomuch a weapon of mass destruction, as a weapon of mass eviction.

Our place looks like it's been used for the testing of such a weapon tonight. The kitchen is decimated, but eerily clean. The bedroom...still has far too many clothes in it, but otherwise, it's just a boxful of air mattress. The bathroom - pretty empty. Our personal batcave - well Hell, that's never gonna be empty, but it's empty of anything that a) belongs to us, and b) we give a toss about.

The living room - well, it looks like the living room of people who don't live here any more. Boxes, wrapped-up bits of kitchenalia, one remaining couch, bookcases with their shelves out, wrapped in paper and taped together...I want to tell you it looks like a bombsite, but it'd have to be a very organised bomb...which I think is where we came in.

d and I have both been at home today, working our respective asses off, so again, I'm not gonna worry about the pizza buffet we had for lunch, or the chicken kievs and pasta I had for dinner. Just not gonna worry, or whinge, or bitch. Popped to the nurse at one point today, and with my clothes on, on her scales, I was doing OK, so, frankly, nehh!

The movers will be here about thirty-six hours from the time I write these words. And the next chapter of our lives begins, I guess.

Something that, of course, cannot be said for Christopher Hitchens, who died today. Hitchens, being perhaps the ultimate scorched-earth realist, probably understood quite well that it was coming. He's beyond gloating and victories now of course, but while he was here, it probably gave him some satisfaction to know that when he died, he would be more missed than many of the people he made the targets of his occasional invective. As a fellow journo, I for one will miss his no-really-cut-out-the-bullshit attitude, his breadth of reference and his uncompromising championship of reality over warm feeling. So here's to Hitchens! And to living as uncompromised a life as possible, for as long as possible.

An Early Resolution

2011-12-15T19:49:00.000Z

Bad day, in all Disappearing probability - our Works Chistmas Lunch. Had soup and bread, followed by tomato garlic bread, followed by pizza: seriously, could I be more Carbolicious?

On the other hand, that's one meal in a week, and probably, given the rotund stuffitude of my bad self right now, probably the only meal of the day, so look at me, not stressing. Of course it probably helps that the scales are dead, and so can no longer call after me like schoolyard tattle-tales.

On the upside, finished almost everything I have to do in work before Christmas now, so the lunch was pretty much like that moment at school where they made you do maths problems, and triple underline your final answer. Work done. Pack now. Then bring on the sweet, sweet sparkly Welshness of Christmas.

Not that work is really done of course. Work doesn't finish till the 23rd for me. And there's still plenty to do - preparing, negotiating, signing contracts probably, all that stuff. But on a list of Stuff To Do, the latest issue of my magazine can now be struck through as Done.

Tomorrow, d and I are both at home, working like Snow White's woodland drudges to make sure that at Fuck-Off-o'clock on Sunday morning, when the big burly Welsh blokes come to steal away my wife and pretty much all our remaining Stuff in the world, we're not caught in another West End Farce scene of endless running around and costumes and chaos.

Oh, note for the vampire lovers by the way - blood was just 4.3 this morning - and this is without any of my previously-normal morning walking. Interesting in a geeky kind of way - wonder what it'd be if I'd done the walking. Really kinda missing the walking. Again, I guess, once d goes on to prep the new flat on Sunday, it's gonna be a weird, fairly desolate sort of freedom - like a sort of rolling back of time, as I get one week to pretty much say farewell to my city. The bike will be going with d, but there's nothing (y'know, save all the usual blistery schtick!) to stop me getting back to a walking regime. Think I need a bit of that, a bit of the walking, cos it almost feels like my blood's turning to nougat again (though clearly it isn't - 4.3, did I mention?) the longer I do precisely buggerall in the way of the exercise I was really getting used to. And while of course everything changes when we get to Wales, it'll be nice to get a bit of zingy, oxygenated early morning blood in my veins on the run-up to Christmas. And hopefully, with a system that's been lulled into a fairly true sense of security by doing buggerall, if I can hit it with some unexpected exercise before going Home, it'll jump-start the weightloss again. It would be mad - I mean really, truly, delusionally mad - to hope to hit the five stone barrier before Christmas.

So naturally, that's what I'm hoping for. We've had more of a Christmas present this year than either of us really knows how to express...but that doesn't stop me wishing for more, and if I could choose just one thing, I think that'd be it. One more half-stone, perhaps not by Christmas, but by the end of 2011. That's just sixteen days, and I've had pizza on one of them, so it's fair to say nobody's holding their breath. Still - nothing wrong with an early Resolution...right?

