The Annual Reinvention

So - what are your resolutions for 2013?

We all do this to some extent, even those of us who, like d and I, understand that resolutions are often just wishes that, like diaries, die a death before January is done.

For me of course, there's only one real resolution for the year to come - to Disappear again, to regain control and discipline and clothes that work and arteries less strained. There are plenty of other things of course, but that's the real one. The one on which I intend to expend energy, and time, and life, and in the cause of which I intend to drive those around me stark raving mad.

Bear with me folks. We're about to go back into perspex hell.

On which note, happy new year folks, and I'll see you in the new one.

The Better Stories Conclusion

Went to reclaim my hat this morning. At first, it couldn't be found. I'm almost ashamed to say that having been told that the hat wasn't in the Catholic church where I accidentally left it on Christmas Day, I was all geared up for a good old rant about the Catholic church having big hats of their own, without needing to steal them off poor unsuspecting atheists.

Needless to say, when I went back in to double check, a nice man in a green T-shirt approached me in my sad hatlessness and said "Did you lose a hat?"
Turned out it had been put away for me in a special place, after I'd dropped the priest an email to say "Yo dude - lost my hat!"

So...fiiiiine...can't bitch about the Catholic church or make jokes about their hats today. (Shrugs) Two days from now is another year...

Went from there to do a thing I've been meaning to do for some weeks now.
Bought myself a new computer.

To be strictly accurate, bought our business a new computer. Bottom line, I've had my laptop about five years or so now, and while it's still working fine after its total brain meltdown earlier this year, I was advised by my optician that if I'm gonna do the amount of hours staring at a screen that being an editor by both day job and side business requires me to do, I should really go up to something with a big-ass screen.

To be fair, I have something with a big-ass screen in my day-job office in London. Thing is, it also has the brain of a Mac, and is therefore by inclination a godrotted, cryptic piece of shit designed specifically to increase the misery quotient of human beings. So today, I invested what I think qualifies as "a shitload" of the business's money in a new computer with a 23 inch touchscreen.

The thing is - it wasn't really the hardware that nearly made me declare the company bankrupt. It was all the stuff that needs to come with it - an upgraded operating system, for one. A new Norton program and something that I've only heard about before called "cloud backup" for another. And a business-licensed version of Word for a third, and the kicker. That last mofo cost about £200! On it's pigging own!

For those who like a laugh, I didn't even get to take it out of the store today. I was gonna, but then they dangled the "have it installed by someone who's not a brain-dead moron" service in my face, and I shelled out another £30. I'm picking it up New Year's Day. by which time, if all goes well, I'll a) have tidied a pathway to ground zero on my desk, and b) have finished the edit I'm currently doing, and so will have at least a day or two of annual leave time in which to focus on the day job, and on exploring the ass off the new little office-jewel.

My pal Rebecca came round tonight for a while. We exchanged Christmas gifts - hers to us was a tin of simply gorgeous chocolate chip Welsh Cakes. I have about 48 hours of the Inbetweeny Zone in which to enjoy them before the launch of the new year regime. We gave her a supposedly lifesize cardboard Daniel Craig. She loved it, and went away to make the most of him.

I'd no sooner changed into my onesie - oh yes...I own a onesie now; a slightly bizarre, but hey-I'm-not-proud Christmas gift from Ma, to spend the rest of the evening editing and chilling, than my other pal Lee texted.
"Wanna catch a movie?" he asked.
"What's on?"
"Life of Pi...In 3d. In about 25 minutes," he expounded.
"Suuuure," I said. d and I both went.
How to describe it...

Erm...

Possibly as the most beautiful waste of time I've seen this year. Which, from a Man who sat through John Carter is saying something. Ang Lee delivers stunning visuals, and goddammit, I know there was A Point in the movie somewhere.

My pants would be on fire right now if I told you I had the first idea what it was. Possibly, if I had to take a stab at it, that believing in God makes for better stories.

(Sigh). NEXT!

The movie we're both looking forward to most at the moment is Quartet. Go Google it now, it looks to be fun and fabulous.
And so, 2012 draws to a close. A year of gains and losses, and it's tempting to see all of them as negatives. Sure - gained a couple of net stone back on the year. Lost my dad. Those are the headlines.
On the other hand, gained a new home, a new acceptance of my town, a new business (which still struggles to quantify itself as anything other than an expensive new way of losing money), a new bank, for which I can only be grateful, a new way of working, ditto, and a new insight into this whole business of Disappearing, beyond the rigidity of my perspex walls. Here's to telling new and better stories - and hopefully one old one in a new way - as we Disappear into 2013.

The Inbetweeny Zone

Right now, while being convinced of new energy and new things and new losses in 2013, I feel like I'm trapped in the kind of Inbetweeny Zone, between Christmas and New Year. Yes, I've stopped eating madness by the spoonful, as I was eating over Christmas, but no, I haven't yet begun a glorious regime of new effort.

A couple of nights ago I woke at 4.43, and determined: "Right - I'm gonna strap my boots on and go walking."

No sooner had that thought crossed my synapses that - quelle surprise - the heavens opened and the country got yet another downpour. Seriously, can I get a petition in to Thor at this point? Knock it the Hell off with the rain, please? Nobody ever dreamed of a wet Christmas, just like the ones they used to know. And similarly, no-one ever wished another human being a Soggy New Year.

So, while I listened to the rain wash away my desire to slip out of bed, slip on some boots and walk for miles, I did the thing you'd expect of any anally retentive fuckwit. I did the maths.

Two pounds per week - the recommended safe limit to lose. That means to lose 14 pound (one stone) should take seven weeks. If we say I start this re-energising at 18 stone (which, just between us, there's solid reason to expect I will), I'm looking initially to lose six stone - or 84 pounds. That would mean I was down to 12 stone, or 168 pounds. While technically that will mean I have a little way to go, I'll be very nearly happy with the weight I am at that point. So, do the math with me: 84 pounds divided by 2 pounds per week - 42 weeks. There being 52 weeks in the year, ten extra weeks at 2 pound per week will take me down to 11 stone 4 pounds - which is pretty much ideal. So: this whole experiment started off as one year to save my life and change it.

Once more, with feeling?

The Unboxing Day Progression

Today has been an...oddish...kind of day.
First - a funeral.
A sad affair, an old friend of my Dad's, who lived in our street. He lived very much for his wife, who died ten years ago. He developed Alzheimer's Disease, and ended up not knowing anyone, living in a nursing home. Ma and I called in to see him just before Christmas, to discover he'd been taken into hospital. He died a handful of days later, and his funeral was truly sad, in that he was a goodish man, and there were only around 20 of us to remember him.

Anyone want to argue with me that life is fair or there's some sort of karmic order to the universe?

Immediately following the funeral, the joy of talking to a nurse.
Haven't mentioned this till now, but Ma went for a few tests a couple of weeks ago, and after eight biopsies, the doctors have determined she has a tumourish...something, but not whether it's a nasty something, or just an odd something. Not being able to say for certain, they're treating it as a nasty something, even though it probably isn't, and she's having it excised on January 3rd. So today, she had a meeting with the nurse to discuss what sounds like a pretty gruesome procedure, but apparently will take less than an hour. That was...unsettling, I suppose, but Ma's always had trouble existing in grey areas, so at least now we have hard information on which to base decisions and plans going forward.

Then we came home, and I got on with the edit I'm currently doing. d disappeared upstairs.

