The Aha! Insufficiency

Aha!

There's probably a word, somewhere in the darker corners of the English language, for that terribly British stiff-upper-lipped sense of satisfaction one gets from having planned to do something for a long time, and attempted it, and failed to achieve it, and then finally gotten the fuck around to it. It's not exactly a "Eureka!" moment, and it can't even be properly exultant, cos you know if you were the kind of person you want to be, you would have achieved this thing on your first attempt, not been dicking about for a week or so trying to get to it and failing. But still, when you finally do a thing like that, there should be a word.

"Aha!" doesn't really cut it.

And it's important not to get me wrong here - I still haven't done the thing I've been planning to do all week: which in my case is get my arse on the exercise bike and...well, exercise. What I have done is finally uncover the bloody thing, so  as of Tuesday, I'll be all set to go on it.

Hmm...wonder if, somewhere in the darker corners of the English language, there's a word for the sense of anticlimax we feel when the subject of some suspense is built up and up and then, when it's finally revealed, it turns out to be not really worth all the build-up?

Monday tomorrow - UberCommute, much coffee, little food. Then we start kicking up a gear on Tuesday...


Again...

Timesliding

Eight years ago right now, I was in all likelihood sliding my hands up d's thigh, to find the promised land of a garter, and slide it mischievously down her leg. Sadly, I then had to throw it to someone else...

It's an American wedding tradition. Eight years ago tonight, I was a newly married man. I honestly don't remember what sort of weight I was, but it was probably about 18 stone some-odd. Today, d and I have been to Cardiff, to have a celebration meal. It was a very pleasant day, all in all - with one slight wobble. We were on a bus from Merthyr to Cardiff, and passed The Heath hospital on the way.

The Heath was where Dad was supposed to be right now - doing his clinical trial, and getting at least a bit better. It felt, going past the place, like we should turn off, like the bus should know somehow that it was in the wrong dimension, and turn off back to the destiny that should have been.

Sigh. This "new normal" thing is a bit of a bitch to get used to.

Apart from that, it was a great day - we shared time, and closeness, and memories, and food. Of the memories, not the least by any means were those of Dad at our wedding, and at my brother Geraint's too. Dad squinting through video cameras, dandling kids on his knee, making speeches, laughing and slapping his thigh at both events...

Got home tonight and had gotten an email from Geraint, including a picture forwarded from our aunt. It was a picture of Ger and I with Ma and Dad, from when Ger and I were teenagers. It was after my first Disappearing campaign, so I was about as slim and cool as I've ever been.

"God you look like a miserable git," said d.
"I'd been hungry for about a year at that point, and I was having semi-sexual fantasies about Snickers bars," I murmured, looking at my young, thin-ish face with it's wall of moussed hair rising about six inches above my head.
"Your dad looks really handsome though," she added. "I've only known the older man, but..."
"Oh yeah," I agreed. "In his younger years, he always reminded me of Timothy Dalton" - Not for nothing, but he's our joint favourite Bond.

It's been a day of timesliding, from now to eight years ago, to teenager time. One thing that I should probably add in Disappearing terms is that I had a full meal today, including a dessert. Did it in a spirit of celebration, and am not gonna bitch about it. It's been, all in all, a good thing, this timesliding, and in the spirit of today being our anniversary. But I'm going to pull it back tomorrow, and move right along. In all fairness, this first week of the re-perspexing has been a lot of talk and little action - I've meant to do do some exercise every day, and haven't. The week coming up will be better - the blisters from the walk will have healed, the office will be clearer, and the gym will be available to me, which weird deadline moments and work issues have meant it hasn't been so much this week.

I'm still hoping to have shifted my numbers back into the 16s by Tuesday, but if it doesn't happen, I can't afford to let that mean much. I have to slide my timeline on into a future where things work for me, where I put the work in when I say I'm going to, and get things working again...

Badmintony

Alright, so it's like this...there's still actually a smallish pile of books on the bike. I was going to get to them, but then a work thing sprang up and punched me in the face. Then my pal Rebecca texted with a reminder of something.

"Badminton. Tonight. 7 o'clock?"
"Cool," I replied.

I haven't actually played badminton since the first time I did the Disappearing thing, when I went from about 15 stone to 10 stone 7. Then, it worked like a sweaty, running-around charm. I've been meaning to get back to it since we came back to Wales, but my first would-be partner pulled out with knackered knees. Now there's a small gang of us - Rebecca, Lee, Gary, Sarah...and me.

Ran around like a sweaty mess for an hour, swapping courts with indecent speed. Feel entirely virtuous now.but also like I need to throw up. I'm notsomuch out of practice as waving at practice via a satellite orbitting a star in the constellation of Pisces. Next time the gang does this is 7pm Sunday night - when I'll be back in choir, singing. Some time next week though, we'll be back on the court.