The Omen

2011-12-14T20:47:00.000Z

"Erm...hi honey," said d when I got home last night.
She smiled a little too brightly, and kissed me.
"Hiiii..." I said, momentarily lulled, as men are when women kiss them. Then reality snapped back into place. "Whatcha doin'?" I asked.
"Nuthin'" said d in a coyish, flirty voice.
"Awww, OK honey," I said, smiling at her, playing along for half a second. "What happened?" I asked then.
She sighed a little.
"I don't know, honestly," she said, shrugging and giving up the cutesy act. She was still plenty cute enough for me. "I came into the bathroom, and it was just...erm..."
She paused.
"What?" I said. "What happened?"
"It's the scales," she said, her voice suggesting that in actual fact it was the scales. It had been the scales. These were scales, I got the feeling that had run down the curtain and joined the choir invisibule.
These, in short, were ex-scales.

"Really," she said, almost as though she thought my head was going to explode and I was going to morph all the weight back in the moment of a broken spell or something..."I don't know what happened. I just came into the bathroom and they were...there. Fallen. And when I tried to get them to work, they just...wouldn't. I took the batteries out, rolled them, put them back, but the scales were just...gone."

OK, I thought. The scales committed suicide. They finally got tired of being trodden on by my fat ass, and decided they couldn't face another ten months of this shit. They took their chance, and moved the fuck on to whatever electronic afterlife scales believe in. One with non-corporeal people, presumably, who weigh buggerall at any time.

So - not that I believe in omens, but this seems to be just another sign that our time in London has come to an end. Again, at any other time, this would probably flip me out, because I've been such a whingy git about only using this one particular set of scales as the Official weigh-in recorders, but hey - they died and we're moving out - one less thing to pack, I guess. One more thing to buy, on the other hand...

Which reminds me...We've gone back and forth on this one...Our fridge, whose name is Sven (and why not?), has been the subject of deep debate recently. He's gorgeous and tall and faux-American and was a gift from my folks, and dammit if he's not dying on us too as the time to move out approaches. We've been taking him, and not taking him, and taking him again...

d called me at the office today.
"Erm...hi honey," she said.
"What happened?" I said.
"It's the milk," she said, cutting out a whole round of cutesy as a favour to me.
"What, the milk committed suicide now?"
"Well...kinda," she admitted. "It's turned...again..."

I sighed. This was sadder than the scales. We never named the scales. In fact, come to think of it, I actually stole the scales from a girl I used to work with about two jobs ago. Sven had a personality. And he hasn't committed suicide - Sven's a stayer. But it's kinda like...you know how sometimes, with a beloved elderly relative, you go round one day and they're not exactly tracking the conversation like they were. And then, just as you go to leave, you notice a faint...uriney...smell about the place...

That's Sven.
He wants to stay with us. We love him dearly. But frankly if he was a human we'd be taking him to a clinic in Switzerland right about now. If we tried to move him to Wales now, and carry him up a flight of stairs, and lift him over a narrow balcony, I think he'd just give up the ghost and slip away in a puddle of turned milk and set his freon free.

So I think we've finally made a decision. We're gonna leave Sven here, dribbling gently, for whoever the Hell takes over this place when we've gone. We're gonna remember him fondly, and hope the new people treat him kindly. And actually, we hope he talks to them as though they're us, and just confuses the fuck out of them. That's a good way to remember our Sven. The scales - meh. Time to go online shopping...

The Half-Disappeared Man

2011-12-13T17:15:00.000Z

Now...if you've been paying attention up to this point, you'll know that I can find a way to rob the joy out of even the most delicious moments.

If this was any other week, this could have been one of Those days.

But let's face one fact here - today's news is good. The weigh-in figure is:
16 stone...dead.

That's a loss of a simple quarter-pound, which in fact, on waking up this morning, I hadn't lost. After drinking some water and feeling the spirit of Cloaca move me though, there you go, quarter of a pound, that's your lot for the week. Now, what that means is that all the bitching I did this time last week about being so close to the 16 stone barrier, and the 4.5 stone of weightloss barrier, and the halfway point of this great experiment...is over and done with. I've done it, I've reached it, happy dance in the streets with your hands in the air...awoohoo.

But...

Yesterday, I did an unofficial weigh-in, and saw my first near-as-dammit-official, why-can't-it-be-Tuesday 15 stone reading. Granted, it was 15 stone 13.25, but there it was, all sparkly and Christmassy and thoroughly fifteeny in its wonderment.