Regular readers will have heard me bitch from time to time about still having a load of the boxes we brought from London, still packed, filling up our bedroom. There was a bit of upstairs kerfuffle, and when I lifted my eyes from the edit, d was calling for a hand with something. In fact, it was a couple of heavy bits of shifting - but all the boxes had gone. Technically of course, Boxing Day in the UK was two days ago. But now forever more, the 28th of December will be known in this household as Unboxing Day. Feels great to have this done, like a kind of domestic enema. Feels almost emblematic of the year to come. A year of accomplishment, and clearing out, beckons, I reckon.

Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

And so it's what I'm rather callously thinking of as Freebie Thursday. Had breakfast at the hotel this morning, skipped the ghastliness of a post-breakfast weigh-in then came home and have been working on an edit all day.

So now I'm sitting here, editing, writing this, and watching The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The book has always eluded my reading, because the beginning of it always seems to high-minded and impenetrable. But the idea of Gray has always fascinated me. The idea of escaping the consequences of one's actions of course is always going to appeal to a glutton and an addict. The notion that there would be a way of shifting the effects of actions onto an inanimate stooge, leaving one free to indulge, and indulge, and indulge every passion, every desire, every want...

Who would we be if that were possible? Where would be stop? Why would we stop?

Of course, the point of Dorian Gray is that there is a price to pay, that effects can only be delayed, that consequences will catch up with us - an analogue of our modern lives if there has ever yet been one: we don't see the immediate consequences of each cheeseburger, each sundae, each cigarette in some cases, each mad and unprotected fuck. But chemistry, biology and time conspire to teach us all eventually - they teach us with fat, and arterial thickening, and contamination, and ultimately, the choices we make about what we do and what we take into ourselves teach us the lesson of a date-stamp and a toe-tag.

Which is why of course it's important to learn the lessons of Dorian Gray before the reckoning gets too high.
I've had a Christmas of quite extraordinary excess that would be perfectly simple to turn into a lifestyle of extraordinary excess all over again.

But no.
I've almost entirely escaped the harm that my ludicrous lifestyle of decades should by now have inflicted on me. There has been some damage, certainly, but nothing in the league I should expect. It's past time to learn my lesson and be a better man again.

The Rod Stewart Impersonation

Ah.
In fact, to paraphrase Alan Partridge, a-ha!!
Do you know what tomorrow is?

Tomorrow, apparently, is Thursday. I hadn't realised that, any more than I'd realised Christmas was as nearly upon us as in fact it was.

There's very little in the way of escape from breakfast here at the hotel in the morning before we leave and go back to our normal life, having at least nominally survived the first Christmas in our life together without my Dad. Good idea, this "going away for Christmas" lark. Would we come here again? Probably not. We've sort of been spoiled for hotels by the wonder that was Kilworth House, which will always hold such happy memories for us, and which was really the first "Away Mission" we did.

The highlight, if that's the right word, of today was a Rod Stewart tribute artist after dinner. There's a whole world of Peter Kay comedy waiting to be mined from the earnest dedication of people who neither look nor sound anything like the people they impersonate for a living, and manage to miss every conceivable "note" in a desperate swagger of rock star attitude. That was...erm...something to behold.

The point of all this meandering is that tomorrow is Thursday. And I won't be able to weigh in until after breakfast, so technically it doesn't count!

Shurrup, no it doesn't. My blog, my rules, alright?

So the next weigh in will in face be the pace-setter for 2013, the target against which all future effort will be marked. And more to the point, it'll be next week. Hoorah!

The Festive Confessional

It would be difficult to pick the highlight of this Christmas Day.

The four course breakfast? Nah.
The early-morning Catholic church ceremony, which begged the question: is this the origin of pay-per-view?
Nah.
The brief stop into a newsagents, where we were greeted by the sight of Mrs Claus buying a pack of cigarettes, a pint of milk and some lottery tickets? Close...
The realisation that I'd left my damn hat in the church when d told me to take it off as a mark of respect, and the subsequent realisation that the church was now closed indefinitely? Big no.
The seven course Christmas lunch at the Ty Newydd hotel, including a trio of desserts, Christmas pudding and mince pies?
Well, it was a big thing in the day, but not the highlight of the day, no.
The three mile walk with both Ma and d to try and work up some breathing room after the seven courses?
Hmm - contender. Walking with d is always fun, and it was nice to share with her.
The Who Christmas Special? Another contender this year, with a new companion, and a team in good strong form.
The weird couple of hours doing a pub quiz based on food, and winning, thanks mainly to d's knowledge? Meh...fun to do, but by the time it was done, we'd done so many taste tests of things I certainly shouldn't taste it was all rather "Must...stop...eating...now..."

Or was the highlight of the day, possibly Trish?
Hmm...
d had gone up, and I was keeping Ma company down in the bar when Trish came over to us. Trish is what's known as a "Valleys Character" - someone with a good heart and a lot of energy and who, while entirely intending to talk about anything else, somehow manages to turn conversations to how good she is. This is entirely unintentional, and one is left in no doubt that she really is as good as she says she is, but it's something of a force of conversational nature in which to get swept up.

"Anyway," said Trish as a conversational side-gambit, "what are you, husband and wife?"
Ma blinked at her.
I blinked at her too.
"Nono," said Ma, grinning ever so slightly. "That's my son..."
"Get away!" said Trish. "Wellllll I never...I would never have said that..."
"Gee...ta," I said. It's not the first time that there have been mix-ups like this. Ma is something of a force of nature herself, and neither looks, acts, nor, as we confirmed earlier today, feels her 62 years. In the last couple of years, since beginning the Disappearing Man Experiment, I've clawed back a level of fitness where I can do things she can't, but before that, there was every likelihood I'd be dead and buried before she broke her first bone. But if ever there was a marker of the need to get a move on with this re-Disappearing, a moment like this with a character like Trish'll do it.

"I don't wanna hear any self-loathing on Thursday," said d when I got back to our room. "You've indulged beyond the point of madness since yesterday."
She's right, I have, and I knew what I was doing, so as with Kilworth House, there's every likelihood that my last weigh in of 2012 will see me tip the scales at over 18 stone for the first time in over a year. But plans are being drawn up in my head already, and they will be put into action, starting on January 2nd.
Now - to sleep off this sugar-hangover.

The Multiplication Error

For a weightloss blog, there has, I am aware, been very little in the way of actual weightloss advice over the last two years (and very little in the way of weightloss in the last nine months). But here's an actual tip.

I know it's an actual tip because it hit me like a sledgehammer to the temples when I woke up this morning at 2.26.

Ready?

Here it is:

Don't count on multiplication to get you out of things.

Hmm...You're impressed now, aren't you? I can tell, you're all stroking your chins and going "That Disappearing Man, he's deep. Fuck knows what he's on about most of the time, but bloody deep..."

What I mean is: There's a tendency to piss about acting like a gambler. To say "I can get away with having an easy week, and then I'll just have to lose twice as much next week, and I'll be back on track..."

That's bullshit. It's a highway straight to failure, because while you will have weeks where you lose more weight than you should or expect to, you can't rely on doing that. Not ever. So if you're relying on it, you're relying on having an ace to play, when you probably have a two.

Rely on patience application of effort, and the long expanse of time. Those two are your true friends. They're the ones that will get you where you want to go, but you have to a) trust the long expanse of time, and have patience with it, and b) put the effort in.

This is of course a statement of rammmmpant hypocrisy from me at the moment, because tonight I've had a three course dinner - including dessert - and too much alcohol, so it's a hollow piece of wisdom. But come the new year, there will be plans, and schedules, and discipline and all that good healthy stuff. There will be the putting in of effort, and the trusting to time. And multiplication can kiss my hairy, wobbly pale white ass...

Oh - did I mention? Merry Christmas, people!

