The Callibration Factor

Hmm...
Well, the headline, such as it is, is that at today's weigh-in, I was:
15 stone 9.5. A whole whopping pound lighter than last Tuesday. BUT there's a hidden headline in there somewhere - for while the news was OK last Tuesday, by Wednesday - and consistently for some days - I was back up to 15 stone 12.75. But now consistently yesterday and today, I'm 15 stone 9.5, so I find the reading more believable.

That said, we went to the diabetic nurse today, and on her scales, which she claimed had been properly callibrated and were as accurate as could be, I was 15 stone 8 in January clothes - which I've previously experimented with (cos yeah, in case you're new, I really am that sad!), and which amount to two whole pounds of clothes. So...you can judge for yourself the importance of callibration, but I've always previously resisted the lure of external scales, so even though I find the Nazi Scales a little suspect int his case, the weight I'm recording is 15 stone 9.5 pounds - two litttle, poxy pounds from this ever-elusive five-freaking-stone barrier...

Next week, dammit. Next week for sure.

Oh and while we're talking about callibration, I also did a blood test at the nurse's, and it showed as 6.2 - whereas when I got home, it showed as 4.8. Again, the importance of callibration. The nurse was still pleased with me though - apparently, (these things bloody well shift!), the safe, good-control region for blood sugar in the UK now is between 4 and 7, so I'm still well within range. She mentioned that if things continue as they've been going, I will soon be able to drop one kind of medication allllltogether. Take that, Diabetes!

Didn't actually go swimming this morning though - had planned to, but I'm sleeping pathetically at the moment - an hour here, a half-hour there...so at 4.30 this morning (oh the irony - 4.30 on a Tuesday, rather than a Monday...) I turned off the alarm and rolled over. Did manage to get 500 calories of biking in before work though, and popped to the gym for the 'taster' session this lunchtime - more biking, more push-up things, some back work and an indeterminate number of ab crunches. Fairly hateful but oddly, less boring that swimming great hulking lengths back and forth. Weird day tomorrow - either swimming and biking or just double biking in the morning...mmmm...double biking in the warm and dry...followed by a lunchtime 'pathways walk', followed, after work, by an aquacise session leading straight in to a gym taster...we'll be knackered by the end of tomorrow night (but then, saying that, we did just go out for a Chinese buffet, so I think probably we'll deserve to be knackered by tomorrow night!).

Should, in all likelihood, get back on the bike right about now, but d makes the very good point that I've spent more time on a bike today than I have in her company during the entire day, so, y'know what? Nice cup of de-caff tea, feet up, heated couches on and the last remnants of the evening spent with my girl, I reckon. Catch you all on the flipside of the exercise-a-thon...

Disappearing Syndrome

See, I think it’s a sickness.

To most people, to normal people, I’m sure “woohoo, I don’t have to get up at 4.30AM!” is an excuse to lay in bed till the last possible moment.

To me, it appears to be an excuse to get up a whole two hours later, at 6.30, pop to the pool, do my now-regulation ten lengths, then bugger off home and bike for an hour before work.

That can’t be right, surely?

Still, Monday and all – day before the weigh-in – Dum-dum-daaaaaaah!

Honestly, anyone still give a rat’s ass? Except me, I mean, and only then cos it directly affects me.

Was talking to d last night about the temptation to do an Aristotelian experiment...

For those who are just joining us, or, mysteriously, who don’t commit to memory every pearl of wisdom ever written in this blog, an Aristotelian experiment is an experiment with pleasure. Aristotle’s Ethics, which I read a while back, seemed to view pleasure with a great deal of suspicion and to argue that, more often than not, it should be avoided, because it colours your view of what is genuinely good. But, said Ari, those who completely avoided pleasure were miserable cop-outs, and couldn’t really claim to have mastered desire simply by staying the fuck away from pleasurable things. The real test, he said, was to have pleasure in very great moderation, and then master it again every day.

Tell me honestly – you wanna party with this guy, don’t you?

Anyhow – my idea of an Aristotelian experiment goes back to reading the book, because I’m one of those who has banned pleasure of a certain kind – of a culinary kind, clearly – entirely from my diet, in an effort to Disappear significantly. So Aristotle’s words rang in my brain as a kind of test, a kind of “come and have a doughnut if you think you’re hard enough!” call from across the terraces of time.

“I’m thinking of doing an Aristotelian experiment,” I said last night.

“A what?” said d.  I explained it to her as I’ve just explained it to you.

“Oh...OK,” she said. “What are you thinking of having? Want a muffin? I can give you a muffin...”

Double-entendres waaaaay aside, this was a kind offer – she’s started baking seriously again recently, and people at our Sunday morning car boot sales are starting to sit up, take notice and pay money. She was offering me the last of her Morning Glory muffins (again, insert your own double entendre here if you like, safe in the knowledge that I did...).

“Nono,” I said. “Too healthy. I’m thinking of a Welsh Cake...”

I should explain – a Welsh cake is a small bake-stone cake filled with currants. Normally, that’s as far as it goes, but one of the stalls at our local market has been commended by Jamie Oliver as a food hero. They do a kind of Welsh Cake sandwich, with jam and what is essentially frosting in the middle. I’m given to understand it’s practically orgasmic.

“Ohhh, yeah, good choice,” said d.

“Oh no, wait!” I thought again. If you were going to experience pleasure, why dangle your toes in the water, when you could jump in head first.

“How about a Sundae,” I said, fantasising about any and all of the colossal, whorish desserts on offer at the local Harvester. D wasn’t as keen on that idea, but as I’ve mentioned before, I have the discretion of an 8-year-old boy when it comes to desserts. The gaudier the better, almost by default.

“Mmmmm...” I Homered. “Sunnnnndaes....”

“Yyyyeah – way to test your strength there,” said d.

The thing is – the point is - that when today dawned, and the opportunity surely arose to put this plan into action, instead of diving into a dessert head-first, I went swimming and biking, and I’m currently wondering if I have time to get another hoursworth of biking in before dinner. Seems to be some perverse kind of addiction-replacement going on again. More water, more revolutions, dammit! Give me moooooore!

Did I mention, I think it’s a sickness?

Sigh...

Tomorrow should be Interesting. Meeting with a diabetic nurse, presumably for a medication review now we’ve moved across the country. Blood remains relatively constant – on just the one pill (down from four at the start of this experiment last March), my blood this morning was constant from yesterday at 5.2. Woohoo!

Also, have another ‘gym taster’ at lunchtime tomorrow, and intend to swim before work again....annnd possibly bike too...Fightback well and truly started. Let’s see if this positively addictive behaviour is even remotely reflected in the weigh-in tomorrow morning...

Best Exercise Accessory...Ever

Meant to mention this a couple of days ago, but blood on Friday was 4.8. Blood this morning, on a single pill, was 5.2 - still within acceptable boundaries apparently, so time to examine my meds on a more fundamental basis come Tuesday's nurse appointment, probably.

Today has been all about chaos. In trying to empty boxes, I've basically created chaos out of order in the office. Once I'm done writing this of course, I'll go and try and reverse the process, minus the boxes. I'm not sure the universe works quite like, but hey - pissing off the universe is one of the many things I'm about.

Apart from that, there's a big rumour today - that we're due a big Siberian wind, loaded with 'tumps' of snow - official Weather Channel word, by the way, when did that happen?

Now it should be pointed out that, as yet, there is no snow where we are. Further up the Valley, yes, but nowhere near us or our travel direction when I bugger off to Cardiff, and then London, in the morning. BUT - it could happen. So my boss has allowed me to opt out of the UberCommute tomorrow. Awoohoo!

Going back upstairs now, to re-excavate the bike (turned it on briefly earlier, peddled a little, felt my heart sing a song of Back In The Saddle joy and love between a man and a piece of electrical exercise equipment, got off - delayed gratification and all that. Ahhhh, it's great to be alive with an exercise bike in the shadow of a rumour of snow - it means you can eradicate the calorific memory of everything you've eaten and stay up later than 9PM. I ask you - does life get any better than that?

Oh wait - being thin enough to eat desserts, right...

Well...sonofabitch, that was a beautiful moment ruined, wasn't it?

No Excuse

Did I mention, the fightback starts here?

