The Hammersmith Fall

Remember this week I mentioned that if I have a bad day, I’m not gonna whinge and moan and get psychotic about it and chastise myself endlessly? Just gonna get up in the morning  and get back on the bike?

Well, depending on your point of view, this might have been one of those days.

Had coffee for breakfast. Nothing for lunch, and a coffee for dinner…then kinda gave in to an urge. Have felt the call of Hammersmith all day long – Hammersmith, longer term readers will remember, being the location of the only remaining Cranberry store in London. Cranberry being a store I used to visit habitually – and I do mean habitually – for fruits and nuts. Went to Hammersmith tonight, got myself a bag of fruit and nuts, which included some honey cashews. 

So there. 

Bless me Father for I have sinned, and enjoyed it, and will get up in the morning and get on the freakin’ bike. Was planning of course to do some pre-work walking, but as the country dabbles with the idea of snow, I’m persuaded that possibly working up a sweat in my own bedroom (insert your own ever-so-witty comment here – I’ve been up for 17 hours and can’t manage it. Shurrup, I’m told it happens to all men occasionally) is the way to go.

(Dribbles aimlessly into keyboard)…SO out of practice at this UberCommute business…

The Home Cooking Dilemma

I've undoubtedly mentioned this before, but d's a great cook.

I mean, a staggeringly great cook. When she puts a meal before you, to leave any of it behind is practically a crime.

As such, it's been a hard 24 hours. Last night, she made French Onion Soup from scratch. Gorgeous, before you ask, but - I suppose thankfully, from a Disappearing perspective - nice and small.
For lunch today, she made pizza subs - again, from scratch.
Tonight, home made mac and cheese and pork chops...nom nom nom...

With perhaps the exception of the pizza sub lunch, which I hoovered down like an elephant with peanuts, I think portion control on these gorgeous meals was...ok. And I'm still doing at least an hour of biking a day. Tomorrow of course, that all goes to pot, as I'm on an UberCommute to London. Might wear my boots though, and do a couple of revolutions of Hyde Park during the lunch hour.

Tuesday, gonna start trying to do early morning walking again, double that up with the biking for a couple of days and see what happens. For now, I have a bag...or two, in fact...to pack, and then some sleep to get before the UberCommute begins again.

Ni'night.

The Perrin Dessert Fantasy

One thing springs immediately to mind, being back on the Disappearing kick: The lost opportunities.

While I was technically off the wagon, I didn't ever go completely and utterly insane. There were no orgies of colossal and conspicuous consumption...unless you count a seven-course Christmas dinner of course, which I suppose we probably should.

While waiting for d, Louise and Mark last night at the Dragonfly, I had a recurrence of a fantasy that struck me once in a Bognor Regis bog-standard chain restaurant.

"One day," I thought, "I'm going to come here and do a kind of dessert version of a Reggie Perrin Special..."

A Reggie Perrin Special in this context is a little tricky to explain. Reginald Iolanthe Perrin is a comic creation by a writer called David Nobbs. A chronically frustrated and occasionally impotent sales executive for a frozen dessert company, Reggie tries to have an affair with his willing secretary, fails, goes a little bit more mad and eventually leaves all his clothes on the beach and absolutely doesn't commit suicide. He lets everyone think he's dead and goes off to have another life, later returning and making a tremendous success of a business selling people things with absolutely no value whatsoever.

I know, I know - you're wondering what all this has to do with the price of a blackcurrant cheesecake, aren't you?

Before he goes completely off the rails, one of the tell-tale signs that all is not right in the world and the mind of Reggie Perrin is that he goes out, on his own, for a meal at an Italian restaurant. He orders a plate of ravioli to start.

When asked what he'd like for his main, he orders another plate of ravioli.

And when asked about dessert, he agrees wholeheartedly that he'd like to peruse the dessert menu...then orders a third plate of ravioli. Ravioli...cubed, as it were. Perhaps the most demented part of which is that he doesn't actually like ravioli. At all.

I've had the recurring idea, as I say, that one day, I'm going to go into a restaurant, and when they ask me what I want to start with, I'll pick the first thing on the dessert menu. And the second thing...And indeed the third thing.

Then, for main, I'll have the next three or four things on the dessert menu, thank you very much. And to finish, perhaps, one each of...everything else on the dessert menu. That'll do nicely. No poncing around with garlic mushrooms. No space wasted on virtuous protein. Just an afternoon composed entirely of desserts. I'd happily tip the waiter handsomely, as long as the desserts kept coming.

Then of course I'd go into a diabetic coma of intense ferocity, and possibly pass out and die. But damn...if you can't do a Private Benjamin, what a way to go...