Somewhere in this flat, I own a badminton racket. Buggered if I know where it is though. Might have to pick up a new one this weekend...Fear me, for I am Badmintony, the Disappearing sweaty, nauseated mess...

Tidy!

Last night, a new reality TV show launched on MTV. MTV The Valleys shows a side of life riiiiiight here in the Welsh Delta, and, though I haven't seen it yet, I'm informed it's pretty much just about as disturbing as any of the other "reality" shows about seriously stupid young-ish people you can see these days.
Hoorah...just what we needed.

"Oh it was terrible," opined my pal Rebecca over lunch this afternoon. "They were morons, but with Welsh accents, saying 'Tidy!' all the time..."

Tidy, I should explain, is the Valleys' equivalent of the Californian Awesome, a universal word of positivity, that can be used for things at both the miniscule level of human endeavour - "Derr...got a couple of pork chops for a pound - Tidy!" to the vicissitudes of international politics - "Tharr'Obama seems a tidy fellah, fair play like..."

The only reason I bring this up today is a) because Rebecca mentioned it, and b) because while I planned to get on the bike this morning, I was stopped by the fact that my office was in a state significantly less than Tidy. Books, discs, papers etc were piled on every surface, including the bike seat. So inbetween big chunks of day job, that's what I've been doing today - making the office at least a little bit Tidy. Plenty of work left to do in there, but at least tomorrow I will actually be able to get on the bike, dammit! Not tonight now - am dashing this off before going to sing in the choir, where I won't be finished till 9: seems mighty selfish at that point to come home and dash upstairs for an hour of biking.

But tomorrow, dammit, I'll be biking Tidy!

Perspex Living

Weigh-in today was a disaster - 17 stone, 3.75.
This doesn't really matter, because today I went back behind my perspex boxes. There's buggerall in the way of an alternative. No fizz, no fry, no sugar, low carb and low calorie, more exercise, more metabolic maintenance.

Today, I haven't actually managed any exercise per se, but tomorrow morning, the bike has my name on it, dammit. I have been more conscious of my calorie intake today though, and it's a beginning.

"Wellll," said d over dinner tonight, "don't forget, you're also battling nature at the moment..."
I looked at her quizzically. I do good quizzically.
"Well you know, the sap's not rising like it used to..."

I ratcheted quizzically up to what-the-fuckily.

"I beg your pardon?" I said. I looked over the bulge of my belly...I swear I haven't worn those bloody boots since the walk. As far as I know, the sap was rising just fine, thankyouverymuch.

"I mean, you know, it's Autumn, you're supposed to pack on the pounds ready for Winter...right?"

Sigh...

That's it...sod perspex living, I'm going off into the woods to be a bear.*

Rawr...



*No, not really.

The Chastity Boots

There are some things in life which just feel ineffably more satisfying if done by someone else.

(I'm going to pause for a beat here, while I let your own undoubtedly perverted minds go through your own appalling lists...)

One of those things, as it happens, is the preparation for a big physical endeavour. d particularly has a thing about doing up my boots before a big long walk. We got to our hotel yesterday, and it hardly seemed any time at all before it was time to head out. I put on my boots.
"Put it up here," said d. I raised my eyebrows at her.
"The boot," she smirked at me.
I put my booted foot up on her knee, and she threaded my laces. When she yanked them tight, it was half playful dominatrix, half Mammy and Scarlett O'Hara.
I opened my mouth to say something, but she stopped me with her eyes, then put the one foot down, and pulled up the other one. A few more seconds of lace-threading and I was done.

"Rrrrawr..." I said. She grinned at me.
"Don't suppose we have time for a little ravishing, do we?" I asked.
"Go nuts," she smirked. "If you can get your boots off..."
I thought about it for a moment, then my head drooped.
"Dammit," I said.
She smirked at me again.
"You know I can't bear to undo your...handiwork," I growled.
She grinned.
"When I get back, lady, there's gonna be some powerful ravishing goin' on..."
"When you can get out of your chastity boots," she said, grinning.

Needless to say, when I stumbled in after walking 20 miles - the first ten easy, the second ten, after having sat down for a fatal half-hour, hellish - I was sweaty and blistered and chafing and raw.
"Take your boots off baby..." mumbled d, almost in her sleep.
"Damn damn damn..." I muttered, half delirious with exhaustion. "Lemme sleep a bit first, eh?"

When I woke up, d was smiling down at me.
"Breakfast, honey," she said.
"Ravishing!" I said, waking fully.
"Well...sure, we could do that...but the restaurant will be closing in an hour."
"Damn damn damn," I said again, and the day began in earnest.

Haven't worn the boots all day...

The Day After, The Night Before...