The Frog Chorus Disappointment

Meh.
World of meh.

Had cake this morning, provided by my Aunt Cynthia. And no, didn't bike - woke up late because the wind outside our open bedroom window was singing fierce love songs all night, and it woke me up at 1, 2, 4 and 6AM before finally leaving me alone till nearly 9.

By 9.30 we were on the road to a supermarket, and then a DIY store...
Gods, but there are times I think DIY stores were invented because Dementors were fictional...

Then went to see my Aunt and Uncle, and ate cake, dammit.

It was our final gig of the year with the choir tonight, and I opened my mouth to sing...and croaked.
Continued to croak pretty much through the whole concert, which sucked all kinds of ass.

Oh and note to self - don't drink a litre and a half of water before going to perform for two hours. Just...don't. Couldn't focus on the words or the tune for the last half of the service - not that it would have mattered, because I sounded like a soloist in the frog chorus, but still...

Tomorrow we leave for a place called Ty Newydd for Christmas. That kinda punched me in the side of the head after the performance tonight. Went and sat in the quiet of the chapel, and thought of Dad, and how he loved Christmas, and how, for instance, we knew he was in real trouble this time last year when he couldn't bring himself to be a part of it, and we went home about 5 o'clock cos he was exhausted. Hit me like a freight train in the quiet of the chapel.

And on we go to tomorrow.

The Santastic Diversion

Ah.

You remember I mentioned that the numbers would start going down from here?

Y'know one...tiny little thing I overlooked in that announcement?

Holy crap, but it's Christmas next week!

Who the hell allowed that to happen? Suddenly, there's a handful of heartbeats between me and the whole "Season To Be Jolly" thing. Ma and d and I are going away to a Christmas lodge place, with food.

This bodes well for the "Being Jolly", but disastrously badly for the Disappearing. More than any meaningful Disappearing this week, there's a certain Santafication that's likely. So let's call a moratorium, and say from New Year, the numbers will start to go down...

Ahem...

Ho Ho Hooooooboy, Christmas fudge...

The Doomsday Squib

It is a truth universally acknowledged by non-whackjobs everywhere that prophecies of doomsday will undoubtedly - and presumably in every case but one (date to be confirmed) - be proved to be wrong-headed, asinine and fundamentally not, in the final analysis, accurate.

I'm now getting to the age where the inevitability of this fact has been proved on a number of occasions. Y2K - remember that? We were all going to have to go and live in caves in Wales and forage for berries because our computers were gonna go all War Games crazy on us and freeze all our money and make civil disturbance robots to come and stun us every time we disobeyed them...

Which didn't happen.

The maddest one to date was the 6th of June, 2006. Remember what was due to happen that day?
That's right - the AntiChrist was supposed to be born.
Wooooooooooh - scarrrrrrrry...
Of course, Hollywood took full advantage of this bullshit paranoia to release it's entirely lame-ass, shot-for-shot (bar one) remake of the original Omen movie (now with much less creepy kid - actually, if you look at him, he looks like a young Sheldon Cooper...just sayin'...), but in the event...that was pretty much all that actually happened that day.

The Heaven's Gate mob had a very personal approach to the end of the world - they were convinced they needed to shed their earthly forms and fuck off to a passing asteroid. And at least part one of their plan went swimmingly - they all died.

And then of course last year we had the happy clappy we're all gonna dieness of Harold Camping's funsters. There's actually an entry in this blog where we were in an airplane, above the US, at the point where the world was supposed to end and Jesus was supposed to appear in the clouds to judge us all.

He didn't show. The thing I loved about the Camping lot was the immediate back-pedalling they did, setting another deadline for Judgment Day.

Didn't happen then, either.

Annnnnnd as far as can be told at this point, it's not happening today either. The Mayan "Apocalypse" - which of course real Mayan scholars will tell you was never going to happen today anyway - hasn't happened so far. I still think the end of the calendar simply marks the point at which the calendar maker discovered girl. Or boys. Or him or herself. Or a very friendly Alpaca for all we know.

There's a T-shirt firm I like called EpicEmbrace.com, and they've just released their T-shirt of the day - "I survived December 21st, 2012". Gotta love that sort of spontaneity.

In my world, a strange day. It was my folks' wedding anniversary today, and obviously, the first one where Dad wasn't there. So that was weird.

Also, didn't bike this morning - had to finish a piece of work before going to sing with the choir at our corporate sponsors' factory. Since then, I've been pretty much beggaring about hither and yon all day. And now I'm about to start another edit - deadline January 2nd, so...erm...zoiks! Back on the bike tomorrow. Truly.

The Falsetto Motivation Factor

Very frequently, the first text I get on any day will be from my friend Sian. Sian is many things - businesswoman, mother, extreme runner, multiple martial artist, Subtlety Aversion Sufferer and, currently, supply teacher, about whom it is whispered in clearly-not-quite-hushed tones that she has a secondary career as an assassin. This, it has to be said, somewhat outstrips her own mother's reputation in the same field - she had to settle for rumours of bloody-minded witchcraft.

Often, in these early morning texts, there won't be any personal detail, just a line of a lyric. Since we share a very particular time and space in the Venn Diagram of Shared Musical Taste, it will usually - not to say invariably - be a line from an 80s or 90s rock or metal song. The recipient will name the tune and the artist, and usually reciprocate.

The lyric, you see, is not chosen at random. It's an indicator of "what kind of day" it is.
Yesterday, she sent me "black lace on sweat" - which the 80s rock-geeks among you, if there are any, will of course know is from Alice Cooper's seminal "Poison". That meant it was an Alice Cooper Kind Of Day - Alice has defined his music as being about "sex and death", but that's not precisely the kind of day it was - it's more about the feeling of his music - slowish, hardish, rebellious,staring, pointy, and more than a little showy.

Today, by contrast, she sent me a Nickelback lyric - tighter, harder, faster, a little more cynical.
On both occasions, the texts came in while I was on the bike, and, as it happened, on both occasions, I was listening to the first two Queen albums - all fantasy epics, kick-ass guitars and demented falsettos - a somewhat self-regarding, highly-strung kind of day, which I suppose when you go on later that day to sing tenor at a carol concert in front of a small but sweatily-packed chapel, is probably accurate. For some reason though, this week, early 70s Queen has been just the thing to power on my legs at what-the-fuck o'clock. Maybe it's the Falsetto Motivation Factor?

What kind of day will it be tomorrow?
I'll let you know.

Oh - weigh-in. Meh - 17stone 10.25. Technically a pound and a half lighter than last week. But of course, this morning I weighed after doing an hour on the bike, which I happen to know takes a pound and a half off me instantly. So probably, when all's said and done, no movement this week, or the biking has yet to take effect - which I pretty much knew going in. Did I mention philosophical whatnots and keeping my head down and pushing the numbers down?

Hmm...Maybe I should move on to the harder Queen albums tomorrow...

The Bethlehem Dislocation

Long day. Biked this morning, then sat all day, editing.
Went to sing with the choir this evening, and at various points felt something like a singing Sontaran, especially when, after the concert was done, d turned, smiling, to me and said
"I need to give you sitting down lessons. When you sit with the choir blazer on, the shoulders of the blazer kinda go up around your ears. Looks...kinda dorky..."
And that wasn't even taking into account that we did a chunk of the recital wearing Santa hats. Yep - I was a singing Sontaran in a Santa hat. Who-geeks, just call me Strax...