This morning - nah, fuck you pal, you're 16 and that's where you'll stay!

Quite enough, on other weeks, to make me panic and pedal and whinge, and slubber the gloss of my triumph (is that a thing people still do?) with the grey paint of hungry ambition.

But this isn't any other week, this is this week. In fact, this is the last Tuesday weigh-in of my London life. The last Tuesday weigh-in before Christmas, because d leaves for Merthyr on Sunday, and takes the scales with her...

She did suggest I keep them with me here, and carry them to work with me on my last day, and then transport them home, like a new-born baby on that day, to set up in our new home in Wales. But - and please note the personal growth here - you can go too far with this kind of thing, y'know? So today's result, while meagre in its nature, and not as good as yesterday's unofficial figure, does at least allow me to say that in ten and a half months since I started this experiment, I've lost half of my excess weight. If we assume a similar rate of progress going forward, then by Christmas of 2012, I'll be, at least physically, the man I'm Supposed To Be. That's got to be a thought to banish the ghosts of yesterday's could-have-beens.

So - who's up for a happy dance with the officially Half-Disappeared Man?

The Downside

2011-12-12T22:01:00.000Z

"Brrrr!" I whinged.
"Yes dear," said d and Sian together.
We'd been shifting life-drippings all day yesterday, and now we were shuffling into the Magor service station for a snatched fast food dinner. And I felt like I was turning blue.
"BRRRRRRR!!" I whinged, louder, to get the point across.
"YES DEAR!" said d, who knows how to deal with me when I get six-year-old and whingy.
"This is bullshit!" I said, through chattering teeth.
"Yep," said d, thinly. She blinked. Sighed.
"What is?" she was almost forced to ask.
"This goddamnsonofabitch cold!"
"Did nobody mention the idea behind December to you, Marty?" asked Sian, scanning the burger-joint menu. (I should say - she calls me Marty, as a result of an ancient, exhausted joke that has its origins in a Martini commercial. Let it go. We probably should have, but haven't. Moving on...)
"Y-y-yyeah," I noted. "I'm familiar with the concept. But why's it so cooooold?!"
"It's December!" they chorused.
"But it was never this cold!" I whined.
d sighed again.
"You were never this thin dear," she reminded me. "Well, not in living memory, anyway..."
"T'riffic," I said, shooting her A Look. "So glad I bothered with all this Disappearing shit."
"Hey, suck it up dear," said d. "I'm turning [figure removed so the author has a hope of ever getting laid again] next month."
I blinked at what seemed like a non-sequitur.
"And?" I asked.
"And I look it!" she almost-growled.
"You don't!" I said, not for the first time.
"I always looked younger than I am," she explained. "People used to ask me how I did it, and I used to tell them - it's the fat. It fills in all the wrinkles and makes me look all smooth and healthy. I lost two stone, and now everything's sagging!"
It isn't, incidentally, but I figure with what she puts up with, she's allowed to whinge about whatever the hell she wants.
But oddly enough, this was the second time in two days that I'd heard about the Downside. The day before, I'd met up with Rhiannon, Sian's sister. She's never really needed to Disappear, but she's done some almost accidentally recently.
"Hey, lookin' good Rhi'," I mentioned to her. She mumbled and muttered darkly.
"Nothing fits!" she said.
"Well, no, but that's all part of the Adventure, isn't it?"
"Huh," she muttered. "I just bought a car, I can't afford to have Adventures..."

Back in Magor, I blinked at d's Downside. Something occurred to me.
"Freakin' BRRRRRR!!!" I said.
"D'you ever want to put the conversations you have with him on repeat until he get it?" asked Sian idly. d raised an eyebrow but didn't openly agree.
"So, what are you saying to me?" I clarified. "The end result of all this whining and bitching and pedalling and so on is having to wear more clothes or freezing my ass off every Winter?"
"I think he's got it!" said Sian.
"This is Bullshit!" I said again.
d sighed.
"Yes dear. What do you want to eat?"
"I'll have a double sausage burger, with bacon, dammit," I muttered, kicking imaginary stones."
I thought about it some more.
"And a hot-water-bottle suit..."

Jewel of the Taff

2011-12-11T23:45:00.000Z

Those with an attentive nature will have noticed my complete sense-of-humour failure last night - almost hand in hand with my consciousness failure. Sian was due to reappear at six this morning, and when my alarm went off, there was swearing from both our couches. We turned my phone off with extreme prejudice, and put it on snooze. When it exploded into life again fifteen minutes later, I was punching myself on the chest, where it had fallen when I went back to sleep.