Sigh...Ignore me...just a little Disappearing fantasy...Mind you, clearly it's not just me. I mentioned this to Louise when she arrived, and she totally got it. Anyone else have this kind of insane gluttony-lust?

Ahem...don't all rush, will ya?

The Murderous Tendency and the Perspex Permeability

Y'know how I can tell I'm back on the Disappearing kick properly?

Mainly, it's the urge to do violent things to other perfectly ordinary human beings. I'm telling you, there's a lesson here that explains why religious groups who are so keen on chastity a) get so mad at other people who have sex and b) often end up being led by people who are sexual deviants. You restrict your ability to have things you want, and suddenly, a little bitter seed of resentment is planted for those who have the freedom you're denying yourself in an attempt to be "better" on whichever scale you think is important.

Today, for me, it was a perfectly harmless guy in line at the bank.
He was already being served when I walked through the door. I could smell him immediately.

More accurately, I could smell the grease and vinegar of the fish and chips he had wrapped up in his thin, wuss-ass Lidl carrier bag, while he had some complex piece of financial chicanery (it's a bank, let's face it: chicanery is likely) explained to him. And for a good handful of seconds, I relished the fantasy of slamming his head down on the counter time after time after time and then forcing it under the glass, into that little curved tray through which all banking business has to be conducted.

Then I blinked, and he moved off...with his life and his head intact.

Now it should be noted that I wasn't even craving fish and chips. I haven't thought about fish and chips in weeks. Actually, what I was craving is something I haven't even tasted - there are ads on Facebook at the moment for four new weird-ass varieties of Kit-Kat - Coconut, Mint, Double Choc Fudge annnnnnd something else. Don't care. Want them all. All the Kit-Kats in all the world. Right here, right now, no arguments! Gimme!

But still, the olfactory memory, when it hit me, was a frying pan to my craving centres. So, luckily, the man in the bank escaped with his life and his lunch, but it was touch and go there for a minute.

Tonight, had great fun. Pal of d's from work called Louise, and her bloke, Mark, met us at the Dragonfly, and we had a fantastic evening of chat and laughs and getting to know each other better.
You know I've committed to this thing, but this time round, with a kind of permeable perspex box between me and all the stuff I want and can't have. That kind of kicked in tonight - had a burger and potato wedges and some mushrooms. Technically, this probably puts me over what I should have had today, but I'm not going to go mental about it.

No, really I'm not.

Honest. Just gonna get up tomorrow and treat it as a new day. Permeable perspex will at least keep me saner than full-on, unbreakable perspex. Whether it remains an effective weightloss strategy...I guess we'll find out at the weigh-in on Thursday.

The Yoghurt Resistance

OK, so today's headline: the first comparative weigh-in of 2013 shows me at:
17 stone 8.5 pounds. That's 246.5 pounds, for the Americans.

That's down 6.5 pounds on last week. Yes, yes, we've all been here before - marvelous, wonderful, but the trick of course is keeping that loss intact, and pushing it down. Anyone can lose that much in a week if they have as many spare pounds as I have. Next week will be a proving-ground, far more than this week.

Still, I won't say I'm not encouraged to have said a hearty "fuck you" to 18 stone again.

The real news today though...and it's dawning on me how weird this is going to sound...was going shopping.

I haven't been shopping alone this week. I've been too scared.

Yeah, you heard me. Scared.

Sounds pathetic to be scared of one's self, doesn't it? But you see, while I was pretty much off the Disappearing Wagon, shopping alone, which I did cos I work from home most days, became a kind of endless trip down fairy lanes of whispering temptation..."Ooh, what about this?" "Mmmm, remember that?" "Oh man, I could just dive into the other..."

I fully expected the whispers to become shouts now I'm absolutely not allowed to give in to them again.
And, true to form, they yelled at me...

For yoghurt, of all things. Muller Corner yoghurts with uber-sweet corner-fillings, like "Strawberry Shortcake" and "Choc and Vanilla Balls" and the like.

I know where this is coming from, thankfully. You remember yesterday, I mentioned Ma's house is a wonderland of temptation? She offered me a Muller Corner after lunch (though she has far more sober Corners, like fruit compote)...and while I resisted that temptation when it was offered to me, clearly while I slept, that little nugget of sweet nightmare festered in my brain, and now tonight, faced with buying milk in what I've long come to think of as "The Yoghurt Aisle", the little bastards screamed at me, straining off their shelves, to get at me, to rip off their little foil lids and yank open my lips and force their way past my straining, gnashing teeth and make me swallow down their sweet, sweet, calorific wonder.

I took a deep breath and the hallucination slowly cleared.
"Fuck you, Muller," I muttered gratefully, standing in the middle of the aisle and disconcerting people. I forced my legs to move, and as I left the aisle, craving was replaced with smugness of a quite unbearable nature, as I rationalised to myself that the only way to break the craving was to go through it, and not give in to it.