We went from the chapel where we did the recital to dinner. We tried a local cheap place called the Dragonfly.
"Sorry," said the unsorriest barmaid on the planet. "We've got no free tables. Like...at all. Christmas parties, innit?"
So we went to overpriced fauxtalian joint, Frankie and Benny's. Waited a couple of minutes to get a table. Then waited for about 20 minutes, perusing menus and dying of thirst. Then we thought "Fuck it, life's too short," and left.
It was starting to rain, and, not to torture a metaphor, but we were starting to get a distinctly "Joseph and Mary" vibe. We shrugged.
"Nandos?" said d. Sure, I agreed. What can go wrong with simple chicken?

"The management would like to apologise for the current shortage of chicken at this Nando's Chicken Restaurant..." said the sign on the door.
Any questions?


Weigh-in tomorrow. Feel huge and Sontaran and blech, but have to be philosophical (again!) and consider that I've started biking again just this week. Tomorrow's result is basically where the numbers start from - after this, they go down again. No, really, they do - the great thing about being a Sontaran is that you can hijack a Time Lord and peep ahead at your story. Gets better from here, honest...

The Merthyrversary Determination

Exactly a year ago today, I watched d ride off in a van with almost all our possessions, and settled in for five days on an air mattress. A year ago today, we stopped pretty much living in London.

I've been noticing the differences in the world today. The most obvious of course is that we came to help my Dad, and now, he's not in the world.

In Disappearing terms, a year ago today, I looked a lot better than I do right now. I had two big coats that fitted, and a penchant for scarves around a clearly defined neck. At this point I have none of these, and I want them back.

To that end, I got back on the bike this morning. Felt ridiculously hard of course, coming as it did out of a clear blue sky to a body no longer used to it. But also, ridiculously good. Something about the doing of it felt right, as well as more than a little virtuous. I will now do this every day until Christmas (when we wake up somewhere else), and meanwhile make plans for the new year, and a new assault on the layers of solidifying fat that weigh down my body, hold down my abilities and press down on my mood.

As years go, it would be hard to say something laudatory about 2012. The hope that we held out for the year turned out to be unjustified, the effort that I'd applied throughout the preceding year was broken and slid back two and a half stone or more. We lost the rock of our family, and we flailed, hopelessly, in the loss of him.

But here we are. Together, and with a better quality of life, a better pace, a better way of being. More song, a business, and still, a shedload of unpacked boxes full of things about which we've largely forgotten. Merthyr itself has been reasonably kind to us, despite the cloud-strewn year we've had. And so begins our second Welsh year - with determination, resurrection of effort, and a commitment to make year one (of the Disappearing Man, rather than of the Merthyr Life) mean something long term, rather than simply "that time when I lost a lot of weight".

The Unwhispered Git Procession

Plumbers number six finally turned up this morning.
They were here for three hours putting up scaffolding. I decided I needed to get a handful of Christmas cards out and asked them if I'd be OK to leave for half an hour.
"No," they said. "Stay here. We'll need to test things."

Arse.
They got on our roof, shoved rods down our waste pipe, removed a blockage, then came and told me to turn all our water-dependent items. I did, and they walked out onto the balcony, while I was in the kitchen.

Tip 1: If you're going to take the piss out of someone, make sure there'a more than a kitchen window between you.

"Durrr, I dunno," called one plumbing-git to his compatriots on the scaffolding. "One hand don't know what the other's doin' here..."
"Yes!" I called through the window. "It really does, you know. Not our fault you tested the wrong pipe the first time round!"
He didn't react. I went out of the front door.
"Right. Seems to be working now."
"Make sure, while we're here," he said.
"Sure as I can be right now," I countered. "If it's not right later, I'll have no compunction in calling you back."

Now, it's important at this point to understand that this whole scaffolding malarkey isn't just because of us - the next door neighbour reported to our second private plumber that they were having issues too. So when Mr One-Hand folded his arms and smirked at me, and said
"See...no-one else has had problems, have they mate?" I rather took exception to his tone, which made out that I was making this whole palaver up.
"Yes," I said coldly. "Next door's been having problems too."
"We just asked her!" he roared, triumphantly. "Says she's had no problems at all!"
"Not what she told my second plumber," I said, shrugging.
He waved a dismissive hand at me.
"Whatever mate, long as you're happy..." he said. I buggered off to go and post my cards. When I came back, the Loud Git and his quieter sub-gits had taken down the scaffolding it had taken them three hours to put up and sodded off.

Any Disappearing today?
Not really, no. Was up late last night, and have been working all day. Going away to snore now...Do not disturb, for I am the Git-Downslapper.

The Dwarven Identification

Went to see The Hobbit this afternoon, which was fun. For me, it was far more accessible than any of the Lord of the Rings movies. It's mainly the story of a quest by a bunch of dwarves to retake the halls of their forefathers.
At one point, the dwarves are having a banquet in Bilbo Baggins' house. They were happily quaffing and chomping and generally...y'know, being fantasy dwarves, and d nudged me, grinning.
"Oh god...you're a dwarf!"
I nodded back. It's kinda one of my things.

In my time, I have been a geek of all almost all kinds. I have played Dungeons and Dragons. I have read fantasy novels and watched fantasy novels, and there's some sort of body-image thing going on every time. I've never felt able to "be" an Elf, or even a human - or indeed to especially identify with them. But the dwarves...famously, the life of a dwarf in fantasy worlds is "nasty, brutish and short" - much like them. But something about their underground existence, their shortness and roundness and beardiness, and general fondness for double-headed axes, makes them appeal to me more than any other inhabitants of a standard fantasy world.

Can't help but wonder whether at any point in my life, I'll identify with the tall, willowy Elven folk, or even the muscle-bound warriors of the Human kingdoms, or whether, having grown up to be nasty, brutish and short myself, my mental self-image will always be twinned with the Dwarves.

Right...am off now to have a good hard quaff and fling some axes at things...

The Important Sitting Protocol

A day of essentially sitting on my ass all day, mainly attached to a computer.
Now, before you all go "Ptui! Thought you were gonna get on the bike...", let me explain.

Yesterday, we had visits from no fewer than five plumbers from four different organisations.

The last of them, who arrived at 10.30 at night, apparently without any understanding of why they were here, stayed a while, and then decided that the only way to solve our current plumbing problems was to get on the roof, probably with scaffolding, and use rods from there to excavate our waste pipe.
"Can't do that tonight," they said (ya don't say?). "We'll get the drain boys here tomorrow. With scaffolding."

So I had to sit and wait for them. No biking in case a) I didn't hear the door, or b) I suddenly had to explain it all again, and was all sweaty.

So...nehh. Day of doing editing - you know, that thing for which I occasionally get paid, and for which right now I need occasional days like this. Made good progress, tried to eat as little as possible, bar dinner, which was stir fry and rice and Brussel sprouts, of which it was absolutely imperative I had two portions.

Other than that...sitting.

Lots and lots of thoroughly lovely sitting. Hard life, eh?

The 50s Mouse Reaction

My brother asked me a thing a couple of nights ago on Skype.
"You're not doing things now just to have something to blog about, are you?"

Now...no. Certainly though, I'm not above that kind of literary whorishness - I did Zumba and Spin classes, let's not forget. If anything, now, I'm not-doing things to have something to write about. I do find myself, perhaps, overegging my actual, in-the-moment reactions a bit just in order to find, perhaps, the comedy edge to report in this blog though. That whole Man-Flu thing, for instance. Most of the time, I can't be bothered doing the whole "I'm ill, sympathise with me" thing. Just occasionally though, if something really gets me, my inner Camille comes out and I retire to my bed in wisps of chiffon and write my own epitaph, bequeathing bits of my DVD collection to various friends. So when the Man-Flu hit, I went completely over-the-top with the "Unclean! Unclean!" stuff, mainly to be able to go over-the-top on this blog and maybe give some people a laugh.
Last night though, there was an instance where I was genuinely, in the Real World, entirely as pathetic as I am now about to make out to you.

