A Day of Three Halves

If there’s such a thing as a day of three halves, then this was it. Kicking off half one, I did a weigh-in, which I’m prepared to count as this week’s official one.

16 stone 4.5.

You may remember on Monday, I weighed in as 16 stone 3, but didn’t count it cos I was ‘full’. This morning was 16 stone 4.5…erm…empty, as it were. So yes, my week of hotel living has not only cost us a shedload of cash (non-refundable…humph!), but has also cost me at least a pound and a half of progress. Mind you, there’s another, proper weigh-in on Tuesday, so I guess I have a couple of days to improve on that.

The first half of the day was the ‘working our asses off’ half. d worked the kitchen, packing and wrapping a bunch of bulky implements and culinary magic-makers. As per usual, I got to sit in the living room and do minimum-impact packing in the living room. Did about…three boxfuls. We came together to dismantle an old computer that can’t be thrown out cos it’s full of important stuff like wedding photos. I untangled it and transported it to d’s packing station, she packed it, I transported it to the bedroom/boxroom. Then, jointly whinging about the pain we’d landed ourselves in, we quit.

Oh, should mention – we finally caught up with our pal Linda today. She works at the local pharmacy, and became a reader of this blog pretty much after being bitch-whipped by d one day, in her friendly pimp-my-ass-out way. Still, fair play to the girl, Linda’s apparently still reading, cos when we popped in, she already knew about our Farewell Tour, and the countdown to the Disappearing Welshman. Was good to see her, and we arranged to pop back in for a proper farewell two weeks today, the day before d leaves for good.

The second half of the day was the ‘laugh our asses off’ half. Didn’t add this into the calendar a couple of days ago, because, quite frankly, so much is going on, I pretty much forgot it. But we’ve long had tickets to our ‘farewell to London Theatre’. It was a combination of circumstances that made us choose the show that was going to fill that place in our heads for the rest of time. Essentially, d introduced me to a movie, a good few years ago, thinking that it was brilliant, and also figuring it would be my kind of thing. It sooooo was. It was a movie called Noises Off. It’s a fantastic farce, that shows the front and back of the stage during the production of a farce within a farce, as it goes through a run. As it happened, there was a production of the play (on which the movie was based) starting at the Old Vic on the 1^st December, so I went ahead and booked it.

Couldn’t have been a better choice, frankly. Neil Simon said of farce that by the end, the audience should be almost as exhausted as the cast, who by that point should be on oxygen support. Noises Off is a farce in three acts – act one gives you a good solid bunch of gags, but more than that, it’s a set up for the really fantastic business of act two. Act two tonight was where the oxygen tents should have been wheeled into the theatre. Act two was so busy, with a stageful of actors in perfect harmony, like a balletful of laughs. Act three, which shows the disintegration of the actors’ brains and relationships into complete on-stage anarchy, was fantastic too, but by that point, we were all exhausted from laughing at act two. It was a great farewell to the joy that the West End can bring to any day, and we’re still laughing about it as I write this.

The third half of the day kicked off when we got home. We couldn’t get in.

We couldn’t get in because an entire column of boxes, stacked in the hallway long before we started turning the bedroom into our storage room, had finally given up the ghost, and collapsed, spilling their innards all the way down the hall.

Soooo – that’ll be me buying some more boxes tomorrow then, and repacking the buggers. Could have done without this financial and temporal setback to cap the day, but it’s pretty much like the pound and a half of weight re-gain. It’s just one more little bugger of a thing, to be understood, gotten around and gotten the Hell on with.

So – if you’ll excuse me, it’s couch-time. Catch you tomorrow, after the boxarama.