Aquacise and gym today, within a couple of hours of each other. You've heard our morning banter many a time, but this morning, you featured in it.
"D'you really want to do this?" mumbled d at 7.15.
"Course I don't really want to do this," I muttered, drooling into my pillow after a crappy night's sleep. "But I really really don't want to have to report in today's blog that I didn't do it."
d laughed a somewhat hollow laugh.
"You're using the blog as a surrogate conscience now?"
"Hey, whatever works, right? After all, there's no excuse not to go, is there?..." I mouthed those words a little bitterly. They weren't originally mine, but my mother's.

My mother, bless her, has a spectacular way with language, with which she blazes through the world like a bulldozer on crack. She, after all, was the woman who introduced herself to her then-prospective daughter-in-law (who grew up in an Sicilian American family), with the immortal line "Oh, don't worry about us, love - we're just like the Mafia!"

One day this week, Ma was here in our little jewel-box, and we were discussing how much we loved being so central for everything that's everything in this town - including the leisure centre, with its gym and swimming pool.
"Oh, absolutely," she said, casually. "There's no excuse not to go now, is there?"

Let's be clear here - there's no malice in her words, and hardly any deeper meaning. But the words have rather hung around us, every time we've been lying here not wanting to do something horribly energetic. No no...there's no excuse now.

And so, against the will of our bodies, we hauled ourselves into consciousness and into the pool this morning, for a range of exercises which are theoretically supposed to be made easier by the fact they're done in water, but each and every one of which we can feel in our muscles now. I, being a sick fuck on times, went back for the lunchtime gym session, to do some biking, some back-strengthening, and some chest pressing - the practical usefulness of which I suppose will only be revealed to me if I ever get trapped beneath a broken building and have to push great hunks of masonry off myself.

Oh and you remember I said yesterday I'd ordered a new bike power cord?
Arrived TODAY! The postal service is clearly enjoying its annual January speed allotment. So now, there's even less of an excuse to not exercise every possible chance I get.
Have of course also done some office-clearing today - as I know have to unearth the bike, in order to get on it! Read some old journals we wrote, to and about each other, and came over all gooey at our certainty, which, over time, has been more than justified, I'd say.

Sigh...ignore me, just having a sentimental moment.

Tomorrow, more office-clearance, while d and Ma do another car boot sale. And undoubtedly, I'll be getting back on my own bike tomorrow...

After all, there's...

Stranger In A Strange Land

"You might wanna follow me in here," called d from the shower.
"Mmm, yeah," I agreed, working on a feature piece for my magazine. It was early, but we didn't have time to hang about. We had an appointment at the gym.
"No, really," she called. "Don't get too engrossed, you should come and shower before we go."
"Meh," I said. "I'm gonna be showering afterwards anyway..."
"Alrighty then," she said. I'm fairly sure there was a note of "way not to get some, dude," in her tone, but I had to get the piece finished before we went.
As it happened, we just about got out in time. The snow, which had come and pretty much gone overnight had hardened, here and there, into treacherous-bastard ice, so we slipped and picked and determinedly heel-toed our way across to the leisure centre.
"Two for Introduction To Zumba please," said d when we got there, technically a minute late.
The guy at reception looked at me.
"Two?" he asked, then blinked, recovering quickly. "Righto, there you go..." He handed us our receipts and we made our way to the dance studio.

I should say, whenever I've told anyone I was joining d for Zumba, I've had two reactions. Women everywhere have gone "Oh....really?" Men have, without exception, gone "What the Hell is Zumba?"

Zumba, for those who don't know - which is to say, the men - is a kind of bizarre combination of aerobics, Salsa, line dancing, battle drill and comedy. It is, usually, an exclusively female pursuit - except, and this should be stressed - in the case of the male participants being Latin and hot. It's a dancing form of group exercise, which - as every man reading this is now saying to himself - explains why it's mainly a female thing.

As we were a minute or so late arriving, there was a pulsing Latin soundtrack coming from the studio, with occasional high-pitched parade-ground yell. Then we were in there, with women from wall to wall, step-step-stepping from side to side and clapping. d and I shuffled to the back, and eventually started step-step-step clapping.

The instructor was the same shouty, sweat-obsessed perkybot from our gym taster a few days ago. Within minutes she was again asking if we were sweating, except this time, she was asking the room.

Of course, Latin dance is all very well if performed by lithe, serpent-hipped people with rhythm and a bodyful of hormones. If performed by a roomful of wheezing, wobbling, unco-ordinated Welsh folk, it loses something of its sultriness. When your instructor has the thickest South Wales accent, and confidently tells you "Don' follow me...I'm a shit dancer!", it's incredibly easy to forget what it is you're there for. And when instructed to do series after series of wide overarm sweeps...your wife's advice about showering before going into the class tends to come back to you, really rather forcefully.
The overarm sweeps were to be performed to the tune of "Rollin' Down The River", on the line "Big wheels keep on turning..."
Well I'm here to tell you that when you hit yourself with a wave of your own rancid armpit-juice with every overarm sweep, the wheels get smaller and smaller in a reeeeeeal big hurry. You kind of end up with hamster wheels keeping on turning pretty quick. When you also have no co-ordination, it slows you down. But there's a good reason why Zumba is generally a womens-and-hot-men's game.

There's a lot of body-shaking involved, and a lot of dance. Both of which are almost calculated to put women at their ease in each other's company, and to make men, by contrast, entirely ill at theirs. There's an air of an Anne Summers party with music about it, and while, surprisingly, I wasn't the only man in the studio, it was like being men in Sex and the City - we were curiosities, little more. Strangers in a strange land of female instinctive understanding.

That said, d had a fantastic time, and made the instructor's day by smiling and laughing probably more than anyone else had breath for. And in her pleasure, my own found some expression. So, clueless curiosity or not, I'll be back next week for more grinding and shaking and foot-slap-clapping - but next week, you can bet your ass I'll shower first!!


As for the rest of the day, a couple of good bits - got a second pair of swimming shorts, so now there's nothing to really stop me swimming most mornings and evenings if I want to. And I did it - I finally ordered a replacement power cord for the bike, so next week, I can start to really get back on track, irrespective of weather, or money, or work or any other damn thing.

That said, we had an Indian takeaway tonight - hardly diet food! But then we're up early tomorrow for another undoubtedly-largely-female exercise class - Time to hit the pool, for the delights of Aquacise! At this point it's anyone's guess what happens on Tuesday, or what prevails - the exercise or the food. We'll just have to see. But the tide is definitely turning. One way or another, the tide is turning from the mayhem of preparing the move, and doing the move, and setting up the hosue, and setting up routines. The next four weeks - the final four weeks of my first year as a Disappearing Man - will see the tide turn forcibly back in my favour, and things will move my way again before we're done with Year One. I will break through my five stone barrier, dammit, before the 1st of March, I will be more than half the way to my goal. I just...will...

Snow Patrol

Ever had that weird lurgi that comes on you out of the blue, kicks the crap out of you and then buggers off, leaving you feeling OK, but vaguely embarrassed about the whole episode?

"Oh, you look awwwful!" said d, coming home from the local Tesco store. I nodded.
"Good. If I felt this crappy and looked a million dollars, I'd be cross," I mumbled.
"Go and have a nap for an hour," she suggested. It was near enough lunchtime anyway, so I obeyed her without protest. She woke me in stages - it was one of those deals where when you first wake up, you feel like you'll never move again, but after an extra ten or fifteen minutes, you begin to feel, as Jerome K Jerome probably put it, that you perhaps won't die today after all, and that s spot of lunch might bring you back firmly within the realm of the living.

Had intended to go swimming this lunchtime, then got knocked on the head by this lurgi, and that put the tin hat on that for a while. When I woke up feeling relatively fine, I figured I'd just go and battle the lanes of water-traffic tonight instead. Then we looked out the window.
"Holy crap!" said d, pulling the curtains back to show me.
"Brr," I shuddered.
It was snowing. Proper snowing, so to speak, not just airy-fairy trying-to-snow. Big fast flurries of fat flakes, that seemed to be sticking.
"To Tescos, Batman!" said d. I didn't question her decision - at the first sight of snow in this country, people panic. If we waited an hour, there'd be nothing on the shelves. So we took advantage of our almost-ridiculous proximity to everything that matters in this town, and legged it. Getting there, it looked like the austerity principle of baking your own bread was really taking hold - pretty much an entire shelf of flour had vanished between d coming home and telling me I looked awful and the two of us returning, about four hours later.
"So - still going swimming dear?" asked d as we struggled back up the steps to our place.
"Yeah, cos I've always wanted to try my hand at pneumonia," I muttered. In short - bugger it all to Hell, am staying home and warm. And, thinking about it, am doing a web search as soon as I finish blethering to you lot - for a freakin power chord for this bike! It's kinda sitting there now, looking like a long-lost but equally long-suffering spaniel pup, all big wet eyes and "nobody loves me". Clearly not true - it's an evil bastard given half a chance, but getting on a bike at the gym a couple of days ago felt good, felt right, and if I could only find the chord, I wouldn't have to dice with pneumonia or feel guilty about every morsel of grub I put in my mouth, cos I could just come upstairs to the office and pedal those morsels right the Hell back off...Right, let's see...Bremshey Cardio Comfort Control leads...