Call us fortunate, decadent Weterners, but we have a kitchen. It's not a big kitchen, but it's a kitchen - washer-dryer, dishwasher, sink, cooker et al.
We've been having issues with the sink not draining away the water poured into it. We've also been having issues - entirely separate issues - with the cooker hood/extractor fan. In particular, the issue there is its distressing tendency to go snap, crackle, pop and, more often than not...urkle.

I'll be honest - I couldn't give a fuck about the extractor fan. The most complicated meal I generally prepare is cereal WITH banana. Or, if I'm really pushing out the culinary boat, toast WITH a tin of something cold upended on it. Such is the fate of a bloke of limited skill who's married to someone who not only loves to cook, but is ridiculously good at it, given that she's only had the one lifetime so far to learn. So - as I say, couldn't actually give a flying fuck about the extractor fan for myself, but d, being the generally willing chef de cuisine of this establishment, really missed it. Being, as I'm sure I may have mentioned before, notsomuch skilled in the Manly Arts as skilled in Getting A Real Man In, I'd arranged for a bloke to come and have a look at the fan last night.

As is happened, I was also up against a deadline - bit of a mad day all round yesterday, but the fan man was coming at 5. At 6.30 I had to get on a bus to go and pick d up from a late shift at work, because a) the buses are a bit dodgy, b) it was bloody freezing, c) it was also dark and creepy where she works and she's a woman on her own, and d) Ma was in a meeting with her car.
At about 5.30, fan man arrived and we exchanged pleasantries about how "wretched bastard freezing" it was outside. he set to work changing the fuse in the fan, and I...being, as it were, "worse-than-fuck-useless" as an electrician's mate, went back to work in the living room. About six minutes later he called through.
"Ohhhh! You know you've got a water leak in here?"
Yeah. Sure. Cos that's what I do when we have a water leak - go back to work in the living room...
I came to see what he was talking about.
Ah.
He was talking about the slew of dirty water escaping from the inactive washing machine, and flooding the kitchen floor.
"Fuck," I said, rather conversationally.
"Yeah," he said, still fiddling with electrics as the water lapped around his ankles.
"Fan's fixed," he announced.
"What the Hell is THAT?!" I said, pointing to the sink.
"That's a sink," he said without looking round. Sarky bastard - I liked him.
"Nono, I mean that," I said, pointing to the dirty water that was filling the sink. It was rising. "Fuck," I said again. He looked round.
"Blimey," he said.
"Ya-huh!" I agreed. It was 5.50 by this point. I had to be on the 6.30 bus.
"Right," he said, taking charge. "Got a saucepan?"
I blinked. I looked at the rising water, and bit back the obvious answer - "No, this is a no-saucepan kitchen..." Instead, I nodded and grabbed one.
"Bale!" he instructed. I baled, taking saucepan after saucepan of warm and dirty water out onto the balcony and pouring them down the communal drain. I managed to empty the sink, and he turned off the water to the washing machine, so I baled that out too.
"Yaaaaaargh!" he said.
"What?!"
"Stabbed myself!" he explained.
"Stop doing that," I muttered.
"Yaaaaaaargh..." he said again, nodding and wrapping his thumb in a tea towel. Apparently, he'd stepped back and jabbed his digit onto the blade of a Stanley knife. I looked at the clock. 6.08.
"What the Hell?" I asked, searching for an explanation of the Poltergeisty upwardly-mobile water-flow that we'd just about managed to arrest. We threw towels down to mop up the flood.
There was a snap and a crackle and a pop and and a determined urkle. He turned around to the fan and frowned at it. It didn't care, it was dead. 6.15.
"S'ok," he lied. "I know how to fix this."
"In five minutes or less?"
He paused.
"Aye, probably..." he nodded.

Oddly enough, he was right. I got to the bus with about a minute and a half to go and collected d from work.

Thing is...I was due to do an UberCommute today. An UberCommute for a Christmas lunch with my officemates. But we couldn't let it be - if it could spontaneously fill and flood yesterday, what was to stop it doing the same again today, when neither of us were there to bale it out?

So I cancelled the London trip. If I tell you that throughout the day, I've been visited by no fewer than five different plumbers, you'll get the sense that this was no ordinary problem. The last bunch, at 10.30 tonight, came and said that basically, the only way to solve it was to get a crew up on the roof, and shove rods down the waste pipe between us and next door...
...but that that was probably impossible without scaffolding.

Scaffolding. Platforms and so on. By daylight. Tomorrow.

So I'm still not letting the damn thing out of my sight, frankly.

So what's the 50s Mouse Reaction?

Laying in bed last night, d said "Gosh, I'm so glad you were here to bale out, baby."
I shrugged. "Pah. Honey, I'm just glad there was a Real Man there. Without the electrician, I'd have been like a screaming woman in a 50s movie, standing on a table when a mouse ran through."
d laughed.
"That's my guy..." she murmured as sleep threatened to take us both.
That's your Disappearing Man, folks. Utterly without Man-Skills even in a crisis, but gimme a saucepan and I can run along a balcony till the cows come home.

The Lurgi Rationalisation

Yep. Pretty hideous.
17 stone 11.25 - that's up 3.5 pounds this week.

I'm going to wantonly grab at any damn excuse I can find for this, and squeeze the lurgi between my fat sausage-fingers. The lurgi started this week making me feel knackered and kitten-weak. It, and a shedload of Stuff To Do, has continued to keep me away from the bike all week, meaning I've basically been sitting mainly on my arse, eating and working. I do know, perfectly well, that if I can carve out a week of regular biking and reasonable eating, I can more than undo this hiccup. But that said, 11 pounds is a fairly big hiccup, and now 18 stone is closer than 17 is. Fairly depressing on the run-up to Christmas, but there it is.

The Man-Breasted Monolith

No, still no biking, leave me alone!
Sigh...this week seems to have been composed entirely of "Those Days", from lurgi to busy to what-the-hell.

Tonight, went singing with the choir at a local old folks' home, and then our local Tesco store. d came to Tesco to support us, and took some pictures. I was dressed in shirt and tie, with a pale blue choir sweater over it.

This, as it happens, is not currently a flattering look for me. Looking at the pictures, I look almost oblong. An oblong with man-breasts straining beneath the sweater. Not a happy picture, all in all.

Thursday tomorrow. Weigh-in day. Feel like I may break the scales, but that's just the picture working its dark magic on me.

Sigh.

The Five Dollar Shakes

Question for the philosophers amongst you: Is a dessert a dessert if you have to drink it?

I ask because, as it turned out, it was payday today, which was an unexpected pleasure. We went out for a payday dinner, and had cocktails. d had margaritas, and I had two glassfulls of a thing that explicitly called itself a "Strawberry Shortcake".

It was basically milk and cream and amaretto and strawberry syrup.
Which, in a slightly different glass, would probably have been a Sundae.

Did I mention...brr? Dammmmn cold out there at the moment. Walked five revolutions of the lake this morning with Ma, although somewhere in the middle there, it turned into semi-sliding some revolutions...

More work, more editing, still no biking. And then a celebratory payday meal...with two liquid desserts at five bucks a pop.

Sigh...

Moving right along. Cleansing breaths and non-payday ordinary Disappearing tomorrow.

The Lakeside Revolution

Lurgi notwithstanding, decided to go walking this morning. Did five revolutions round the park lake with Ma. Coughed up half a lung, but felt all sorts of virtuous at the end of it. Decided, to quote Shakespeare, that "being crept in favour with myself, I shall maintain it..." and that I'd get on the bike today.

