Shaving Father Christmas

Alright, what the Hell happened there?

So, seriously, if you’re really obsessive or have a reasonable memory, you’ll recall the history of last week. Monday – 16 stone 3. Friday – 16 stone 4.5. Today, for this week’s official weigh-in…

16 stone 0.25.

Seriously?? 4.25 pounds in three days? That’s way outside the ‘healthy weightloss’ remit of this project. It also makes absolutely zero sense, inasmuch as I haven’t got on the bike since I came home on Friday. Haven’t done a long walk. Have done precisely buggerall in the way of actively trying to lose weight, if I’m honest, and last night, had an Italian, largely bread-based meal. Sooooo what the Hell???

Of course…I did have a shave yesterday. Now, of course, I’m not dumb enough to think this is behind anything, but it was getting to a point of critical mass. Can I just say – December is not the month to be a fat, occasionally jolly bloke with a full bushy beard and only the vaguest of holes where your mouth should be. Kids on tubes get utterly spellbound, and you can actually hear their conniving little brains as they work out that they’ve just seen Santa on his way to work, and that they’d better be extra specially nice, certainly, but also extra specially noisy to make sure he doesn’t forget them when The Time Comes.

So yesterday, I had a professional beard trim, and am now much more confident of which hole the sound is coming out of (to paraphrase Ruby Wax). But four pounds of hair? I think not.

  

If I wanted to pile on the pseudo-science, I’d expostulate (you might have noticed, I do that sometimes. It’s a habit. I have many.) that maybe the seriously nipple-popping weather we’ve been having lately has something to do with it. It would make some weird sort of mathematical sense, wouldn’t it, that your system had to burn more calories just to function normally in ridiculously cold weather?

(Shrugs) Could be bollocks of course, but all I know is that I’m now so close to the 4.5 stone barrier, the 16 stone barrier and, perhaps most importantly, the halfway point I can practically taste it!

Mind you, having said that, you’d think I’d have been in a better mood all day, really. Haven’t been – have been snappy and growly and generally a pain in the universe’s ass all day long.

Mind you, I have been in Nottingham.

Not that this should be taken as in any way meaning I have a problem with Nottingham. I like Nottingham a lot – as a city, it seems to make sense to me (to the extent that I could navigate around it without issue today, which, as we know, I can’t do in London after living there for nearly a decade!). I’ve just, I think, been snarly and growly because…well, firstly because I’m so close, and yet can’t smoke the triple-cigar of official celebration – 4.5 stone, 16 stone, halfway: that, finally, will be a fat cigar of accomplishment, and the kind of celebration I put off at three stone and four stone. So close, but not yet quite there. Growl.

Plus of course, it has to be remembered that much of the rest of the planet is populated by fuckwits. I’ve been run over, line-jumped, frog-marched, frozen and made to take an interest in buses today, and all while being acutely aware that the box-run is now THIS WEEKEND, and that d’d be at home alone this evening, so it doesn’t feel like I’m pulling my not-inconsiderable weight. Clearly though, it’s another of those things that needs to be accepted and growled about and then gotten the Hell over and moved on from. Everything’s positive right now – Disappearing, the move…wow, that was a short definition of Everything, wasn’t it? How many days do we have left before the Euro implodes, anybody still counting? And apparently we’re ‘back’ in recession (note for the linguists and pedants – does being back in recession mean we’re in a re-recession?)…but, y’know, apart from imminent financial collapse, and allegedly some Mayans thousands of years ago predicting people they neither knew, nor in fact gave a fuck about, would stop existing next year, everything in my personal garden is pretty damn rosy right now, so as d would say, time to grab my ass and get happy.

So this is me – grabbing handfuls of wobbly buttock and singing a happy song!