Petition

1. We the Undersigned demand the immediate conferring of Knighthoods, Damehoods, Priesthoods, GerbilFur-Lined Hoods, unendingly vast fame and fortune, 72 virgins in gimp suits or whatever the Hell floats their boats, frankly, to the scientists who today announced that fried foods aren't actually bad for you, so long as they're fried in olive or sunflower oils.

2. We further demand that all fish and chip shops in the UK now be forced to provide a 'de-caff' option, allowing customers to choose to have their battered sausages fried in traditional three-week-old dark and crusty-bitted lard, or to have them delicately dunked in dew-fresh olive oil for a 'Healthy Fry' option.

3. This 'de-caff grease'  option must, in order to avoid the intolerable smugness of chefs and foodies everywhere and the creation of a two-tier dietary state, be no more expensive than the traditional 'fell-off-the-ass-of-a-zebra' lard option. This will necessitate radical action to bring down the price of the 'Healthy' oils.

4. Seriously, do what you have to do. We're not above going to war for cheap olive oil. Operation Popeye, let's go! Get a bunch of Scots Guards together, let's invade the fuck out of Sicily! I mean, obviously, go tooled up, cos we've all seen The Godfather, but still...


Signed: Fat Fucks of The World, Desperately Craving a Guilt-Free Fry-Up.

Wet, Wet, Wet

"You really don't have to do this," said d.
"Urrrgle..." I said. Then her words sank through my skull. She hadn't read last night's blog, thankfully. If she had, she probably wouldn't have given me the 'encouragement' I was banging on about yesterday - the encouragement to take it easy, or to quit.

Without knowing that, she'd said the words, and in my semi-conscious state, they had absolutely the opposite effect to the one she probably intended. I'd been laying there, rationalising the feasibility of staying in bed, all warm and cosy, and had just about decided I liked that sort of logic when d gave me permission to do nothing, and inadvertantly got my ass out of bed.

"Ugh," I said at the view outside our front door. It was 6.30ish, so dark, and absolutely pouring with rain. I got my boots, my big coat, my scarf, my hat...
"Ugh," I said again, stepping out into it.

I've spoken before about the power of music when you're exercising. And I'm here to tell you that the Manic Street Preachers, good lads as they are, are utterly depressing when walking round your home town in the dark and the pissing-down rain at Christ o'clock in the morning. Switching eventually to the Mamas and the Papas, it was amazing how revitalised I felt. The coat was protecting me, the hat was protecting me, the boots were protecting me, and whereas with Life Becoming A Landslide and From Despair To Where, Merthyr looked bleak and dark and horrible, with a dose of California Dreaming and Dedicated To The One I Love, I would have been more than happy to carry on for a while longer. Then, while I was singing along, a car came up from behind, and aquaplaned through an enormous puddle.

I stood there, dripping, wet to the backs of my knees, and muddy water running down my face. That was it - I was done. I'd actually done what I'd set out to do anyway - an hour or so of walking, and getting home an hour before work was due to start, so I could put in some extra time, because lunchtime was going to be spent at the gym on the first of our doctor-referred exercise classes. I crept in, took off some clothes and wrung them out, and got to work.

Lunchtime came, and we went across to the gym. This first session together was a 'gym taster', which basically meant some people who were too toned and bouncy by half would press some buttons on a range of machines for us, and then shout at us to get sweaty. It's important, in situations like this, not to take it personally, or there'd be rather more gym bloodbaths in the world. We treadmilled, we static-biked, I rowed up the freakin' Nile, and d did some frankly weirdass reverse-hand-pedalling thing that seemed like the very antithesis of fun. At random intervals, these toned fucks would appear as if from nowhere and shout encouraging things at us - and indeed at the other fat fucks in the room, of which, I'm glad to say, there were many..
"Gettin' sweatttty?" asked one brunette woman, as I rowed.
"What do you think?" I panted.
"Goooood!" she yelled, grinning and moving on to positively harangue a woman with individual breasts bigger than my head.

We staggered home, soaked with sweat and feeling exhausted but highly virtuous, and had a lunch that featured d's homemade bread strongly. Homemade bread - have I got a great life, or what?!

Five o'clock came and I bolted out the door - we'd decided, while we were there at lunchtime, to bite a bullet and get month-long 'swim passes', meaning we could go and swim any damn time we liked. So I decided to go and swim when fewer people were there.

Yyyyyeah, that didn't work. Just after five o'clock? Still like a motorway of wet bodies. Managed to do 14 lengths and then got out, more bored of stopping to swerve than actually exhausted. Came home, to d's home made bread and fresh corn bread. At which point I refer you to the point about the freakin' life I lead from just two paragraphs ago.
"Go shower," said d, "you're chloriney...and sweaty, come to that." So I went to shower, having come out of a pool full of pissing-about Welsh people.

Now - dinner, and an early night - tomorrow is technically Wednesday, but from my point of view, it's Monday, day of the UberCommute.

Ugh...as I seem to have said rather a lot today, given that it's been a great day.

Oh yeah - blood was 5.0 this morning (I dropped down another pill last night, so this is pretty good), and the weight today was:
15 stone 10, dead. Not great, but much better than I was expecting - yesterday morning, I weighed in at 15 stone 12.75, so clearly, Doing Stuff has shocked the system a little. So here's to shock and awe, and bringing it on for next week...
Woohoo...

Season of the Stubborn Bastard

And so the fight-back begins.
Doesn't mean I'll be able to avoid a faintly humiliating result in the morning, but hopefully, it means I can start to pull this thing back in the right direction this week - we went and got registered for our GP gym referrals today. We start officially tomorrow on a programme of 'at least two classes a week' at the local gym/sports centre. The first one, at lunchtime tomorrow? Gym Introduction. Basically like a low-grade personal trainer-cum-tour of the equipment, from treadmills - (walk, don't fall off, next!) to bikes (pedal till you die) to cross-trainers (again...no, seriously, don't fall off!), to rowing machines (annnd stroke....) to bits of kit far more reminiscent of the torture chambers of the Inquisition than anything the 21st century has devised.

That said, I couldn't let today - my one-month Welsh anniversary (as well, of course, as Chinese New Year. Year of the Dragon no less, surely a good Welsh omen?) - go by without finally popping my leisure centre cherry. I went over tonight at about 6.15, while this time d waited in for the return of Jason the Doors Guy. The pool, tonight, closed at 7, I was told. Bugger...but still, I was there by then, so I paid my money and went on in.

Well....erm...that was weird. It was kinda like Oxford Street, Christmas Eve....only wetter. I'd like to tell you I did ten lengths, and technically, if ya wanna be lenient to my poor Disappearing ass, I did. But what I actually did was about 30 third-of-a-lengths, a little flapping about, and quite a lot of desperately-getting-the-fuck-out-of-other-people's way. Clearly, there are good times and bad times to go a-swimming at the local pool. And clearly, while-no-one-else-can-get-there is the best of times.

Came out and had that horribly compelling craving you get after swimming - for stodge! In my case, for chip shop fish and soggy British chips drenched in vinegar, with lashings of bread and butter and ketchup for chip butties...

S'kinda evil, that, isn't it? You're doing this activity to try and redress your calorie-exercise balance, and it instantly triggers a positively visceral need in you for grease. I've said this before, but I swear, Disappearing is alllllllmost enough to make you believe in a Devil!
(B'doink, b'doink, b'doink...) Sorry, just felt the need to headbutt my desk a few times. Feel better now. Here, let me just swig some healthy water, instead of the gallon of thick, black, sweet, fizzy wonderment I'm craving...

Ahhhhhhh...