Nothing quite gets you awake like punching yourself in the chest, trust me. d woke up and snarled, at me and it, and I turned it off again.
"Wait a minute," said d, as I slid back into sleep again. "What the Hell time is it?"

"Mmmff..." I groaned, the staggering pain in my arms and shoulders waking up and bitching at me.
"It's not 5.45!" said d, announcing the time it was supposed to be when the phone woke us up.
"It's 4.45!!" she announced.
"Ni'night..."I mumbled, turning over on my couch. At some point int he next time, I went to pee. Took the phone with me. Left it in the bathroom.
Next time we woke up it was nearly 7 o'clock. I stumbled back to the bathroom, picked up the phone.
"So - gonna let me in?" said the message I'd received while snoring my head off.
Sian was outside the door, in the van...pretty much preparing to put the seats back and get some extra kip herself.
We ran around, finding clothes like characters in a West End farce. I'm fairly sure there was a Bo Peep costume at some point. There was definitely a vicar's collar. I put on and took off a pair of trousers at least three times. By the time we opened the door, we didn't know what day it was, let alone what time it was, who we were, or why we were running around at this ridiculous time of day.
"Sardines!" I yelled, almost instinctively.
"Not before the first coffee of the day, thankyou," said Sian, striding purposefully into the chaos of our living room. The next hour was a whirlwind of props and movement, as we shoved what we knew we were moving into the van, and then ran around again, improvising madly, making impromptu boxes, emptying bits of furniture we hadn'teven realised were there (that's what being 'part of the furniture' means, after all). A couple of wooden komodo dragons found themselves whisked to Wales. Suddenly, in the space of fifty minutes, our living room looked empty. Our bedroom was emptier. The kitchen...granted, there was still a lot of stuff in the kitchen, but it looked like a naked ass - suddenly and dementedly revealed. It looked achievable to pack up the whole of our lives in mainly one more week, with a couple of extra days at the end. There wasn't time to reflect on that though, we had a date with the motorway. Made it to Merthyr in good solid time today, rather than piddling about round Gloucester.

When we got there, there was plenty to do before we even dared unpack the van. First, and perhaps most important, there was boggling to do. It was the first time d had seen the place since it had been an idea, dunked in the dinge of a previous tenant. Now...

Now it's a thing of real beauty. Light, and bright and newly equipped and newly painted and newly...erm...new. Of course, it was this little oyster shell of a place, with a vanload of yesterday's boxes in it. d boggled, and loved it. Really, she loved it. It was one of those moments where you could see her eyes widen and her heart burst, like a...well, obviously enough, like a kid at Christmas. We opened boxes, and started putting our real identity on the place. Within the space of an hour or two, it felt like not just a jewel on the Taff, but our little jewel on the Taff. We brought one of the couches from London, and our bed. By the end of the day, we had put them both in place, and made the bed up, so that when we both move in on the 23rd of the month, we have a bed to go to.

In other words, this was a wonderful, painful, close connected day.
In Disappearing terms of course, there was a lot of exercise, and my arms are dead right now. As for food intake, it's been simple, but not light, so who knows what'll happen on Tuesday morning. But I wouldn't trade today for a stone of weightloss this week.

Or anything, come to that.

An Exhausted Entry

2011-12-10T22:46:00.000Z

Unff...

Great day. No words, just great day. Christ o'clock we woke up, Christ o'clockish, Sian arrived with the van. Had a McDonalds porridge breakfast that d got for us. Decided, after the events of Camden Town (pretty much the last time I spent the entire day with Sian), not to take my Xenical today.
d, on reflection, decided that after an hour and a half of van-packing, and emptying almost the entire bedroom of boxes, she'd stay home and pack more for tomorrow's trip, while Sian and I did the run to Merthyr and back.

Satnavs, let's agree, are fantastic bits of kit. They will do exactly what you tell them to do, and guide you where you need to go. The one we had this morning though had its own special ideas about how to get from London to Wales. No petty M25 shenanigans for it. It eschewed the straightforward, homely dignity of the M4. We ended up buggering about round Gloucestershire, flirting with Ross-on-Wye, skirting Bristol on the M5, and essentially taking a little more forever than we should have.

Got to the new flat at about 2PM. That's when the hard work really began. Getting everything into the van had largely been a matter of shifting things that were on the same level. Getting the full boxes up to our new first floor flat was serious resistance work. Took us two hours, and by the end of it, we were pretty much dead. Several of our boxes had collapsed, spilling contents all over the balcony as we walked to the fla, just to add to the fun.