Once I'd done a shedload of day-job. And a bit of business.  Annnnnd maybe a handful of choir stuff.

Just finished a handful of choir stuff about fifty seconds ago. Still have some business to do. So the cycling has been back-burnered for the day, leaving me just five revolutions of the lake to set against my calorific intake for the day.

So what's that been? Not too bad, all told. Weetabix breakfast, toast and beans and a little roast beef and gravy for dinner...apple...coffee...

Should be OK, Scooby-creeping-style. On to tomorrow, with more revolutions and hopefully, the cycling that got pushed out of today...

The Intimate Gift Debacle

Apologies - you're not going nuts, Disappearing-readers, there was no post last night. Didn't get in till nearly midnight, and was dragging my ass along by that point.

The night before, I didn't actually think I'd be going out last night at all - I was still wallowing in Man-Flu Hell. But after a night of being slathered in "Vick's", my fever broke and the mucusfest in my head dripped down from my brain to sit mainly in my throat and nose and chest - all of which I could cope with. Which was just as well - after posting the last entry, my friend and sometime banker Sue responded:
"Glad you're not sitting next to me tomorrow night!"
"What's happening tomorrow?" I said, sniffing.
"Rhod Gilbert, stupid," she reminded me.

Ohhhhh yeah. That.
There will be those amongst you who don't know who Rhod Gilbert is. To you I say - YouTube is your friend. Go there, now, type in Rhod Gilbert - yes, really, spelled like that - and then proceed to laugh your ass off. He's a successful Welsh stand-up comedian, on a par with Lewis Black for the demented rages into which he works himself onstage. Sue had booked tickets to go and see him, with her daughter, a while back, and I'd paid her to get me and Lee tickets too.

Yesterday morning arrived with a clearer head.
"I should probably find the tickets for tonight," I said to d.
"Yeah, probably. Where are they?"
Rhod would probably have answered that if he'd known where they were, he wouldn't have to find them, but I was in no state to be authentically Gilbertian.
"Last I knew, they were on the seat in the hall," I sniffed. I went to look. They weren't there. I checked through the pile of papers on the kitchen table. Not there either. Checked the pile of papers on the living room pouffe...Nope.
This was getting serious. I moved upstairs to the office. There are three pile-locations in the office too. Went through all of them, and no tickets could I find. I was freaking out by this point. It had taken us three and a half hours, by now, of turning the flat upside down. I'd texted Sue to reprint the tickets, maybe, and texted Lee to ask if I'd somewhere along the line given them to him instead. I was pretty much calling off the trip...when d found them, underneath a pile of clothes on the stairs, waiting for one of us to take them upstairs.

So we were back on. Fantastic show, essentially - if you get a chance to go see Rhod in action, take it. Turn your house upside down if you need to, force down Man-Flu if you have to. Go do it.

The rant that closed the first half though sent me whirling back to a personal memory from a couple of years ago. It was about a toothbrush. An expensive, electric, state-of-the-art toothbrush that his then-girlfriend got him for Christmas last year. I'm not going to steal the man's jokes, I'm going to force you to GO HERE and laugh your ass off at his original delivery of them. Suffice it to say, he proposed the idea that an expensive, electric, state-of-the-art toothbrush was pretty much the shittiest Christmas present it is possible to buy someone you ever expect to be nice to you again.

Spooooooool back with me a couple of years. Times were hard, the economy was pretty much teetering on the event horizon of the toilet bowl, and d sat me down to make a speech.
"Times are tough, honey," she said. "So this year, you're only getting one real, intimate present, and a couple of little things, OK?"
I perked up quite considerably, having my own ideas about what a "real, intimate present" could involve. Christmas breakfast served by a d dressed entirely in ribbon and gift tags, I'm not entirely ashamed to say, sprang to what passed at that moment for my mind. But I nodded sombrely and continued in my then-spendthrift ways, trying to think of more and other ridiculous things to buy her that she didn't want and didn't need.

Come Christmas Day, she handed me a package with batting eyes. "Here's your special, intimate gift baby," she said. I was slightly worried. It was a longish, thinnish box. What, I wondered, had she done?

She'd bought me an expensive, electric, state-of-the-art toothbrush.
"Ah," I said. "Thanks, baby...erm...cool..."

It was actually about a month later when, tidying away some papers from a pile, I came across a receipt.
"Erm...baby?" I asked. "I don't think I was meant to see this, was I?"
She looked. Then a million-piece jigsaw in her mind all fell into focus.
"Oh," she said. "Fuck!" Then she got up and dashed off into another room, coming back with a tallish, widish box, beautifully gift-wrapped.
"I've just worked something out," she said, handing over the gift.
"What's that?" I asked.
"The look on your face on Christmas Day," she explained. "I forgot all about this!"
It was the box set of MASH, the American sitcom which I'd watched as a kid with my gran, and which d herself had watched occasionally own-jawed for its moments of body-slamming pathos.
"Ah!" I said. "So this would be-"
"Your special, intimate gift, yeah," she agreed. "Can't believe I didn't remember that!"
"I did wonder," I admitted. "Where did you think I'd be using the toothbrush?"
"Shurrup, ya dolt," she laughed, nudging me, and I kissed her. With perfectly clean teeth, incidentally...
What I love about this story is that she'd given it some real thought, got me something that connected me to a loved, but now deceased relative, and connected us, and also happened to be incredibly funny. She'd wrapped it beautifully, tied it with a bow, written a very sweet tag, hidden it safely where I'd never find it...and then forgotten all about it! Even when on Christmas Day, she'd introduced what must, on some level have registered as "one of the small things" as the intimate gift, the existence of the gift she'd actually found, and wrapped, and dedicated, didn't pop up in the back of her brain and ring its little bell of recognition.

That's my girl, and I love her.


To be fair, having revealed what was probably d's biggest Christmas faux-pas, I should share my own. I think it was the year before the Intimate Gift Debacle.

Thing is, that year, everything I knew d wanted was more than I could get, and everything I could get, I knew she didn't particularly care about. I took a desperate, blokish stab in the dark, and ordered her a spa day online.

The voucher for the spa day was supposed to have arrived long before Christmas, but hadn't. In a doubling-down of desperation, I hand-wrote some riddling love notes, and hid them on all three floors - count them, one, two, three - of Ma's house, where we habitually spent Christmas. So on Christmas morning, my beloved wife went up and down and up and up and up and down and up and frigging up again those stairs, chasing clue after clue after clue, that ultimately led her to...

Precisely buggerall.
Pink-faced at the end of it, she asked what it was all about.
"It's a spa day, baby!" I explained, practically doing jazz-hands and ta-dahing..

"Oh," she said. "OK..."

The next day I was ringing up the spa day people to say that not only had the voucher for the spa day not arrived, but now I didn't want it, and could I just have the money back...like, right freakin' now please...

So, much as Rhod's rant was funny, it's my contention that there is a worse gift than an expensive, electric toothbrush (mine still works, by the way, and I use it daily!). For truly fucked-up Christmas ideas, a three-story guessing game, leading to buggerall, followed by an explanation of a gift that the recipient will never, ever use, and which moderately creeps them out and reveals to them that you have no real idea of their inner soul, despite having been married for a couple of years...yeah, that's worse.

Hmm...Toothbrushes...
Amazon.co.uk, here we come...

The Lurgi Retalliation

Unff.