Anyhow, as I mentioned - tomorrow's results are going to suck ass. They absolutely are. I've been of course intensely neurotic about these things before, but given half an opportunity, I think this is the first time I could feel really sludgily low about this prospect. Until now, there's always been the idea of being driven on, of backward steps being just blips on the inevitable journey. But, given just the least little bit of encouragement, I could stop now. I could rest on my laurels and go "Fuck it, four and a half stone's not so bad..." and go out and get that fish and chips, that Snickers bar, that Coke.

That's not going to happen though. Am pretty much manufacturing positivity against my own will at the moment, almost directly as a result of KK's intervention this week. Must push on...must push on...Tomorrow's gonna suck, but must push on...Feels like earlier tonight - I'd done eight lengths, and thought "Right, sod it, that's me done." But then I thought "That's not really what you came here to do though, is it?" Bear in mind, I hadn't gone with any particular amount of swimming in mind to do, so this was news to me. But the idea of being able to say I'd done ten lengths appealed to me. It was sort of like a finishing line - a finishing line I could legitimately think of as being a finishing line (damn metric system...). So I flapped on through another six third-of-a-lengths, floundering frankly at almost every pause, every bank, every get-the-fuck-out-of-the-way, completely done, but stubborn-bastardy driving me on. Yeah...it's like that. It's the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, but for me, right now, it's the Season of the Stubborn Bastard.

And on we go...

The Disappearing Door

"What is it with you and closing doors?"

I practically crawled up the stairs. It was about 12.30AM - hey, gimme a break, I'm 40 now, that's a pretty wild night! - and I'd worked for a good few hours on the office after yesterday's walk. I was keen to show off the fact that the room was...well, a functioning room...before we collapsed into bed.
"It's just tidier," I muttered.
"Did you lock this thing?"
"Hasn't got a lock dear, you're just tired."
"Err...no," she said, waggling the handle and pushing.
"It's locked," she said again.
"Can't be locked," I said. "Hasn't got a lock. Really..."
"Welllll I don't know what to tell you dear, but this," she said, unconsciously John-Cleesing, "is a locked...door."
I frowned, pushed her gently out of the way, waggled the handle.
"Erm..." I said.
"It's locked," I said.
"Yyyyep," said d.
"Can't be locked," I reiterated, spiralling into a pointless little self-argument. "It hasn't got a lock!" I waggled the handle more firmly, pushed a shoulder against the door.
"Ahem..." said d.
"Do you have a screwdriver dear?"
"Yep," I said. "Got three."
"Oh great - Where are they?"
"They're on a shelf on the bookcase on the other side of the door."
"Not helping!"
"Think you've got problems?" I muttered. "My iPod's on the other side of this door. Hell, every Dr Who DVD I own is on the other side of this door!"
Realising this was true as I said it, I took to bashing on the wood to try and get it to see reason. The door did its utmost to impress upon me the fact that I could whine all I liked, for all it cared. It wasn't budging. I could almost swear it stuck its tongue out at me.
d padded exhaustedly downstairs, rummaged around for a couple of minutes, and came back with a flat head screwdriver. The screws in the door-handle were Philips. It didn't seem the right time to point this out, so I set to work taking off the door handle. We tried the door.
Nada.
We pulled out the rod conecting both sides of the door. That didn't make it happy. Neither did it make it obliging. I screwed the door handle back on, tried it again, in that faintly hopeless way you do when you think 'maybe the last twenty minutes were a dream...' They weren't.
"Maybe the CD rack has fallen over and is just blocking the door," suggested d. 
I blinked the fatigue back out of my eyes.
"Mebbe," I acknowledged. "Didn't hear anything fall though."
"Maybe..." said d.
I've learned to vaguely cringe at that "Maybe..." It inevitably precedes a suggestion that is of such appalling good sense I have to agree to it, and end up doing strategically sound but situationally stupid things for an hour or so.
She looked up. Abover the door was what d called a 'jealousy window' - but which I, being an uncultured nonce, call "a bunch of glass slats, angled to stop you seeing any damn thing. They were apparently held in place merely by a coat of paint.
I looked at d. Nodded. In all fairness, she's more than ready to equip me when she has schemes like this. She padded back downstairs again, and came back with a three-step ladder. I climbed it, and waved a flashlight through the slats.
"Well, the main one is still upright," I said.
"What about the small one? The one that's right next to the door?"
"Well...that's a small one," I said.
"Yes dear..."
"Means I won't be able to see it anyway from up here," I condescended.
"I know that honey," she said, producing a pair of small knives. I blinked.
"Err...let's not be hasty..." I said, smiling quickly, and scampering down off the ladder.
She rolled her eyes and climbed the ladder, started to scrape away at the layer of paint holding the slats in place
"Ohh, right," I said, hiding a yawn. Badly.
"This is useless," she announced a few moments later.
"Yes dear," I said.
We did a few more experiments, and determined, in the absence of hard evidence, that the door had more give at the top and bottom, and that it was the lock itself that was the fatal obstinacy.
With that much agreed between us, we went to bed.
Today, d and Ma were due to be at a car boot sale, leaving me to work in the office and do some walking. Now, we told Ma about the Door (it had acquired a capital letter for itself in the night), and then they went with Plan A - heading to the sale. Plan B for me was to wait in for the Jason the Door Guy.

In one of the most impressive deviations from London living - we called him at about 9.30, and by 12.30 on the same Sunday, he was walking through our (front) door. He set about the offending door with a couple of screwdrivers and a certain amount of brute force, and within about twenty minutes, he was walking out again, with the latch of the door, in several pieces, in his hand. He's coming back tomorrow evening to fit a replacement.

The excitement of the door (I stripped it of its capital letter because it turned out to be a wuss when faced with Jason the Door Guy and his magic screwdrivers) being over so soon, I buggered off and went walking as planned. So...nehh! Got some walking today, in spite of the door. Then, admittedly, went ot Ma's for a big Sunday Dinner.

All of which is relatively immaterial - tomorrow's the day - tomorrow I move into the office, properly, and tomorrow, we go to get assessed at the gym. The proper fight-back starts...erm...tomorrow.

Blood was 4.8 this morning, incidentally, for any remaining vampires in the crowd.

An Intervention

"Honey?"
"Yeah?" I was three steps up on our staircase, preparing to trudge the rest of the way and throw myself into the work of turning a box-room into a functional office.
"It's blue out there."
I looked. She was right.
"You're right..." I acknowledged.
"Why don't you go for a walk while it's nice and bright?"
A couple of minutes later, I was out there, repeating my walk of earlier this week - up a steep hill, then another steep hill, then a flat bit, then another steep hill, then a long windy flat-ish bit, and finally a long long windy downhill bit to home. Couple of miles probably, but it makes you feel terribly virtuous to do something after weeks and weeks of doing Not Very Much At Freakin' All...

On which subject, pal of mine did an e-intervention for me tonight. This is Karen. Not Karen Who Shall Be Called Mae, or Karen Pulley, but Champion Slimmer Karen, who, for reasons lost (for the protection of the not entirely innocent) in the mists of teenage time, I always think of as Karen KrazyKlaws, or KK for short (yes, fellow pedants, I know that should make it KKK, but that's a whole world of unnecessary confusion, don'tcha think?).

She popped up on Facebook this evening and told me - in her stern voice no less - to pull my finger out, get off my arse and do something, cos she was sick of blogs that were basically "ate loads, did buggerall, feel wretched, boohoo, am gonna have put on weight on Tuesday, waaaaah!" The Chronicles of the Reappearing Man, in short.

She's not the only one. I'm bloody sick of them myself. While walking round the Valley today, I was musing. As ya do. It's like the whole of January has been a limbo-month, filled with work and boxes. I'd like to tell you this will all snap into place and a better, more Disappeary rhythm will kick in soon. And it occurs to me that this is pretty much in my power to do, isn't it? Getting out and doing stuff is in my power. Finding the damn bike power chord would give me a huge amount of control back over my destiny.

Come Monday, I will have been a resettled Welshman for a month. Seems weirdly fitting somehow that apparently, d and I have our gym-for-half-price induction meetings on Monday. It's the kind of meeting for which you're advised to "wear loose clothing". I'm thinking there may be sweat involved. And I've had about six weeks off from any kind of proper work-out. This could get messy. But messy in a positive, ass-kicking, setting-foot-back-inside-a-gym kinda way.

I'm done being the Reappearing Man. Time to get back on course, dammit. Tomorrow, more walking.

So tonight, just a quick thankyou to KK, for an e-kick in the ass. Limbo is done. Focus has returned. The game's afoot and all that!

