Leave the Gym, Take the Battered Sausage

Sometimes, there are days when it doesn't come down to particularly great temptations, or particularly onerous challenges. Sometimes, when it comes right down to it, you just want to have the night OFF...
Pal of mine called Sally-Anne, with whom I also work (she took the impenetrable tangerines off my hands) just embodied this concept for me as she was walking out the door. She's recently joined an Am Dram group, convinced of the merit of getting something of a life outside her normal routine. They meet tonight, all the way across town (close to my neck of the woods, in fact, so she'll be privy to my Hellish travel universe), and, as she put it, "all I really wanna do tonight is go home and watch Comic Relief with a sausage-in-batter." To my American friends, yes, that really is what it sounds like - a long British sausage (which d fetchingly describes as having the texture of 'boneless baby fingers'), dipped in a fish fry batter, and then deep fried. It's basically a greasy offal-tube, coated in goo, and then covered in more hot grease.

Oh sure, cos the land that serves applesauce as a side dish and brought the world the idea of maple-covered bacon would never do anything gross!

Anyway, I don't know what to tell you - they absolutely shouldn't work, I agree, but they do. They're gorgeous. Especially when accompanied by glorious, vinegar-soggy, equally-dubiously-greased British fish shop chips.

Like the ones they sell just up the road from my house...

Dammit, dammit, dammit!
I'm so suggestible. But they're so digestible (see what I did there? Yeah, did me no good whatsoever, cos while I was wondering how to spell 'digestible', I thought of Digestives, especially dark chocolate Digestives, the biscuit of the chocolate gods, and arrrrrrgh!).

Clearly, this has to stop. Must get a grip on myself. But she's right, dammit - sometimes, you just want to relax, and not think about what you should and shouldn't do, and just do what feels RIGHT! And that's the scary thing of course - had something like this discussion with Mae yesterday - Right now, in my insane, suggestible, craving moment, it feels more right than anything else on Earth to go home by way of the chippie, pick up as much carb and grease as I can carry, stop off at the grocers on the way for a packet of dark chocolate Digestives and go home and slob out in front of the TV all night. Actually, while I'm at the grocers, I could pick up a tub of ice-cream...could use the Digestives instead of a spoon....Fuck it, get two packets, use one for the ice-cream, and another to dunk...

Aaaaaaargh! Shut up shut up shut up....It's like...well, Hell, it's like a description that only works if you saw David Tennant's farewell in Doctor Who, because in that, a character called the Master is raised from the dead, but it goes wrong and so he's always, always, always hungry, and entirely indiscriminate. He gives a speech about wanting "Meat and beer, cheese and chocolate, great big lumps of red, hot blood food..." - I did try and find it on Youtube, cos it's powerful stuff and exactly what I'm feeling right now - but the pixies of Youtube have seen fit to cover every version it with Weird Al Yankovic - thanks for that guys!

I just want to grab...everything. It's like my blood is lacking in essential nutrients like sugar, salt and fat, and I just need to get them into my mouth in great big gallumphing handfuls, and then everything will be alright, everything will be calm and good and right with the world again. And that's where it gets really druglike and insidious...because the next rogue thought to wander through my differently-working brain is that not only will the world be right again if I do exactly that, but that I will be good, and calm, and right again. There's some part of my brain that tells me, in moments like this, that my whole identity, my whole sense of self, is tied up with being a fat fuck. And the worst part is it's not entirely wrong. I've almost always been big. It gives you a sense of outsider humour, which is essential to my understanding of who I am, and to which I'm not sure I'll feel entitled if this experiment works and I lose a socially remarkable amount of weight. I'm actually, actively, scared about who I'll be if this works, and these moments allow the little dark wraith of neurosis in the nub of my brain to come out and dance and play tunes on that fear...

(Takes a deep breath)...

...but...

I've always said this blog is chiefly about letting me rant when I need to and avoid smashing things...or indeed people...without falling off the dessert-trolley. Letting all this out right now has pretty much allowed the moment to roll on by and past me. So I'm going home now, to fish and steamed potatoes, another ten mile cycle, and what looks like a good Comic Relief line-up.

(Takes a Zen breath of purity or some other bollocks).
Get thee behind me, battered sausage and chips.