Ma had prepared chicken rolls for us, and as the sun plummeted, we tore into them, desperate to get the protein into our system after the hours of shifting. And then we trusted our lives to the satnav again. It took us through some of London's more...erm...populous areas on a Saturday night. We did quite a monopoly tour, from Pentonville Road to Angel Islington to Whitechapel and Bow Road and more...Sian, who ain't from round here, keeping up a monologue about how there was no reason to own a car in London under any circumstances. Not ever.

She dropped me off at home at gone ten tonight. She'll be back at about six tomorrow. Have to be honest with you, there was lots of funny stuff today, and a partial re-enactment of Camden Town (I killed our very first Merthyr toilet-brush, which is just frankly unfair under any circumstances!)...but tonight, I can barely focus, let alone be funny. Just take my word for it. Funny. Haha. Yay. Good feeling to get rid of boxes. Mumblemumblemumble, going to couchzzzzzzzzz.....

Slipping Into The Fog

2011-12-09T22:19:00.000Z

Have you ever thought what it's like to be the central processing unit of your computer?

I'm generally pretty merciless, and push mine till they squeak - while I realise that having loads of stuff on your desktop makes your CPU addled and slow and basically forget what is, I figure it exists to serve me, rather than vice versa, and so I make it suffer for the convenience of having things where I can see them at a glance.

This week though, I'm starting to get an idea of how it feels. The more plates you spin, with the same physical deadline, the more intense the energy and the less focus yo uhave on any particular thing, until ultimately, everything gets too much and you crash, and fall over yourself, and retreat into a darkened corner of your casing and gibber for mercy.

Kinda feels like the spirit of the day, and the spirit of the week, really - work deadlines, packing deadlines, Disappearing deadlines - waaaagh! - and unless I'm really careful, I'm going to go into lockdown, or meltdown, or somesuch 503 Error.

Since only one of these deadlines is self-imposed, the Disappearing is almost slipping into the fog of the background. It's not that I'm suddenly guzzling handfuls of lard or anything, but I haven't biked in almost two weeks now, and the bottom line is I'm unlikely to get back on it before we leave London.

The fire still burns though - this is not me stumbling to a halt some two months before the end of Year One. It's just a case of spinning the first plates...first, as it were. As I keep wittering on about, when we get to Wales, everything changes. Time, availability of a range of exercise options...y'know, like uphill walking(!). For now though, I'm just having to do whatever I can in the way of not stuffing my gob, feeding myself excuses like the slowing of the metabolism as you lose weight, and, as d has just mentioned, get the 'stairmaster-workout-from-Hell,' carrying boxes up and down to our first floor new home...So if I happen to not have lost on Tuesday, or if I even happen to have put back on, it's just what it is. It's a speed-bump, till this deadline is passed, and that deadline is passed, and we can (to steal a line from a big fat dead guy in a bathtub) break on through to the other side.

Which is two weeks from now. Fourteen little days from right this minute, we'll have closed the door on our new place. As I look around our devastated living room, that seems unreal. But it's really a rollercoaster moment - tomorrow at 6AM, we crest the first hill and start rushing down at about 2G. And from there, we don't really stop for those two weerks. Of course, as I may have mentioned, there's only one more week before both the bike and the scales disappear from my life for a week. So, hold on to your Disappearing hats - this is where things get a bit manic and complicated. Though not noticeably less foggy till Christmas.

The Sweet Shop Window

2011-12-08T21:31:00.000Z

I mentioned that I like Nottingham as a place a couple of days ago. Forgot to mention a very particular thing.

Nottingham has the most peculiar sweet shop I've ever seen. Ten months into this Disappearing experiment, I'm mostly past the stage where I stand drooling outside sweet shop windows, mourning over what I can't have. Mostly. But I popped into this particular sweet shop, because of a most extraordinary claim.

Sugar Free Sweets.

I know, I know - there have been sugar free sweets for decades, but normally, they're just a handful of varieties, and they both look and taste like bitter little turds of self-denial and self-loathing - they're kind of like the culinary equivalent of drunk nightclub-sex. You grab them, you have them, you throw up and you feel like crap.