Of Mice And Disappearing Men

It was Eddie Izzard who famously looked at the great quote "The best-laid plans of mice and men aft gang aglay" - or "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go wrong" as it's translated in modernity, and asked the question...
"Exactly what mice plans was Robert Burns thinking of when he wrote that?"

I'm guessing there have been, to date, no mice making plans to lose about nine stone. Except possibly some mice in labs somewhere. That'll mean there have been no mice plans to go swimming, and no mice plans to walk for miles at the crack of dawn.

No - those are uniquely human plans, I'm thinking...
Was all set to go swimming last night. Then I opened the front door...
Now, I know I've said that this is Wales, and if you didn't do things in the pissing-down rain, nobody'd ever go outside, but I have to tell you, I looked at the drizzle, and I felt the nipple-popping chill, and I thought about being fresh out of the apparently fairly cold pool, and trudging home the couple of hundred paces...
And I closed the door and had dinner. Not as calorifically virtuous as swimming, but rather more fun.
And then there was this morning. I was exhausted and bitchy by the time we dragged our asses up the stairs last night, and the thought of getting up at 6.30 again this morning filled me with an all-consuming horror, so I chose the path of weakness again, and turned off my alarm.

"Oi!" said d. "Get up, he's here!"
"Ummmf?" I asked.
Oh. Him. Really? Already?
"Whattime'sit?"
"8.30 - get down here, he's here in a van, probably can't figure out the code, and if he can't figure out the code, he might just leave!"
I rolled into clothes and stumbled downstairs. Sure enough, there was a guy trying to get in through the main doors to our apartment block. I called out the code to him and then he was on his knees.
I should probably mention at this point, the big plan for the day was to finally get our home phone line and our braodband up and running. The phone-wizard twiddled about. Then realised he needed to drill through our external wall and lay new cable. He called in a mate with a drill. Twiddled some more.
"Right," that's me off then," he said eventually.
"Broadband?" we asked.
"Ohhh," he said, looking at his watch. "Dunno nothin' about that, mate," he claimed.
"Told you that when you walked in the door," I told him. Essentially, we had to go a little clientzilla on the guy in order to get him to do what had been agreed. Still, he did it in the end, even though his particular plans for the day ended up being an hour and a half behind schedule.

Re-sult!

Went out for a low-key, calorifically cheap lunch...and ended up with something like seven and a half dinner rolls on the side. Sooo that would be another plan gone to Hell in a mousetrap.
Got back to work, and as d had a little post-lunch doze, I made a decision. When I was done, I was gonna go walking, dammit.

Then I finished.
"I invite you to embrace your inner jammies," murmured d. Annnnd my final plan of the day crumbled into couch-loving, movie-watching, snuggled-down crumbs.

Tomorrow, the plan is to get to the freakin' bottom of my office, dammit, and possibly do Something to help the ailing recovery of my weightloss program.

Yeah, that's the plan...Anyone taking bets?...

The Only Way Is Up

"Remember when I was bitching that there were no big hills in London?" I groaned to d at about 8.30 this morning.
"Errr yes dear..."
"You're married to a stupid man, you know that? A very stupid man," I said, clomping towards the bathroom. I hesitated at the foot of the stairs. I followed them with my eyes.
They went up.

Bastards.

"Would you really mind if I peed in the sink?" I asked, optimistically. d's eyebrow answered me, and I yanked myself. See, here's the thing - I'm sick of my own bitching about not actually doing anything, so I gurgled my way out of bed at 6.30, and decided to go for a walk before work. Decided to avoid Grandma and the Men With Dogs, which meant going Uphill.

Situated as we are at pretty much the bottom of the town, there is arguably only one genuine "downhill" road from our house. Evvvvery other direction you go, you're going up. I went up a thing called Twyn Hill (non-Welsh folk, it's pronounced sort of as Toyn, but with a rather more rounded vowel). It's like you called any hill you know a sissy, and it brought its big brother to come and sort you out. I followed it up as far as it ran. It was positively nosebleeding, and dissipated eventually into estates. I snuck a little back down, and across a long plateau, looking across what feels like a caldera. A caldera of coal, twinkling with houselights in a black, pre-dawn world. At several points along the way, even when it felt like I'd gone up as far as was humanly possible, I'd look to my right, and find - another damn hill...going up. At one of them, one where I had the opportunity to go down, it was almost as if the Valley itself was mocking me...
"Oh, gone all soft and Londony have you? Can't cope with us now, can you, you old fart? No no, that's fine, go down if you like...we'll understand..."
I went up. Up and up and up some more. Ended up on a thing called the Goat Mill Road (who knew you could mill goats?), and walked on, up to Dowlais, site of one of the Ironworks that made Merthyr one of the engines of the Industrial Revolution. I only decided to go downhill and come home when it looked as though I'd be late for work at nine if I did anything else.

So by the time I got home, and struggled up the flight of stairs to our maisonnette, I had had quite enough of Up, so the final steps to the bathroom were kind of like Merthyr laughing at me.

Still - a good long walk does make you feel terribly virtuous. I've eaten oatmeal, and a cheese toastie, and rice.
"Phew," said d over dinner. "I'm stuffed."
"But you've eaten all your meat," I said. "Was that what you were told as a kid? At least eat the meat?"
She looked at me like I was mental.
"No," she said. That's cos I'm a carnivore!"
"Ah," I said, as she handed over her plate of rice. "Guess that makes me a carbivore," I said, tucking in without much of a sense of calorific guilt.

Not long after dinner, d enjoyed a local delicacy - Welsh cakes with cream and jam. I ground about an inch of enamel off my teeth.
"Make us coffee," she grinned. "It'll help me get rid of this quicker."

I don't know whether this was subconscious, or merely stupidity, but I made us a couple of real, fully caffeinated coffees (the trigger for my tachycardia)...It was only after I'd stirred them I realised my mistake.
Suddenly all Uphills seemed jussst fine. Except the one up to the local hospital!

Blood yesterday was 4.9, in case anyone's keeping score. Blood this morning after the odyssey of Upness - 5.1. See - Uphills are bad.

So Macho

"So..." I said, looking at the thing online. "You wanna get that delivered?"

For any women reading this blog, that is desperate 220-pound weakling-speak for "Please God, don't tell me you want me to carry this thing?!"
I watched my meaning fly daintily over d's head. It turned its own head and blew me a raspberry, just before it splatted against the living-room wall.
"No," she said, "I was thinking we'd just go and pick it up."
"Fuuuuuuuuuck!" grumbled my brain. At which point, my balls spoke up.
"Oh, sure, OK," I said, in a slightly deeper register.

Again, for any women reading, we know you understand when we say things like this. We know you're choosing to ignore us for your own purposes. We know all this, but once the balls have spoken, we find it impossible to take their words back. And yes, sadly, we know you know that too...
"Great," said d, smiling, and getting her keys.

The thing in question was...Hell I don't even know. Some wood and rattan storage...thing...for bathrooms. No straight man ever designed anything like it. Hell, no straight man ever designed anything to store bathroom products. We wouldn't have bathroom products, left to our own devices. Hell, many of us wouldn't have bathrooms.

It looked fairly formidable even in the online catalogue.
"You can always get them to show it to you before we take it home," said d. This is such a cute, intensely feminine point of view - Here honey, you can at least take a look at your hernia before you decide to get one.

As it happened, we did - but looking at it was of course absolutley immaterial - the balls had spoken; their will must be done. I looked at it. It was chunky and short, kinda like me. It was also really...freakin'...heavy, also, as it happens, like me. I lifted it in the store, and thought I was going to pass out.
"Wow," I said. "That's really pretty heavy."
"Yeah?" said d. There was jusssst a hint of (possibly unconscious) feminine wilery in her voice. My balls roared to the rescue and grabbed my vocal chords again.
"Ach, that's no problem. Just get them to string it for me, would you?"

I think the idea is probably primeval - Me Man. Man - Strong. Impress Woman With Muscles, Make Many Babies Tonight! The flaw of course is somewhere around Stage 2. That whole "Man - Strong" thing...cos your balls may know what they think works for them, but they're pretty much a two-man band, while the rest of your body (including the bit with the brain in it) is screaming "I'm too old for this shit! Ah, fuck it, I'm gonna just lay down here and have a coronary embollism..."

I stood in the store, asking the poor assistant to "maybe just add one more loop of string, just to make good and sure of it...", all the while thinking "how...the...HELL...???"
And then I picked it up. And then it's quite possible I died - sorry for the whole Sixth Sense ending, but I think quite possibly I'm a ghost right now.

