Blood sugar was 3.9 this morning, after a big meaty meal last night. This continues to perplex and confuse me, but am assuming as long as I'm not having hypos, the smaller the figure in terms of sugar in the blood, the better. Am probably wrong, but will get a verdict from the doc tomorrow.
In the wider world, Amy Winehouse has been found dead. There have been a range of reactions to this news, perhaps the most common of which is surprise that it took this long - the singer (who was only 27) was famously addicted to things that were likely to kill her sooner or later, mainly alcohol and some fairly serious drugs.
I was never a fan of her music, though in fact if you played me some right now, I probably wouldn't be able to definitively say "that's the Winehouse". Nevertheless, the death of an addictive personality is something that blows cold across the day of any Disappearing man or woman. There's a sense of "there but for the grace of....something...go I." Successful struggle, probably.
Oddly enough, I was thinking about this last week, before the Winehouse news ever broke. I'm currently listening to the audiobook version of God Collar, by Marcus Brigstocke. Marcus is a hilarious comedian with an arse-kicking conscience, and he's written perhaps the most honest book about the experience of atheism I've ever read - go get it, go get it now. The relevant point here though is that one of the many revelations in the book is that as a teenager, Marcus was both addictive and compulsive - he rose to something over 25 stone, as well as getting involved in similar addictions to Winehouse. Eventually, he faced a realisation, went into rehab and (while establishing a different relationship with the Christian god), dropped about half his bodyweight in seven months or so. These days, Marcus is not someone you'd look at and think "Wow, bet he was a fat fuck as a teenager". His penchant for corduroy might make you think "Wow, that's one funny, angry geography teacher", but you wouldn't think of him as an addictive man, who's battled with food. But in the book, he says he's bored with the effort it takes not to relapse every bloody day.
Without daring or wanting to claim any kind of martyrdom after 39 years of addictive fuckwittery and only four months of trying to survive, I know what he means there - especially while trying to blog every day about the experience of trying to lose a life-saving amount of weight. Christ, it's dull. And it would be so fantastically easy to say sod it, and just fall back into the way of living that part of me - possibly even most of me - wants to; eating everything in sight, careering towards the cliff-edge of pure self-revolving destruction and jumping off, feeling happy and full and sweetened to death.
I'm also not breaking addicts down into two categories - the Winehouses and the Brigstockes - because it's actually a very individual thing; the triggers that kick addictive or compulsive behaviours into play tend to be individual, and the moments of relapse are sometimes circumstantial, other times down to being distracted, or steeling the resolve against the temptation to do what you really want to do.
So what am I saying?
I guess that Winehouse is an example of what can happen...and so is Brigstocke. Plenty of people go the Winehouse route ever day, and plenty do a Brigstocke too, and come to that, huge swathes of people are Disappearing at any one time without feeling the need to pollute the internet daily with their whinges about how hard the whole thing is. No remote example is likely to actually save the life of any other addict, because everyone fights their own battle, ultimately against their own addictions. But if the principles of rehab have any genuine value, it is, I suppose, knowing that other people are fighting at least a similar fight to you, and that probably, if you try, you can be as strong as they are. So while I'm not a mourner for her music, I could happily wish that Winehouse had won her battle, had won herself a future. Plenty of people appeared to enjoy her creative contribution, and of course her family would undoubtedly love to have had her there going forward. I for one am glad Brigstocke won the main part of his battle (addicts will know of course it's never really exactly won, except on a daily basis) many years ago, so he could still be here to see his kids grow up, and make a lot of us laugh off our chairs, and think while we're doing it. So perhaps ultimately what I'm saying in this fairly tortured entry is that if you lose, you lose all the potential of your future, its love, its pain, its friendships and its creativity. So every day is worth fighting for, no matter how wretchedly dull it is to do. Everybody should be encouraged to fight their battles.
Except Simon Cowell. He, I think, should probably be locked in a room with three tons of crack, just see what would happen. But...yeah, almost everybody else...
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