But these were different. These were genuine sweet shop sweets - bonbons and suckables and eclairs - how the fuck do you make a sugar-free eclair? - and wonderful stuff. I pressed my nose to jars, and actually contemplated getting some. After all, they were sugar free. One jar of lime and chocolate sweets though had actual calorie information, and they apparently 'cost' about 250 calories per quarter-pound. And while, don't get me wrong, there are far worse ways of spending those calories, I couldn't bring myself to buy them.

Was pretty much too bhusy being miserable and frozen on the day to focus on this, but today has felt like a real 'sweet shop window' kind of day. Or, if you like, a 'kid on Christmas Week' kind of day. With so much focus on the move, and the steps towards the move, simply going in and doing a day of work and coming home feels like almost bursting out of my skin with anticipation of what's to come. Come January, I'll be there for my folks - which appears just as well, as there's News today that is a little disquieting, though not as bad as it could have been - I'll have time to do more active Disappearing, and I'll have at least a little more time to write. I can see them sparkling in their little jars of Future Time, and I just want to unscrew them right now and guzzle them down.

So this is me...staring in, hopping up and down from one foot to another, counting the change in my palm and knowing, just knowing, it's not time to go in yet.

Not quite yet, dammit.

Oh, for the vampires among us, blood was 5.0 this morning, back to normal after a shocking result yesterday of 6.8. And for those hanging on the idea that I might break all those barriers on Tuesday, I should note - just had myself a big-ass pizza (in so many senses of the phrase). Still - here's hoping. Still hoping.

Jingle Bells

2011-12-07T21:31:00.000Z

Ahhhh, and so this is Christmas - when To Do Lists get longer, and tempers get shorter, and the season to be relentlessly shitty to our Fellow Man is upon us all, gracing each face with a sweet-natured snarl, and each lip with a cheery "...Fuck You Too!"

Ain't the human spirit grand?

Somebody stole Harrods this morning - I think it must have been some of those jolly, rosy-cheeked urchins that Dickens was always wittering on about at this time of year. I got off a tube at Knightsbridge, intending to walk the shortish distance into the office, only to discover that Knightsbridge tube station (which I've walked by many a time en route to getting hopelessly lost in Victoria) had been shifted down a back alley somewhere. I found Harrods eventually, but I'd walked so far by then I think it was visiting the Moulin Rouge. Certainly, it wasn't where I'd left it last time. It's kinda weird - now that we've given notice on our flat, we'll come in of an evening and just do a mental checklist of whether anyone's been in to see it - is the bathroom door open, or the toilet lid up? Is there (as there once was when we came back from a holiday and hadn't given notice on our flat), a carrier bag full of ancient printer in the hallway...that type of thing. So now it's kinda like we've given notice on London, and familiar landmarks have been moved, as though the estate agents have come in and shifted things around to impress the new tenants.

Finally found my way back to my office, and had the kind of day that was deeply deeply productive, but only by virtue of jettisoning my To Do List early on (side-note to Kathy - SORRY - tomorrow, images, first thing, I swear!). I was home late, and got on a bus for the last stretch at Stratford. We'd gone one stop when things kicked off. A couple of twenty-something women had been dinging the bell to get the doors opened.
The doors stayed shut.
They dinged some more.
The doors stayed, if anything, shutter than before. It would be fair to say they almost pursed.
"Oi!" shouted one of the women shouted. "Can you open the doors please!"
The doors positively puckered, into a state of shutness that would be the envy of a pharoah's tomb. The bus began to move off.
"OOOOOIIIIII!!!!" yelled the woman. "Open the doors! There's people who wanna get off the bus!"
"Should have rung the bell, innit?" yelled the driver, pulling out into traffic.
It's important at this point to note that I was between the two of them, getting an earful of this positively Shakespearian dialogue each way.
"WE DID RING THE FUCKING BELL, YOU FOOL!!!" The woman had given up on yelling as it clearly wasn't getting her point across, and had moved on to demented Harpy-like screaming instead.
"FUCK OFF!" yelled the bus driver, presumably eschewing the scream as too demonstrably non-masculine.
"The bystander, a man in his forties, was due to leave the city in just two weeks time..." ran the newsreel of my accidental stabbing in my head.
The driver though clearly wasn't thinking this through. The woman would have been more than happy to have fucked off at this point, except she'd have broken at least a couple of nails trying to claw her way out through the hermetically-sealed cast iron doors, and then, in all probability, she'd have been run down by oncoming traffic, assuming her stilletos hadn't snapped on the impact of landing and pitched her under the wheels of her own bus.
He drove off, with her ringing the bell repeatedly every inch of the way.
"I'm RINGING THE BELL, you deaf fucking FOOOOOOOL!!! she screeched. He didn't appear to care. He drove us around a big corner, then stopped in the middle of the road, and opened the door.
"Now FUCK OFF!!!" he yelled again. A cab bacon-sliced right by the side of us. Now it was her turn not to care - clearly several tons of metal, travelling at speed, was less of a danger to life and limb than staying in this bus.
She screamed at his once more as she was leaving, he tried to decapitate her with the deadly doors, and we moved off with a scream of tyres I didn't think buses could achieve unless they were driven by Sandra Bullock.
My stop was next.
"It was the bell-ring that that broke the driver's mind, causing him to strangle the so-called 'Disappearing Man' with his own man-scarf..." said the newsreader in my head. I reached up, tentatively, took a deep breath...and rang the bell.