Managed to get it about halfway home, struggling and sweaty and red-faced and panting, with d asking every few steps - "Can I help? Seriously, can I help in any way at all?"

Again, this is sweet, and cute, and the balls won't allow it. "We're taking care of business!" they seem to scream. "No Wombs Allowed Here, move along now madam..."
"You could put on a glove, so it doesn't cut into your hand...erm...quite so much?" she suggested. I staggered to the nearest bench, to put the thing down.
"There's a bench straight ahead," she advised.
"Sure," I muttered. "Food, water, nubile maidens, but fuck it, let's press on to the next oasis..."
I reached the next oasis and set the thing down and pulled on one glove. It should be pointed out that at this point I also had on my what-people-think-is-a-cowboy hat. A cowboy hat and one glove.
"Oh look," I muttered. "Who's Bad?!"
It was a pretty ridiculous get-up, and I wondered if I was now expected to Moonwalk home, but thankfully not.
"You could turn the other glove round and wear it on top of the first one...y'know, for protection..." d dangled.
"Fuck it, why not?" I said, fitting actions to words, and gloves on gloves on fingers.
And so I staggered on, the other half of the way home, and then up the flight of stairs to our maisonette. d opened the door for me.
"Keep going," she instructed. "No point in stopping now, migh tas well take it all the way up to the bathroom..."
"Sure," I squealed, as a vein appeared to pop in the side of my head. "Why take two instalments to do a job when you can combine them into one big heart attack."
"Exactly," said d, probably listening.
When I stumbled back down the stairs, she smiled brightly.
"So - still wanna go swimming tonight?" she asked, with the kind of open, innocent look that gets people killed in cities.
"Get into your kitchen, woman, and feed me," I said, shuddering through to the living room and parking my not-inconsiderably ass on the couch. "I just used about 3000 calories," I whinged, destroying any last vestige of primal male attractiveness that had survived the sweating and the struggling and the bitching up to this point.
"Well...good then," she said, grinning not a little. "Y'know, since you haven't moved off the couch all day..."
She's not wrong. It's been a day for proofing the scientific journal I occasionally work on. Very dull, very clever, very mind-scrambling, but hardly high on the aerobic exercise front.
I looked at her.
"Ug," I said.
"Yes dear," she said, and went to fix us dinner...

Owning Speedos

OK, headlines are up and down. Blood, despite going down another pill (just two of this particular kind now), and having some late night carb - 4.1 this morning, good enough for me, thankyouverymuch. Weight this morning -
15 stone 10.75 - so, up a couple of pounds. Dammit.

Still - it's one of those 'can't do the time, don't do the crime' things - I've been saying all week 'out for dinner, no exercise, out for dinner, no exercise, out for dinner, no exercise...'  so to expect anything other than an increase is clearly just wishful thinking. In a way of course, I've gone back a couple of weeks during the last seven days. I still think though that when - and it's an imminent when - we start getting back to a more active lifestyle, it'll shock my system into sudden, hopefully significant losses again. d's doing a car boot sale with my mother for the next couple of Saturdays, and apparently I'm not required to flog stuff, so - much walking in the Valleys for Tony.
"Hey honey - how d'you feel about going swimming tonight?"
I don't know why, but I was struck with the idea this afternoon.
"Sure," said d. "Why not?"

Why not was because Ma turned up with some fairly sage advice. Even recent readers will know that my current swimming shorts were pre-Disappearing, and don't currently fit. I also have something of a morbid fear, when swimming, about hitting my head on the side of the pool, so I tend to swim for four or five strokes, then pop up, panicking, and bob about like a big fat spluttering cork. Science has of course devised a solution for this kind of stupidity, in the form of goggles. So when Ma turned up with her discount card for a local sporting goods store, we piled in the car and went there...instead of anywhere where the goods might be sportingly employed.

So now I own goggles. And a pair of Speedos.

Don't vomit yet - they're not what you're thinking. They happen to be made by Speedo, but they're still shorts, not the second-scrotum nightmares that are most closely associated with the name.

Oddly enough though, I still find owning them vaguely significant. It's like...
When you get beyond a certain weight, there's a kind of self-devaluation that happens. A sort of self-exclusion from the right to own certain things, or do certain things, because you know you're just going to look awful and embarrassing owning them or doing them. Speedos are pretty much one of those things. Hell, anything that trades on its sports credentials qualify, in all probability. But on the way down - here's a tip to all Disappearers - you get that sense of sporting value back. Clearly, it happens in stages, cos there's still no way I'd wear the second-scrotum Speedos yet, but as I get down, there seems to be a little voice of self-righteous vindication at the back of my head going "Fuck you, fashionistas. I'll wear what I like..."

Feels good.

Now of course all I have to do is put them to some sort of use. Maybe tomorrow night? (Still no bike cord yet. May have to just bite the bullet and buy one!)

Hell's Monday

For those of you who think that Mondays generally are forged in a special pit of aspic-dripping awfulness in the netherest of netherhells, I'm pretty sure I'll get a 'Testify!" out of today's entry.

Up at 4.30, having decided at midnight that actually going to bed was just feeding our delusions, and that really, sleeping on the heated couches probably wasn't that bad an idea. Turned on the TV, to have our vulnerable brains stoved in by anodyne Irish TV host Eamon Holmes and "TV Scrabble."

Out the door at 5.15, cab down to Cardiff. Froze briefly to death at Cardiff Bus Station, elbowed a couple of people in the throat to assure pole position on the bus.

Froze more leisurely to death on the bus. Hardier souls than I asked the driver to turn on the heating.
"It is on," he frankly lied.
"No really," said one poor Indian guy who was turning an altogether unlikely shade of blue. "I travel on buses every week, and this is nor normal!"
"'T'is for these buses sir," said the driver, and that was that.
Got to signs for Chippenham (about a fifth of the way), and ground to an unceremonious halt. Gridlock. Three lanes of motorway reduced to one lane, due to an accident between junctions 16 and 17. We sat there for an hour and a half with the engine off. At one point, the driver buggered off to take a leak, and, as we'd all by that point begun to suspect, nothing of consequence happened to the traffic in his absence.

When, finally, we inched past the accident, we began to pick up speed again, only to be met with "long delays between junctions 10 and 11" signs. Several of my fingers and possibly my penis gave up the ghost then and dropped off from frostbite (which explains why this blog comes to you late in the day...I always type with my penis....Ohhhh, the old ones are the best.....here's hoping...). As it happened, junctions 10 and 11 passed by in relative obscurity. It was as we approached London that things got peculiar again. The driver made an announcement.
"The maximum number of hours a driver's allowed to drive," he said, "is four and a half. As of this moment, I've done four hours, twenty minutes. That means I can't take you into Central London. I'm going to drop you off at Heathrow Airport."
Ignoring the ensuing chorus of "What-the-fuck"'s, he continued.
"A representative will meet you at Heathrow and lead you to another coach, to take you the rest of the way," he explained, and a chorus of Eskimo groans went up from al parts of the bus simultaneously.
We got to Heathrow, and clearly, no-one had told them about the need to provide us with a replacement bus and driver. I was two hours later than expected at this point, on only the second day I've done this uber-commute. Keen not to piss off my boss too much too early, I decided to give up the bus and jump on a tube. It was only when I reached the automatic ticket machine that I realised that d still had both my cards, from when I'd given them to her yesterday to do shopping and pick me up some cash for my morning cab.

Bugger. Fortunately, I'm changing my bank at the minute, so I have a card and an account with an overdraft facility, so I used that in the relative emergency of this (by then) afternoon, and now technically owe myself £8! Finally staggered into the office by about 12.30.

And weirdly enough, am finishing this blog at 5PM on the dot, which means I now have to haul my ass to Victoria to get the bus home. Here's hoping that I don't have the same kind of palaver on the way back, or I might miss my connection up the Valley, and tomorrow's blog will come from the pile of Welshman-granita in Cardiff bust station.

Hmm...wonder if flab's easier to lose if it's freeze-dried...

Cowboys and Slayers and Favourite Things

Good day. Sian brought our god-daughters, Brianna and Epona, round to visit. Fun times with the youngsters, and we went out for lunch (yep - AGAIN!).
We explained to Sian about my "I always face North" mental block, and she lost it completely, laughing so hard I thought French Fries would come down her nose.
"That makes sense of everything!" she gasped, having been with me on many, many occasions when I've turned right, thinking it was right, and turning out wrong. It was like she heard the universe click into place on discovering this single piece of information - just as d and I did when we discovered it.

