The Father Christmas Feeling

Blood was 6.1 this morning after a five mile walk in vaguely uncomfortable shoes. Kind of expected that, cos I broke, and had a couple of handfuls of trail mix at about eleven last night. Still, at least I did the walking - gods only know what the blood would have been before the walk (I work on the principle that a morning blood-test isn't worth doing till I get to my desk, because Hell, none of the rest of me is awake till then, there's no reason my blood should rush to the surface just cos I stab a needle into my thumb. My blood's like the rest of me, it needs coaxing into operation early in the morning...)

Good-ish day, when you consider that neither d nor I do terribly well when we're out of each other's immediate orbit for too long (and yes, frankly, overnight is too damn long!) - we're one of those absolutely nauseating couples that way. I got quite a lot done today, but have discovered that as time is closing in, my To-Do Lists have entered their spawning season - I can barely get half way through one before two more lists have popped into existence. What's more, by the time I've actually managed to cross an item off any one list, at least three extra items have been born on that list, and a couple on at least one other...

The whole thing, added to the fact of getting up and coming home in darkness, gives a sense of rapidly encroaching twilight to the week - the sudden running out of the daylight-time of my London life. We did a lot of farewells while d was here, and I'm having to do final visits to a couple of places this week, but with d already working on setting up the new flat in Wales, it feels like I'm running to beat a Solstice sunset, or and endless series of Christmas lists and deadlines...

It occurs to me that this is probably what Father Christmas feels like in these precious last few weeks, wondering where he gets a pony from for little Louise at 24 hours notice, and whether Timmy Johnson can be persuaded he wasn't quite good enough this year, simply because lumps of coal are a hell of a lot easier to come by in this economic climate than Sony Playstations...

In purely Disappearing terms, probably not that bad a day - as mentioned, five miles of walking in uncomfortable shoes, a record three Starbucks (which pretty much, between them, negate the five miles of walking!), brocolli soup for lunch - seriously? Broccoli, as a soup? Which demented vegetarian ever thought that was a good idea?? (shrugs...one with a shitload of brocolli to use up, I guess...), and beans on toast for dinner. You know that technique where if you eat slowly, and make a meal last for 20 minutes, you feel fuller for longer, because your eyes are not only very often 'bigger than your belly,' as the phrase has it, but your brain, frankly, is also very often slower than your gut. It takes about 20 minutes for the signal "Hey, Schmucko - I'm full!" to travel the distance from your stomach to your brain.

Think about that. As a species, we have the hand-eye co-ordination to play cricket, for God's sake (though noticeably not the intellectual capacity to explain why we do so to the satisfaction of an impartial observer). And yet it takes 20 minutes for your brain to work out that if you keep shovelling food into your mouth, at some point fairly soon, your body's gonna be full.

Can I just mention, once more, that Intelligent Design is a crock of horse-shit?
Thank you...

Anyhow, the technique would appear to work quite well - smallish meal really, but very filling, because I ate it while reading some of The House of Atreus by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. It's all fathers sacrificing their daughters on alters, and then wives stabbing their husbands to death for sacrificing their daughters on alters, and then, just when you thought it couldn't get weird enough, there are dreams of women giving birth to snakes, and breastfeeding them, till they sink their fangs in and suckle blood out of their nipples...oh and then the wife's two remaining kids get together with a plan to stab Mommy Dearest in the chest, and slit the throat of her new, possibly gay-man, lover (hence the 'possibly'!)...

...which is a great way of making sure you chew your beans on toast slowly, it has to be said. Actually, looked at one way, it's a great way of realising you're not that hungry after all.

Mind you, I could just be thinking about this too hard. With all the dashing about and list-spawning, it's entirely possible I was just savouring 20 minutes of doing pretty much buggerall but reading ancient Greek gorenography and eating some beans on toast! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got an elf strike in sector 7Q and Rudolf's come down with reindeer-flu...