A Day Trip To Bethselamin

It was that genius Douglas Adams who first wrote about the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin, 'which is now so worried about the cumulative erosion caused by a gazillion tourists a year that now, any net imbalance between the amount to eat and the amount you excrete is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave, meaning every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt.'

Well as I sit here at St Pancras in a fantastically pretentious French cafe having overpriced and garnished-to-death scrambled eggs on bread (not toast - bread; seriously, a couple of minutes of heat would have killed ya?), I have to tell you that I've already been to Bethselamin and back this morning.

To explain - it being a weigh-in day, I got out of bed, and went and weighed immediately (prior to any morning bathroom action). It revealed the frankly stunning result of:
18 stone 9 pounds.

That's a phenomenal 5.25 pounds lost since last week (still pre-bathroom).

Then, as it happened, I felt the power move me, and sat down to my normal ablutions. I am now this sad - I then stripped off again, and weighed once more. 18 stone 10.5 pounds! Clearly I should have got a receipt after my first weigh-in.

This baffled me all the way to King's Cross, but I was preparing to be all grown-up and mature about it. After all, I don't need to lose five pounds in a week, 4 will more than suffice, yadda yadda yadda. It was only as I pulled into King's Cross that I remembered one thing. Between the first weigh-in and the second, I'd chugged two-thirds of a 1.5 litre bottle of water. Now, I know what you're thinking - Water? Pah! But water has its own weight (just ask Archimedes!), and last night, after drinking an awful lot of water, my weight had gone up to 18 stone 13.75, which was interesting to go to bed with. But overnight, clearly the water had been absorbed and excreted, and given me a true reading.

So ya know what? Balls to being mature about it, I'm taking the original, pre-water reading as accurate. So our golden number today is officially:

18 stone 9 pounds (or 261 pounds) - just a pound and a half away from my two-stone marker. Now, you'll have to excuse me, I have to get fleeced by a waitress and bugger off to Brussels!