The Leaps And Bounds of The Ex-Polar Bear

“Brr,” I muttered at Ugh o’clock. It was cold and pouring with icy sleet in our little Welsh jewel-box maisonette. I shivered around the place, getting quickly into layer after layer and doing final preparations for a day in London. When I popped back upstairs to say goodbye to d, she kissed me sleepily.

“You’re wearing your raincoat, right?” she drowsed.

“Yep.”

“Hat?”

“Yep.”

“Gloves?”

“In the coat pocket,” I assured her. “And another pair in the bag.”

“Scarf?” she suggested.

“Don’t push it,” I said, grinning and stealing another sleepy, full-bodied kiss before heading out the door.

I’ve never worn this many clothes in my life, I swear. Then again, I’ve never been this cold in my life either. I get cold feet (in the purely physical sense) because of what is probably encroaching diabetic neuropathy, but somewhere along this Disappearing journey, somebody’s been buggering about with my thermostat, and it’s not bloody funny!

When we married, d nicknamed me Thermoboy because she was always cold, and I was always radiating ridiculous amounts of heat. There’s a line in Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood”, where a draper is wooing a groceress, and he entreats her to “Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket. I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster. I shall lie by your side like a Sunday roast...”

That was me – I was Sunday Roast Guy. I was ToasterBelly.

Now....now is simply not fair, as d has to sleep by the open window to keep from burning up all night, and I, poor, Disappearing wretch that I am, am huddled under about five blankets and duvet, often with a hot water bottle for the feet.

Of course, d likes to tell me it’s because I’m not a Polar Bear any more.

I always used to be able to go out in inclement weather in just a T-shirt and never feel the cold, and people would ask me how I could do. Being a fundamental smartass, I used to tell them I was built like a polar bear – layers of blubber and hair. Now...notsomuch. hence the wearing of more clothes in the last year than at any point in my personal history.

The only thing is...while Britain is a small island, it’s by no means meteorologically consistent. Pissing down, windy and ice-sleeting as it was in Merthyr, by the time I got to London, having been delayed at Swindon by flooding on the line, the Sun was high and strong, and I was contemplating giving my clothes away to a Big Issue salesman. He’d have been doing me a favour. I baked like Mr Potato Head under a black felt cowboy hat. I cooked like a rotisserie chicken in two layers and a raincoat. I stashed every glove I had into crevices in my pilot bag.  Needless to say, I lightened the load considerably the minute I hit the office.

The heat though does funny things to you. Having no alternative but to don at least the hat and sweater again on the journey home (bite me, we've gone from plastic bags in the office to paper ones that tear if you actually ahve the temerity to put stuff in them), I stood and chuntered with passengers at South Kensington station, as District Line after District line tube came and went, and we all ignored them, waiting for an increasingly mythical Circle Line train. Eventually, with just 40 minutes before I had to be in Paddington, some five stops away, and pulling out on a Cardiff-bound train, I decided to take a leaf out of d’s book and take matters into my own hands.

No I didn’t bludgeon a train guard to death and hijack a tube to Paddington. That would have been Plan B.

Instead, I bounded (oh yeah – d was amazed on Saturday when we caught the Avengers movie that I bound now – I’ve taken to bounding up and downstairs like a kind of pudgy doughball on those springy stilts that are all the rage in certain West End shows...) up to the ticket hall, and asked a member of staff whether there was a problem with the Circle Line.

“8 minutes,” he said.

I looked at the increasingly swarm-thick platform. We were all waiting for that train, which would undoubtedly already be full by the time it got to us.

“Bugger that for a game of soldiers,” I thought. There was a train going the other way in one minute. I got on it, got off one stop later, bounded up the stairs (it’s habit-forming, I swear), crossed platforms, waited one minute and got the Circle Line train going my way. When we arrived back at South Kensington, I made it my business to grin, smugly, at the poor schmucks who couldn’t get on. Sometimes, you just have to be smarter than the average bear if you want to get your train!

Mind you, the heat continued to affect me. At Paddington, I just had time to grab a Starbucks. I gave my order, swiped my card, waited for it to be served to me, took it to the buggering-about station, added some sweeteners, stirred like an obsessive-compulsive, added a dash of extra skimmed milk, put the top back on the to-go cup...and walked out.

It was only when I was downstairs, about to take my first refreshing sip, that the emptiness of my free hand occurred to me. I bounded back up the stairs, spotted my coffee still standing on the buggering-about station, grabbed it, tipped my hat to the Asian barista who was clutching her middle in paroxysms of mirth by the milk jugs, and bounded back down again.

Remember that flooding I mentioned earlier?

Still there at Swindon.

Meaning we were ten minutes late for most of the journey. I have a six-minute turn-around at Cardiff if everything goes right. You know, and I know, those numbers don’t add up. When they let us off the train, I did one final round of bounding (I’m thinking of renaming this blog The Disappearing Bounder), bounding down the stairs of Platform 2 and up the stairs at Platform 6, to bound, heroically, if a little bewilderingly, onto the Merthyr train just as the doors were closing.

When people are trying to encourage you to lose weight, they always say “You’ll be able to run for the bus!”, as though that’s a genuine incentive to a fat fuck.  Can I just say – fat fucks don’t want to run for the bus, and you’re welcome! It’s us you have to thank for the fact that there’ll be another freakin’ bus along any time now!

But this bounding lark...they should mention this bounding lark. They should tell you if you lose weight you’ll be able to catch a train you’d otherwise miss, and so get your lardy ass back on your couch where it belongs that much quicker. That my friends would be an incentive.

Now excuse me, this particular no-longer polar bear is off to do a few hours of hibernating before the morning walk...

Ni’night...