Clearly though, the driver had vented his day'sworth of fury and fucked-offness. He let me off, and I scurried home.

Merry freakin' Christmas, people. I'm a Welshman - get me out of here!

Shaving Father Christmas

2011-12-06T19:24:00.000Z

Alright, what the Hell happened there?

So, seriously, if you’re really obsessive or have a reasonable memory, you’ll recall the history of last week. Monday – 16 stone 3. Friday – 16 stone 4.5. Today, for this week’s official weigh-in…

16 stone 0.25.

Seriously?? 4.25 pounds in three days? That’s way outside the ‘healthy weightloss’ remit of this project. It also makes absolutely zero sense, inasmuch as I haven’t got on the bike since I came home on Friday. Haven’t done a long walk. Have done precisely buggerall in the way of actively trying to lose weight, if I’m honest, and last night, had an Italian, largely bread-based meal. Sooooo what the Hell???

Of course…I did have a shave yesterday. Now, of course, I’m not dumb enough to think this is behind anything, but it was getting to a point of critical mass. Can I just say – December is not the month to be a fat, occasionally jolly bloke with a full bushy beard and only the vaguest of holes where your mouth should be. Kids on tubes get utterly spellbound, and you can actually hear their conniving little brains as they work out that they’ve just seen Santa on his way to work, and that they’d better be extra specially nice, certainly, but also extra specially noisy to make sure he doesn’t forget them when The Time Comes.

So yesterday, I had a professional beard trim, and am now much more confident of which hole the sound is coming out of (to paraphrase Ruby Wax). But four pounds of hair? I think not.

If I wanted to pile on the pseudo-science, I’d expostulate (you might have noticed, I do that sometimes. It’s a habit. I have many.) that maybe the seriously nipple-popping weather we’ve been having lately has something to do with it. It would make some weird sort of mathematical sense, wouldn’t it, that your system had to burn more calories just to function normally in ridiculously cold weather?

(Shrugs) Could be bollocks of course, but all I know is that I’m now so close to the 4.5 stone barrier, the 16 stone barrier and, perhaps most importantly, the halfway point I can practically taste it!

Mind you, having said that, you’d think I’d have been in a better mood all day, really. Haven’t been – have been snappy and growly and generally a pain in the universe’s ass all day long.

Mind you, I have been in Nottingham.

Not that this should be taken as in any way meaning I have a problem with Nottingham. I like Nottingham a lot – as a city, it seems to make sense to me (to the extent that I could navigate around it without issue today, which, as we know, I can’t do in London after living there for nearly a decade!). I’ve just, I think, been snarly and growly because…well, firstly because I’m so close, and yet can’t smoke the triple-cigar of official celebration – 4.5 stone, 16 stone, halfway: that, finally, will be a fat cigar of accomplishment, and the kind of celebration I put off at three stone and four stone. So close, but not yet quite there. Growl.

Plus of course, it has to be remembered that much of the rest of the planet is populated by fuckwits. I’ve been run over, line-jumped, frog-marched, frozen and made to take an interest in buses today, and all while being acutely aware that the box-run is now THIS WEEKEND, and that d’d be at home alone this evening, so it doesn’t feel like I’m pulling my not-inconsiderable weight. Clearly though, it’s another of those things that needs to be accepted and growled about and then gotten the Hell over and moved on from. Everything’s positive right now – Disappearing, the move…wow, that was a short definition of Everything, wasn’t it? How many days do we have left before the Euro implodes, anybody still counting? And apparently we’re ‘back’ in recession (note for the linguists and pedants – does being back in recession mean we’re in a re-recession?)…but, y’know, apart from imminent financial collapse, and allegedly some Mayans thousands of years ago predicting people they neither knew, nor in fact gave a fuck about, would stop existing next year, everything in my personal garden is pretty damn rosy right now, so as d would say, time to grab my ass and get happy.