OK fine...so Disappearing trousers be damned. Ring me the goddamned bells, people!
"Man-Fluuuuu! Man-Fluuuuu!"
Painted a couple of black crosses on the front door this morning. That was about all I managed to achieve today. Well, two black crosses, one press release and a partridge in a pair treeeee...

Head one enormous bubble of sickly green snot, that - and here's the part I really don't understand - burns when you swallow it. What the Hell is that about? Tequila-snot? Nowhere near as much fun as it sounds.

Thought of getting on the bike right now is enough to make me fall to my knees and weep. But then oddly enough, thought of simply sitting here, or laying down, or blinking, is pretty much enough to make me fall to my knees and weep too.

Well, it would be, if the thought of falling to my knees didn't make me want to weep...

The phrase "good for nothing" is thrown about carelessly these days. But today, that would be me. Good for absoluuuutely buggerall. Might just conceivably achieve some heavy snoring later on, but other than that, this is one of those days which, on my eventual (we hope!) death-bed, I'll really resent the fuck out of. When it comes time to expire, and all the might-have-been days of long walks on the beach, and good wine with friends, and making sweet love with my girl flash in front of my eyes...hopefully lingering here and there...days like today will rise up like cancerous black carbuncles on my sweaty ass, cos they're days that could have been spent doing so much more, or so much else, than sitting here whimpering, blowing rivers of snot out of every conceivable orifice (don't ask) and feeling supremely, Man-Fluishly, sorry for myself.

Hating this more than just a little...

The Sausage Boy Discrepancy

Point 1 - Go wild and crazy, Disappearing fans - weigh-in today showed 17 stone 7.75 - in other words, having been away from weigh-ins for two weeks, one of which included three days of unrestricted hedonism, and the other of which has been mainly Scooby-sneaking by, and rather than the 18 stone and some that I felt sure I'd be at by now, I've actually managed a fartsworth of loss. So that, we love.

After three days home with appalling lurgi, d went back to work today, to infect the fuck out of her colleagues. I went up to Ma's for one day...and have come down with the bastard.

Had to go out tonight though, to choir committee. d told me to put my rain jacket on. The one I surprised us all by getting into months ago, when it was a medium and I shouldn't have been able to get into it at all.

I tried to zip it.It squeaked.
"Fuck you," I told it, and zipped it all the way up. Jussssst about.
"Wow," said d. "Alrighty, well have fun, Sausage Boy," said d, looking at my Kielbasa'd body as I waddled out, almost unable to breathe. The walk to choir takes about three minutes, if that. By the time I got to the door, I had to unzip the jacket, to allow the stuffing of my sausage out.

So on the one hand, I'm happy about the lack of weight I've put on. And on the other, I've had a salutory reminder of how far back I have to go. So - lurgi be damned, Disappearing Trousers on, and forrrrrward!!!

The Alcohol Equivalency

d remains lurgied, but ventured outdoors at lunchtime. As it happened, there was a Continental market in town, so she came back with a gift for me - an assortment of fruit and nuts, a la Graze boxes and Cranberry!

So - yay!

She poured out a small bowlful and handed it to me. I looked down, a little sadly.
"That's what's classed as a responsible portion," she explained. "But I'm not gonna treat you like a six-year-old," she added, handing me the bigger jarful as well. "You're a grown-up, just, y'know, enjoy responsibly. Think of it as the Disappearing equivalent of alcohol."

By now, I would say I'm by no means drunk. In fact, I'm not even properly tipsy. I may be one over the eight, and hail fellow, well nut...

But am now putting the jar aside, at least for tonight. I've got choir in an hour, and it simply wouldn't do to be caught singing under the influence of nut-mix!

The Cyber-Conversion Confusion

Well, that was odd.

Went up to the hospital this morning for what I was told would be a "walking ECG" - where they strap a bunch of crap to you, basically turn you into a Cyberman, and then you walk around for 24 hours giving heart measurements.
Got there, and they told me I was down for an echocardiogram - much less fun, all in all. I queried this with the blunt-faced bint on reception.
"No," she said. "You're down for an echo, not a 24-hour tape."
"Really?" I said. "Cos there was a sheet of information about the 24-hour walking ECG, and nothing about an echo."
"Really," she said, challenging me with her eyes. Those eyes said "Are you fuckin' stupid, fat boy?"
"You're...down...for...an...echo."
I'm really not exaggerating her diction here.
"Please," I said, meeting her eyes. "Check." She checked. I was right. She sniffed.
"It's the wrong attachment," she decided.
"Is it?"
She stared at me.
"Yes. Obviously. You're down for an echo!"

I walked away. I bow to no-one in my admiration for the NHS - as a concept, it's breath-taking and as an inspiration to care and vocation, it trumps any pecuniary advantage you care to name.
But no organisation of its size and scope will survive without a certain number of arseholes. You kinda take pot luck with finding them.

Thing is - the Cyber-conversion had put me in a mindset that I wouldn't be able to do any exercise today. When it didn't take place, did I embrace the opportunity and jump on the bike?

Nnnno. Came home and worked my ass off doing day-job stuff, No exercise of any kind today, though calorie-intake hasn't been bad either. Tomorrow...who knows? Not thinking about it, really. Feel like I've been hit with the lead pipe of Knackerdity.

Zzzzzzzz.....Zzz.....Zzzzzzzzzz....

The Cranberry Disappearance

Particularly stalkerish readers will have heard me talk about Cranberry, a store at some of London’s tube and train stations where I have a habit of grabbing some fruit and nuts on the UberCommute as a kind of healthy-ish protein shot to add a certain nutritional value to days that would otherwise comprise principally of coffee. There’s a thread here – I used to have Graze boxes delivered, which were tiny shots of the same kind of thing. d has frequently made me jars of a fruit and nut mix as a healthy-ish snack. And Cranberry had become something I looked forward to about the UberCommute. Having had a month off them, I swung around the usual corner at Paddington this morning, only to find the shop shut up and a notice on it saying it had been repossessed. Have had a madly busy day, but actually found a minute to call up their head office, to see if they still existed as a company. Yes, it turned out they did…but only just. From having about nine stores, they now had a single stall left, in Hammersmith.

It will show you something probably quite deep and meaningful about the nature of addictive behaviour if I tell you that after work, I got a bus from Kensington to Earl’s Court, just to visit the stall. And then I got a tube from Hammersmith to Paddington. I went miles out of my way, just for a couple of handfuls of fruit and nuts.

That’s got to be wrong, surely?

So I’ve made a decision. I’m choosing to interpret it as a sign – even though I’m a rationalist who doesn’t believe in signs – that the Paddington store has closed. That’s me done with Cranberry. Phase done, time over with. Back to simply Coffee Mondays when I do the UberCommute.

Hey – protein’s over-rated, right?

Tomorrow should be interesting – I’m going for Cyber-conversion to do a 24 hour walking ECG. d, bless her, is still lurgied, and is apparently banging into walls and doors when she stumbles around the flat. So, walking ECG, shedloads of work, and trying to get my girl all better – she went to the docs today and apparently it takes around two weeks to throw off this bug. Poor thing.

The Scooby Sunday

Sssshhh...

Trying to essentially tiptoe, Scooby Doo-style, through the day. Walked four miles this morning with Ma, then came home and had my three Weetabix breakfast. Since when, I've had...fruit, and two bowls of mashed potato, with a small "snackpot" of baked beans. Should be my lot for the day, I'm hoping - early night, probably, as we return to UberCommuting tomorrow.

Woo...Hoo...

So, hence the trying to not let the day notice me - done fairly well, all told, and hope not to give the day any reason to throw me for a loop.

d remains lurgied and with the strength of a particularly lethargic kitten. Hence, additional benefit to an early night.

