A Brand New Map

Something weird is happening to me. I know you'll be shocked to hear that. You're all sitting out there now aren't you, going "Oh yeah, right. When did something normal happen to you, for God's sake..."

But I reckon it's something that any disappearing people might identify with. My map of me is changing.

You know how you sort of roughly know what you look like, what you feel like, and how much space you take up? Well, this last week, I've been repeatedly (or "obsessively" if you believe my wife), weighing myself in the morning - which, yes, I know, I absolutely promised I wouldn't do, cos it has had a tendency to make me go nuttier than squirrel-shit, but anyway, I've been doing it for what seemed, at least to me, like a logical reason.

Which is that my map of me is changing. You see, I've been used to having a belly that describes a particular arc if you run your hands over it. If and when it was lumpy, that was bad news, cos it meant I'd put on weight again, and I had to accommodate the new hillock of flab into my mental map of myself.

This has been a particularly lumpy week, and so the natural trigger-trip reaction has always been, of a morning, to go "Oh bugger, I must have put on again..."

Except I haven't. I'm not doing extravagantly well, like I did last week, but I'm making slow, steady progress in a downward direction, which is after all the plan. It was only yesterday that the seeming discrepancy in the verdict of the scales and the mental map of me clicked into place and made some sense. These aren't lumps of weight-gain, they're lumps of weight-loss, lumps left over as little chunks of me have melted away like great flabby icebergs and bogged off into my metabolism, to be used, and processed, and hopefully never seen again. In essence, I'm revisiting the lumpy bits of weight-gain I had years ago, before the great round smoothing Buddha-like calm of my 20.7 stone belly made all the lumps one big united thing. That was quite an eye-opening revelation, I don't mind telling you.

Had another one this morning too. For reasons that I may or may not reveal next week, I had to get out my suit this morning. You may remember me telling you that the last time I had to buy a suit, I had to go to something bigger than my normal Big Fat Bastards store, because I'd finally gone off the top of the rail in the ORDINARY Big Fat Bastards store? Well, thankfully, as I think the next step up from where I was is a Mumu, I tried the suit on this morning, and it looked like a bizarre combination of things...It looked like my dad was a clown who'd been forced to buy a suit for a funeral, and hadn't been able to resist still getting typical clown-pants, and a shirt to match. And now I, his clueless son, was trying them on for a laugh. So I'm leaving you now to go and buy some altogether less comical trousers, which will probably be an expedition in itself.

Blood was 5.4 this morning by the way, in case you're keeping score.