And So To Narnia...

And so we’re out of here, heading to Western New York. Or Narnia, as I think of it. d tells me this is ‘only’  because I’ve only ever been there in February, but it’s always...freaking...snowing in Western New York. I mean...just...always. It’s become something of an exhausted joke, to the point where it’s almost crossed a threshold in my brain from “Hahaha...Narnia” to “No, seriously, it’s always snowing here!”

d tells me I’m going to swelter over there this time, because it’s “Spring”. And I’m having to actually work quite hard to believe her, because it’s become so ingrained a scene in my head – Western New York=White. Endless vistas of white, and the need for huge boots and layers and layers of clothes. Scraping windshields with credit cards and driving through blizzards.

It’s also of course, more really, the ultimate test of my Perspex boxes and my resolve. When we last went over, just three months ago, I felt a huuuuuge pull to fizzy drinks and sweet things – on one serious occasion, I had to get d to rescue me from my buckling resolve in the ice-cream aisle of Wegmans, the local supermarket. Without her, I would probably have fallen, and inhaled the whole cabinet. I’d have been found hours later, like one of those woolly mammoths, encased in ice, with my Neanderthal beard smeared in frozen Pecan Caramel Twist. And that was when there were just two injunctions I was trying to maintain.

Now of course, there are at least another couple of dangerlines – fat has become biologically dangerous. Coffee now has to be de-caff, or ‘old person coffee,’ as d helpfully calls it. Fried foods are – mainly – out. It’s kind of like the Perspex box becomes a lattice of electrified webbing, like a mixture of temptation and potential mayhem. And the point is, America is such a beautiful place – it has such a comparatively healthy attitude to pleasure that even their baked potatoes come with butter and sour cream. Everything comes with half a dozen extras, and that’s simply because Americans are just so joyfully generous about food, and opportunity, and life in general. The attitude of meanness in which this experiment has to be conducted is utterly at odds with the environment into which I’m taking it. How I’ll do, I don’t know. But I’m gonna give it a try...

Oh yeah, I meant to mention - you know I've been working on the principle of getting one blog entry out per day (Blogger failures notwithstanding). Well of course, some of the entries I've posted have been near to the wire in terms of time. So the question obviously is - am I sticking to Greenwich Mean Time, or am I shifting to New York time?

I thought for a long time I'd stick with GMT. Then I bitchslapped myself and thought - That would mean getting every entry out by 7PM New York time. Very often in the day, the things that make a blog haven't even happened to me by that time. Yesterday's twitch entry being a perfect case in point. So bite me, I'm going New York time, which means Brits, for the next week, you might not get your daily dose of rampant ego and nonsense till five in the following morning. I'm sure you'll deall with it. If not, what can I tell ya? Fuggeddabouuudddit....