Oh bugger - just remembered, have to go early to choir tonight as well...Right...well, then this is me, going to pack a bag for tomorrow.

Remember...sssshhh....

The Neanderthal Nightingale Approximation

Back into the perspex boxes today. Kinda hatin' it so far, have to say. Even though technically, I'm glad to be back into a simpler dietary regime, a less excessive approach to what goes into my body...it's like going cold turkey with anything - you've grown re-accustomed to the excess, so in my case, you just kinda just want to grab a gateau and shove it in your face.

Nevertheless, have done a day of pretty restrained eating - Three Weetabix, four slices of toast, one banana, two apples, one small bowl of sausage pasta.

Simple eating, and no particular exercise today. Have been doing my Neanderthal, blokish version of Florence Nightingale today, as d was stricken with a lurgi. This, for anyone who doesn't have a Neanderthal of their own to call upon, translates as "Ug...Me make tea. You sleep. Me make more tea, wash dishes while you sleep. You up, take pills, drink fluids. Lay on sofa. Here - take hot water bottles. Take pills. Me make toast...You sleep..."

It's not what I'd call an effective care plan, but it's what there is in my experience-bank, so I've used it today. Tomorrow, Ma and I are at least going for an early-ish walk, to re-introduce our bodies to the business of exercise. Monday, I'm back to the UberCommute, and back to London. Tuesday's a weird one. Having another 'walking ECG" - which means becoming a Cyberman for 24 hours, strapped into monitors that I carry around with me. Not allowed to shower or bathe while I'm wearing the kit, so it seems unlikely I'll do any deeply strenuous exercise Tuesday either, though may sneak in a lunchtime walk.

And on we go, hitting perspex as we reach for that damned gateau.

The Maternal Resurrection

Beautiful breakfast with d and Ma and some of Wendy's family. Home from Kilworth House via a quaint Tudor village called Ledbury, where we stopped for the kind of lunch you can only do when you're in a whirlwind of hedonism, promising to reform in the morning. Butternut squash soup, and a cream tea. Yep, cream. Yep, tea. Yep, get over it.

Got home, chilled out for a ridiculously short amount of time, and then got dressed for a choir performance. Ma turned up in her car to drive me up to the chapel in one of the higher bits of the town.
"How you doin'?" I asked.
"I'm dead," she said. I sniffed.
"Looking good on it," I decided.
Turned out she'd had a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions - which she'd had to contact following the death of my Dad. "Thank you," it said, "for the information regarding the death of..."
Then it printed my mother's name.

My mother's name.
She smiled. Sweetly.
"I'm going to talk to them Monday," she promised, with the kind of annunciation that makes kings and presidents shudder.
"Zombie apocalypse," I muttered to myself.
"Hmm?"
"You're going to insist on a resurrection, I'm assuming?"
She looked at me, smiling horribly.
"Y'know, I just might..." she said.

"So," she asked. "Back to perspex boxes tomorrow then?"
"Back to perspex boxes in the morning," I confirmed.
"Me too," she agreed, encapsulating a sense of resurrection and new beginnings that's left over from the wedding.

So here's to tomorrow.

29th November - The Wedding Hedonism

So there you have it. My mate Wendy walked down an aisle, actually hand in hand with her beloved, Maria, today, and everybody clapped and almost-cried, and burst their hearts with gladness for them both.

Of course, it is true that everybody also nearly pissed themselves, somewhat cruelly but equally unavoidably, at the registrar, who had a most unfortunate lithp when it came to pronouncing words like “Regithrar”…and “Leithterthire”, and perhaps most unavoidably hilarious of all, “Thivil Partnerthipth”. Bless her, she meant well, and was perfectly within the law, but really, I think if you’re going to have a heavy lithp, you might be just as well to stick to marriageth…

But generally, the day went beautifully well – starting with breakfatht…oh stoppit!...breakfast, which was highly professional and, once again, taken in the Orangery, this time by daylight and white and bright and like eating in a beautiful long conservatory.

What is it about hotel breakfasts that turns perfectly rational human beings into the Emperor Caligula on a bender? I ordered the Full English, and that – bar the black pudding, of which I’m not notably a fan – was what arrived: sausage, bacon, egg, tomato, fried bread, so far, so tasty. Then a couple of holderfuls of toast arrived, and I figured “fuck it, I’m on holiday,” so I got stuck into that too. Enough to satisfy the hungriest bloke who ate, all in all, about eight hours before, right?

Yeah, but there was other stuff there. So I gamely tucked into plain yogurt with fruit compote, and fruit juice – which incidentally is by no means the innocent choice people think it is, and more than calorifically deserves the kudos given to it in the 70s as a course of its own. Then I did a hit and run of the cereal bar, scooping spoonful after spoonful of various different breakfasts into the same bowl. Because ti was there, and technically, it was included in the price of the room. Did I want it? Probably not. Did I need it? Certainly not. But yes, I ate it because it was there.

What? It’s a perfectly valid reason when applied to walking up mountains, but not when chowing them down?

Anyhow – the ceremony went off perfectly, lithp notwithstanding, and we thankfully didn’t eat again until about 5ish. Three full courses – soup, steak/chicken and chocolate tart in my case. Then coffee and petit fours. Because they were there, shut up. Then they brought round wedding cakes – generous cup cakes made, I strongly suspect, of chocolate brownie, then iced. I didn’t eat that. I couldn’t. We brought it upstairs and have packed it away…for tomorrow. Fuck you, technically I’m still on my holidays tomorrow – there’s another breakfast in about 9 hours, to which I’m perversely looking forward. I did however have another nightful of cider, and even though technically I didn’t need it, I just ate a chocolate tart from Costa while writing this blog entry.

This, incidentally, is how you end up being 20 stone and 5 feet 6. I would have not the slightest hesitation in guessing that at this moment as I sit here, I weigh more than 18 stone again. And yes, this is the kind of eating and living that got me to my crisis point in the first place – this is what it looks like when you’re almost intentionally self-harming through food.

Except this, I am actively, painfully aware, is on longer a way of life. It’s an aberration, a time of pure hedonistic celebration and involvement with the joy of my friends. It’s the same impulse that has seen me, tonight, get up and boogie. To quote Mitch Benn, “I have plenty of natural rhythm, but it’s all above the waist”, but still, the night was made for dancing, so on and off, here and there, the Disappearing Man…danced.

Once tomorrow has come and gone, and the sun has set on this wonderful holiday, and Wendy and Maria have buggered off to Lapland – gotta love that for a December honeymoon, no? – I will be coming down to the Earth on which I must now live with a bump. I know this, and accept it, and am to some extent looking forward to the rigors of pain and exercise and hard bloody work all over again.

Oh, two nice things as side—notes. I gave a speech as part of the after-dinner celebrations. Went down very well. Made people laugh, made people cry (even a couple of hard nuts, I gather), made people go “Oh wow” a bit, and made a parade of people whose names I couldn’t tell you if you tortured me come up and shake my hand or hug me and tell me I was fab.

Which could be a dangerous association, were my mind connectively inclined – wild calorific hedonism=people telling me I’m fab. But such thoughts must of course be cast out…largely in an abject fear they may be valid.

And I was given a gift, for doing my bit as a witness to the ceremony. A kickass new pen, from Wendy and Maria. There’s a crazy bit of connectivity there too – I always love getting new pens, they inspire me to write new stories. I can’t wait to see what stories this new one has in it.

But whatever they are, I’ll find them out in a world of discipline and exercise, not this world of chocolate-tasting madness. Nehh. I have spoken…

Mmm…breakfast in nine hours…