Our 'heated couches' discovered a whole new bunch of adherents today - we seem to be spreading the word, one ass at a time - Lee and Rebecca didn't want to leave this week (and Reb posted the idea on her Facebook page as a result - did I mention she's a celebrity?). Today, two children and a fully-grown 8-stone woman were highly tempted to curl up like cats and just purr away their afternoons on our couches. The secret, incidentally - double underbed mattress-warmers (not electric blankets), spread on the bottom and back of the couches, then covered in faux-fur throwns that envelop the couches completely. Switch on. Purr.

Epona definitely stole the title of 'Speaker of the Best Line of the Day,' though. Just as she was getting into the car to go home, she looked at me, in my Disappearing Coat, and scarf, and what-other-people-see-as-a-cowboy hat, and grinned.
"You look like a Slayer," she said, waving goodbye. I fell about, in laughter and also, relatively speaking, thrill. Not sure it was necessarily meant as a compliment, but given that until recently, I looked like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, I'm happy to take 'Slayer chic' as a positive improvement!

We went to Tesco for some baiscs, and as we were coming down the escalator, d nudged me.
"Idiots coming from the South," she muttered.
"What?" I asked.
"Scuse me!" called the leader of a group of teenage girls behind us - Ah! Behind us=South, of course.
"You a cowboy?" she asked, the thicknes of her Valleys accent adding an extra-special veneer to the stupidity.
I turned.
"Yes..." I said, dropping any ounce of Welsh out of my own accent, and aiming for a Jeevesian contempt.
"Really?!" she asked.
I raised the hat.
"Yee...ha..." I said, bringing my best cut-class out to play. The girls burst into giggles, and we fucked very definitely off.

Home now, watching a programme that poses the question: What are the best things you've ever eaten?
Of course, to make the programme work, they break the foods up into 'types'. Just watched 'messy food' and now there's 'best barbecue'...

Gets you thinking though. Best things I've ever eaten...mmmm...

Can't put these into any particular order, but I'm thinking...Goulash by one of my old friends from Austria...my wife's macaroni cheese...first time d cooked lobster. Onion soup and honey bread from the Outback steakhouse. One bite of prime rib at Aunt Millys, just off the Indian Reservation in Irving New York. Cheese and potato pie by a woman I only ever knew as Mrs Bliss when I was age...probably-10. Meat loaf, dammit, d-style. A fantastic little goats-cheese and balsamic onion...creation from one of the restaurants we managed to close in Stratford. Parisian patisseries. Roman pasta. Ohhh! Pizza subs from CJs in Westfield, NY. Risotto - by d.

Plenty more, most of them in all probability made by d (my brain is not what it was!). I also have a feeling that some of my favourite things are yet to hit me. Watching Food TV kinda gives you that idea. What are some of yours, folks? What haven't I tried yet that I really should, when I reach my so-called 'target weight'? What meals would you recommend if you had, say, a week to live, or a life to properly enjoy?

Perspectives

Bleurgh...
Feel physically ill at this point. Too...much...foooooooood.

Good food, don't get me wrong. Last night's Chinese, coupled with tonight's Indian, showed me there are great places to eat in this town (even if the service tonight was Victoria-Wood comical!). It's just that I'm not used to eating this much this regularly now, and I feel pretty much like the woman who's on my TV screen right now.

Which doesn't help when she's 'the world's fattest woman,' weighing in at over 74 stone, or more than half a tonne!

Must stop eating like this. Must stop soon! I can practically feel my colon begging for mercy!

Mind you, at the moment, my everything's begging for mercy, and so it d's. But that's because (fanfare please!) - we now have three bookcases built and in situ. We built two of them before going out to eat, and they went together quite quickly. The third one we built after a carb-heavy, sugar-heavy Indian meal (curse you, sweet peshwari naan!), and it was interesting to see the effect it had on us - our co-ordination was off, our ability to perform simple tasks was shot, the air was notsomuch blue as positively toxic, and the damn thing took us about two hours to screw and hammer together.

Clearly, the sugariness of the meal played a critical part in this - two diabetics, hopped up on sweetened coconut, is about the same as two healthy people on weed - mellow, giggly, staring into the middle distance for long periods, distracted, very thirsty etc etc...I guess the only difference is that at no stage in the procedutre did we feel the need to down tools and eat candy.

Also, it becomes screeeeamingly apparent that Tuesday's result is gonna be a bit of a shocker. May well have pushed myself back up to the 16 stone mark with this week of limited exercise and regular eating out. If so, y'know what, that's fine - that's the price you pay for the choices you make, I guess. But soon, dammit...soon, the fight-back begins in earnest.

I guess, when you think about it, it's all in the perspective you use, isn't it? Last time I weighed-in, I'd lost a total of 69 pounds or thereabouts. If you compare that to my pal Sian, who helped us move in here, and who's popping in tomorrow with our goddaughters (the last time we saw them was the memorable occasion in Camden Town), that's a bit more than half her body-weight! I told my pal Jake in Australia what I'd lost so far this week, and he yelped "Damn, man, that's as much as both my legs!" On the other hand, the woman on my TV screen apparently has buttocks that weigh about 120 each (amounting to roughly 240 pounds of pure ass).

So, I've either lost half a Sian, two Jake-legs or a quarter-ass of the fattest woman alive. Except of course, by the time Tuesday comes around, I probably won't have.

But I will have an office I can use, probably for the first time - Awoohoo!

Prepare the Urban Workout

Ok fine, so score one for the Old Biddy. Woke up at 7 this morning, felt an ache in my hips and thought "Sod it, she can have the lake to herself," then snored some more.

Blood was 4.6 this morning, despite having reduced by one pill and taken onboard some inadvisable late-night carbs last night. So - that seems to work - will continue with the reduced pillage and see what happens.

Did buggerall but work most of the day, and had a great night out with Lee and Rebecca. First time I've seen Rebecca since we came home, and it was pleasingly positive - she kept saying she could see the difference in me and yadda yadda yadda. Did I mention, my friends are fab?

Sadly, made the mistake of a 'mid-week weigh' this morning. Not good, not even remotely. And then we met up tonight for - guess what? - Chinese buffet. And tomorrow night we're out with Ma at one of the only Indian restaurants in this town. So the ahcnces of pulling off a weigh-day upset are looking fairly miniscule...

I know, I know, you've heard this all before and then something goes right. Might this time too, but am not counting on it. By the end of January though, goddammit it, I will have broken the five-stone barrier. This weekend is not about walking my ass off, it's about working my ass of - getting the office set up, and finding that freakin' power cord to the bike! My aim - which d, being the family realist, says is hopelessly ambitious - is to have the office habitable as an office by the end of Sunday. So - lots of toting, shifting, building, re-shifting, the occasional burst of alphabetising...just because...and the like.

Can we say: Urban Workout?

Orbits

Blood was 3.8 this morning - danger-zoney low. I think tonight I'll only take one of my two remaining pills, and see what happens to the numbers tomorrow.

Got up around seven this morning and left d in bed. I walked up to our local park - Cyfarthfa (don't try and pronounce that unless you're Welsh, you'll sprain at least one vital tongue muscle) - and spent an hour or so walking around its lake. Ma reckons that once around the lake is half-a-mile. I have my doubts that it's quite that far, but it's no pushover either. When I arrived, at 7.23, I was the only walker in the place and it was very dark, the idea of dawn coming slowly in the Valleys, because the Sun has to filter down the slopes to get to us.

After I'd done a couple of laps, I passed a doughty older woman with an umbrella, going in the opposite direction. She nodded to me, I tipped my hat to her and on we went, like atoms circling the centre of the lake, each in our own orbit. We went round another couple of times, tipping hats and nodding and even occasionally sharing a smile or a word. I didn't want to make her feel obliged to say anything to me though, so I kind of deliberately snubbed her once, and then felt like a mean metropolitan bastard for snubbing a woman who'd been perfectly nice to me at every opportunity afforded her by the limited and frankly bizarre nature of our relationship so far. So then - being British - I had to over-compensate and be extra smiley to her on the next trip round. In fact, I started smiling when I saw her coming round the bend, a couple of hundred yards away. And I had to keep it up until she drew close enough to interpret the smile.

Nothing! She blanked me! Clearly, she'd thought we were developing a nice, civilised, hat-tipping, head-nodding, ships-passing-in-the-night kind of relationship, and then wallop! I'd dropped my eyes, I'd broken the social contract between us, and now she was gonna make me suffer for it.