Won't stop me having all sorts of cravings of course. That's the pure delight of craving sweet things - there are so many irrational directions in which they can go, and so many places they can pop up out of the blue. I fully expect days when I feel I can't go on without a Cadbury's Creme Egg in the next few months...or a box of After Eight mints (What do you mean with the raised eyebrows? Everybody knows that once a box of those suckers is open, it's freakin' history!)...or Coconut Mushrooms, and plenty of things equally bizarre and twice as banal. But for today at least, I have beaten the Yoghurt Monkey off my back...

One day at a tiiiiiiime, sweet yoghurts...

The Maternal Temptation

Yes, yes, I know how icky that title sounds.

Went up to Ma's place today to work there, and just Be Around if needed. Thing is, even on a discipline jag, Ma's has frequently been a kind of "holiday" destination. You're offered endless cups of tea and coffee, and, as today when my aunt and uncle turned up, the biscuits come out.

"Want one?" asked my uncle.
"Nah, I'm good thanks," I said, wanting to tear the barrel out of his hands.
"Go on mun, have one," he encouraged, waving the barrel under my nose.
"Nono, really..." I said.
"GO ONNNN," he insisted. "If you have one, I can have one..."

I love this kind of logic. I've used this kind of logic sooooo many times it's entirely unfunny. I clenched my jaw.
"Go onnnn," I unconsciously imitated. "You have 'em, I'm trying to be a good boy." He sniffed, as if to keep largely his own counsel about either my potential goodness or my desperate pretension at 41 in describing myself as a "boy", then picked out a biscuit and started to dunk it.

There are similar temptations around every perspex corner at Ma's. She offered me a bunch of sweet diet biscuits, for which, during the Disappearing Downfall of 2012, I developed something of a taste. I brought them home, and now they're sitting in the larder, like a kind of solid icing-covered anchorweight to this whole thing. They're there if I abbbbbsolutely can't stand it and need a quick sweet hit for about a hundred calories. But I'm going to keep them there as long as I can.

And so on to the morning, and the first comparative weigh-in of the new regime. Am genuinely curious about what it'll show, having been a reasonably "good boy" this week.

TheYogic Deadline

Now...

...y'see...

The thing is...

I was all gung-ho for the yoga and the boot camp tonight, but, as usual, there was one thing I hadn't taken into account...which was that today was my first day back on the day-job since before Christmas, and that the deadline for my magazine would immediately be pressing and THIS BIG.

Also, I'm not sure what happened to all the clocks in the world today, but every time I blinked, or looked up, or glanced over a clock, an hour, or two, had passed. So at about 4pm I made a command decision, ditched them both, finished the work I was doing and plugged in the bike.

Rode for about an hour and a half, and burned about 600 calories - or lunch, as I also think of it (soup and toast).

Which was just as well, as d put a gorgeous plate in front of me for our evening meal.
Or rather, two.
Fish, sprouts, tomatoes, and a kind of crostini with goats cheese and balsamic vinegar. Felt like a LOT of food, though doing some of the maths, I should be jusssst about OK to have eaten it today, having burned off lunch on the bike.

After last night's sausage explosion, I actually weighed this morning, and was startled, though pleased, with the result. But of course, one shouldn't believe what the scales tell one when one's ass has just fallen out, so let's say there's a certain guarded optimism going into Wednesday. Am up at Ma's house tomorrow, doing more of the day job, and choir in the night - all go for a Disappearing Welshman, innit? - but d's going in to her work early, which gives me an opportunity to either walk or bike or do something at the gym at ugh o'clock, before the day really kicks off.

Came down off the bike this evening, feeling free of pain and oddly righteous."How you feelin'?" said d.
"Good," I said. "Not in pain, and oddly righteous."
She gave me a look, raising her eyebrows.
"Smug, I think, is the word I'm looking for," I admitted.
She laughed, knowingly.
"Yyyyeah," she agreed.

I'd forgotten quite how smug I can be when I'm on a Disappearing jag.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned to d over dinner last night, this time around, I'm going to be altogether more sane either than the first year of the Disappearing Man, or the bounce-back year. I'm going to do my best to have good days, one after the other, but in the event of having a bad day, I'm not going to throw myself off a cliff of hopelessness and go on some sort of binge. You have to just get up the next morning and get back on with it. And so, while I didn't end up doing the yoga and the boot camp tonight, tomorrow's a whole other day. I figure the deadline on doing yoga and the boot camp is, by this definition, stretchier and more limber than my day-job deadline, so that's why I made the choice I did tonight. So - on to tomorrow, and then the first comparative weigh-in of 2013.