So this is me – grabbing handfuls of wobbly buttock and singing a happy song!

Princesses United

2011-12-06T00:48:00.000Z

See, there have always been two parts to being a journalist. Part One, I'm reeeeeeallly freakin' good at, cos part one is finding out interesting stuff, and knowing it. Part two...the whole bit about telling anyone the stuff you know....nnnnotsomuch.

This came home to me tonight, when, with d and I having lived in this city together for seven years, and my having known Brenda (you remember Brenda? She's a really cool pal of mine who works on the same floor - I've blogged about her before) for four or five or possibly even stretching back to six, I finally got them together in a room.

See - I've known d is wonderful, and I've known Brenda's wonderful, and I've known that, if I got them together, it'd be love at first words...I just haven't particularly told either of them fact three in this list. Wellll, I sort of have, but the pace of metropolitan living kinda washes words away in the checking off of Stuff To Do. When I got them together tonight (well, I say I did this, I only half did it really, Brenda and I determined to do it, dammit, to finally stop the flow of Stuff and turn our friendship into a proper couple-thing), it was magical. We went to Strada on High Street Kensington.

Can't honestly remember if I've told you about this before. But anyone who remembers the Paradiso Lost post, about the place we were going to hold our wedding reception, will remember that at the last minute (or rather, with ten days to go!), we turned our back on Paradiso, and went somewhere else entirely. Where we went was Strada in Richmond. We didn't even know it was part of a chain, we were so blown away by the food, the welcome, the space above the restaurant. And we had a fantastic reception. It was only later that we realised there were Stradas everywhere, and since I work in Kensington, the HSK branch has long been a local favourite for us, so tonight ticked one more slightly sad memory off our Farewell Tour list. But mostly, it was fantastic to enjoy Brenda's company outside of work, to finally meet Gerry, her bloke (whose existence, and life and progress in my friend's affections into the pride of place in her life, I've charted excitedly over meetings in corridors and halls and occasionally in doorways and lifts), and to see d and Brenda enjoy each other's company and stories.

See, you'll have heard of gaydar - the instinctive recognition of same. What no-one tells you is there's a similar recognition between comfy couples. Couples who are happy and comfy and funny together, as long as they share a wavelength, will know other couples who are happy and comfy and funny together. And stick a couple of them together, and what you get is the kind of evening that frustrates the bejeesus out of waiters, as the talk overtakes the eating, and you only tear yourself away eventually cos you have to get up in the morning and go to freaking Nottingham.

In a way, I feel kind of guilty about introducing d to these truly fabulous people now. It's sort of compounding an issue she's feeling already. She's made some great friendships while she's been here in London. Yuen, and 'DQ' and a couple of others (not including Tig of course, with whom she was friends before she got here). But recently, very recently, she's gained a really great pal in Caroline, and there's a kind of kick-in-the-teethness about having discovered her now, and thennnnn buggering off. I feel pretty much like a pantomime villain, carring Rapunzel off to a Valley-shaped tower just when she's found, if not her prince, then at least a really cool Princess she can hang out with, swapping Princess stories of balls and Princes and frogs and incompetent fairy godmothers and the like.

And tonight, I reckon she found another Princess. Well, I know she did, cos I know Brenda's quality. But when we parted, d whispered "Wow, she's just like Annie..." - which, short of "Wow, she's just like Lori" is the highest praise she can give. Of course, they say 'better late than never', and I'm pretty much sure that these two will now form bonds of their own, without the necessity of me as a bridge, and we as a foursome will go forward, with visits and Skyping and suchlike fun. But still, feels like I should shake a fist at the audience, stroke a comedy beard and cackle "Bwahahahahaaaa..." as I fling d over my shoulder and drag her home to Wales.

Oh...and a sidenote, for those who are wondering about the ongoing career of our Chinese woman - of whom I happen to know there are a few - we came home tonight to find the lid of our garbage bin flung open and boxes flung hither...and possibly even yon...in our front garden. So - we either have pretty musclebound urban foxes, or that cheeky bint is scavenging for more bags and rucksacks and bloody wardrobes. I'm thinking of setting traps tomorrow, just to see what we can catch. Hey - it's still a while till payday, and it brings out the Urban Trapper in me. May have to dig my Davy Crockett cap out of a box, just to get into the swing of it.

But for now, have to crawl into my couch. Nottingham ho, my liege!