I was still reeling from that when a man with a dog overtook me. I was taken aback. It was like:
"Hold on a minute - where the fuck did he come from?"
I'd gotten so used to the rotational nature of my morning so far, crossing the path of the older woman at two specific points for every lap, it was as if my brain couldn't cope with the idea of any extra variables.

So now there were three of us, plus the dog. Two of us and the dog were going one way round the lake, the older woman who's just dealt me the social death-blow was going the other - clearly, she was the rebel. Right, I thought...Two and a dog onto one...

But, sad as I know this is, another thought bubbled up through my clueless brain...
"I've just got to lap this bastard with the dog once before we take out the old lady. I've got seniority here, pal, you can't come swanning in with your four-legged friend and just own the lake!"

So I did - I put on a burst of speed, passed him once - no acknowledgement, not yet - we're not brothers in arms till you see me next, alright? I passed the old woman again, and this time she smiled!
Fuck! Now I had no idea how to play the social dynamic at all. I returned the smile, thinking "just you wait, grandma, I've got a bastard with a dog on my side of the cycle..."
I hadn't gone more than fifty paces beyond her, and had yet to catch Man With Dog, when a whole new variable entered the scenario. Bigger Man With Fuck-Off Enormous Dog! Going the old biddy's way! Sonofabitch! I sang at him. I don't know why - partly a panic reaction, partly defending my diminishing territory, I think. It probably wouldn't have been quite so weird if the song on my iPod at the time hadn't been The Addams Family Theme.

You've probably never had a fat bloke in a damp hat suddenly sing "They're CREEPy and they're kooky!" at you for no discernible reason while you're out walking your dog, I shouldn't think, but try and imagine you have and picture the look of consternation that would cross your face. Then double it. More importantly, try and imagine the look that would cross your dog's face, in apparent contravention of biological possibility, in those circumstances. The dog might have been big, but clearly it was a wuss-ass. It nearly fell in the lake. Anyhow, I didn't have time to think about them right now - I had Original Man With Original Dog to catch. I didn't exactly run, but I did put on one of those camp-as-tits competitive-walker wiggles, cutting a corner or two to catch him on the back straight. Of course to do that, I had to cross the Brolley Nazi's path once more.
"Windy, isn't it?" she said, with offensive cheerfulness.
"Ah, fuck off Grandma!" - I didn't say it, but the monologue was coursing in my head. I may, just possibly, have clicked my fingers at her, twice, in time with the Addams Family, the details are a little blurred now. But did I catch Original Man With Original Dog? - Fuck yes! I'm not an obsessive, scary dickhead for nothing, you know. I actually slowed down once I knew 'victory' was assured, so I could sing all the way up to him, and at him, and past him. We'd moved on to the Mad About You theme by that point, so he heard me first.
"Tell me why-" I demanded, at least vaguely in tune. "-I love you like I do!"
He looked round, but didn't quite know what to make of this new addition to his day.
"Tell me whoooo!" I sang as I passed him, "can stop my heart as much as you..." And off I went.
I encountered Big Man With Big Dog again of course. I didn't say that Original Man With Original Dog had challenged him to a fight, but you can do a lot with a tilt of the head and an eyebrow when people are watching your every move in case you suddenly sing at them again. And then finally, I encountered the Old Biddy again.
"That's me for today, I think," I said to her cheerfully. I think she got the message.
"You and me - same time, same place tomorrow, bitch - I've got my eye on you..."


It's entirely possible I should 'get out more.' But then again, on the basis of what I've just revealed to you, it's equally possible I should stay the Hell indoors for the safety of myself and others.

Bookshelves for the office arrive tomorrow. Absolutely nowhere productive to put them at the moment. So...that'll be Interesting...

Dressing For Dinner

Blood this morning was 4.4 - blood control still being good, clearly, despite the rest of me being bad (neither of us could be arsed with the 'eating at home' thing last night, so popped out to the Chinese Buffet again). Today has been largely sedentary (bike cord still in hiding, dammit!), but on the upside - PAYDAY!!!

Payday meant we were able to take our GP referral forms over to the gym tonight.
"Right," said the chunky lad behind the counter. "What this means is you'll go on the programme..."
He said this with the kind of emphasis that meant it should have been "The Programme" - some vast govenrment conspiracy to wipe out Fat Fucks or chemically sterilise us or somesuch.
"The Programme?" I asked, unconsciously capitalising.
"Yeah," he said. "The Programme," he acknowledged my emphasis. "That means you agree to attend two classes a week for sixteen weeks. At the end of the sixteen weeks, you'll be assessed, and if you're accepted, you'll get your membership for half price."
"Rrrright," we said, hanging on to comprehension by our fingernails.
""Here's a list of our classes," he said. "All the ones for GP Referral are marked."
Again, he kind of made that sound like we'd have special third-hand State-owned gym clothes with embroided burger-badges on them to mark us out for death by aerobics, or at the very least social ridicule. Not so much "Unclean!" as "Unfittttt!"

"OK," we said. "And, erm..."
"They'll call you next week," he explained. "They'll arrange your classes with you."
"Right," we said. It was only as we were walking out the door, having gotten so close to the gym and yet remaining so far from its exercisey goodness, that the questions arose in us.
"After sixteen weeks, is the assesment to find out if we're fit enough to be allowed in the gym, or unfit enough to qualify for government assistance?" I asked d. She shrugged.
"Guess we'll find out in sixteen weeks," she said.
"Dinner?" I asked - as it happens, the gym/leisure centre is surrounded by restaurants, and we have a payday tradition of going for a celebratory meal, in honour of having survived for another month(!).
"Dinner," d agreed. We decided on a local Harvester, and went in. d's vaguely in love with the Harvester, because they have an unlimited salad bar and an apparently unending supply of dressings. Equally, she's irritated with Pizza Hut, because they have an apparently killer honey mustard dressing, but are always out of the damn stuff.
We had our meal - including several mini bowlfuls of salad for d - and then she brought me a plate.

An almost entirely empty plate.

Now, those of you who've been with this blog from the start will remember my anti-mayo rant. This was actually merely symptomatic of a loathing for all dressings. Blue cheese - I don't think so. Honey mustard - nice enough in their own worlds, but why you'd mess with them and add the stuff of dressings is beyond me. Thousand Island - get to fuck!

There was dressing on the plate.
"Try it," she said. "I think you'll like it..."
Now, as it happens, there's probably never been a better time to try a line like that on me. I'm undergoing a bizarre period of personal growth, determined to shake off some of my own cynicism, my own pre-conceptions of 'what I do', and 'what I like'. I sprung this on d last night at the Chinese Buffet - she's had a long-standing aim to get me to go horse riding and I'v refused because a) I was officially too heavy for most riding schools, and b) horses are the devil's children, and they know what they're about. But as part of this new spirit of finding new Stuff to be into, I said I'd go riding with her if she wanted. What was probably more - what, in fact, made her clamp her hand to her mouth and say "Really??" three times, as if I was ill, I agreed to go golfing with her. Golf, here in the UK, is the pursuit of the middle-class and higher, and I'm resolutely working class (or even slacker class, given half a chance), so I've categorically said I will never 'betray my roots' and play golf. I say shit like that, hoping to come off all Che Guevarra, and instead coming off all 'wanky tosspiece'. So last night, I told her if she wanted to play golf, I would play golf with her.

The dressing sat on the plate - all red and suspicious. I looked into d's eyes, and figured "Ah, screw it," and dipped in a finger.

"Yum!" I said.
"Yay!" said d. "Now if I could just get you to have some on a bit of lettuce..."
I'm not about to let a challenge like that go unanswered. I got up, got a single piece of lettuce, a single miniscule cube of beetroot, some onion flakes, and a dribble of dressing on a plate, came back and consumed them in one bite.
"Yay!" said d again. "The first salad of 2012!"
Hadn't thought of it like that, but she's right. Look at me, I eat dressing now...

Part of this whole new spirit is to Do More Stuff Together - this being a crucial part of the work-from-Wales plan, and so, dear reader, you find me perched on a stool in my darling's kitchen, as she prepares a chicken and leek pie for tomorrow, and as, together, we've pootled about with our brand new, seriously kick-ass soup maker, making leek and potato soup. Seems to work. Seems to promise the potential to make my own freakin' lunch in future. Seems like a good new plan...