Yesterday, we put what I have little option to think of as all that remained of my dad in a big deep hole in the ground. Well, almost anyway - people always come at atheists with the "bleakness" of our worldview, that when people die, they just die. But it's not ever entirely that simple. We celebrate the life that was lived, and we keep the example of the person in our minds, to guide out own actions - and in that way, they DO live on beyond their years of biological life. My dad, as was made abundantly clear by the church full of people yesterday, was a man worth being. As such, he is a man worth missing, and we will. He's also a man worth in many ways - though by no means all ways - emulating, and I intend to try and follow some degree of his example going forward, as I've tried to follow some degree of it before.


I'm not about to talk in depth about my dad here. I've said enough about him. He's alive in all our minds, and through our lives going forward. But that's what we did yesterday.

Today, the day after, has been a day of slightly odd lassitude. Tomorrow, lassitude will play verrrrrry little part in the day...or at least, not in the night. For tomorrow is the Night Hike for Maggie's Cancer Care Centres - d and I get on a bus and schlepp to London for the weekend, and, just for a kick-off, I walk 20 miles around the capital city. Wahay!

I'm going away now for a scandalously early night, back in our own bed at home, leaving my brother here overnight. Tomorrow he goes home to Ireland, and the strange, pleasant bubble of family time we've had during this horribly-motivated phase of Dad's decay folds up and posts itself to different places. Hopefully though, the seeds of reconnection that defeat geography will continue to grow. Fairly sure my Dad would have wanted them to.

Then, when we come home on Monday, I go back in time again, to full-on Disappearing, to perspex boxes and strict, unbending, non-Aristotelian discipline. I want this to happen. One last remnant of yesterday - My brother and I each did a reading for Dad, and a churchful of eyes were on us. When I was 15 stone, I would have been comfortable with that - the Master Suit was big on me, the profile was reasonably flat, the face was slim-ish. Yesterday, I felt none of that. Yesterday it was more like the old, old days, with the two brothers - one like a rake, the other bulging and balding. I'm not happy with that, and it doesn't work as a tribute to my dad either. When he set out to do a thing, it was done. That's going to be the spirit of the Disappearing Man going forward...
...
.......
...presuming I survive the Night Hike intact...

The Roller-Coaster of Reality

Today sort of started like a hangover, and has ended like a roller-coaster. Everything is now on track for tomorrow, when we bury my dad. Firmly on track, with all of us hog-tied into the front carriage, our eyes glued open by the oncoming wind of inevitability. 

Sigh...or, y'know, I could stop being a drama queen and just get on with things.
It's just felt like that kind of day - one thing after another, after another, and all of it taking us closer to the fundamental reality-shift where my dad's not here any more. In particular, we went to see dad at the funeral home, in his coffin, and followed him in his hearse to the church where he's staying overnight. As reality-shifts go, that was a pretty big one.

Still managed, in among all the last-minute arrangements, to go home for my weigh-in this morning.

Now, I know what I said about being back in the 16s this week, but the week has been radically unsuitable to losing weight. In fact, this morning's weigh-in showed me as:
17 stone 0.75 - so...technically, up half a pound.
Did I mention that next week, things start allll over again. No, really, they do. Properly this time....

Honest!

A River Runs Thru It

I joined the Dowlais Male Voice Choir last night…

Y’know…as ya do…

Many of you will know my appallingly anti-social habit of singing at passers-by on my walks. It would be fair to say though that I haven’t turned my singing voice to any useful purpose since school, when, as a member of the choir, I used to scare the bejeesus out of the music teachers with my over-enunciation and positively comical mouth-movements. Joining the Dowlais choir though was something I always thought I’d do once we moved back to the Valleys. Why Dowlais? Pure literary vanity, really – In Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood there is a line, spoken by a dead Welsh sailor, who, as his one question to the world of the living and dry, asks “How’s the tenors in Dowlais…?”

Plus, if I’m honest, it was the only choir of high standing of which I was aware, right on my doorstep – almost literally, as it happens, because for all they’re the Dowlais choir, they don’t, in fact, practice in Dowlais any more: they practice within spitting distance of our flat, down in Caedraw! This will only mean something to those with a reasonable grasp of just how entirely Merthyr is made up of upward-sloping hills. Truly, even the downhills go up in Merthyr. Dowlais is pretty high up on one of the uppier bits, whereas Caedraw is about as down as Merthyr gets before you have to start calling it something else. So for the downwardly inclined (see what I did there?) potential chorister, being able to combine the Dowlais choir with Caedraw practices is something of a gift.

Of course, nothing’s ever entirely straightforward in the life of a Disappearing Man. My brother, bless him, decided early yesterday afternoon that some air was called for.

“Wanna go for a stroll?” he offered. I looked up at him over the edge of my computer screen, where a particularly tricky edit was taking place. I raised my eyebrows at him. I would have only raised the one in trademark quizzical fashion, but mine don’t seem to do that – they work as a team, or not at all. I like to kid myself my meaning was clear though – “A stroll, you say? You interest me strangely, O brother mine…”

He grinned, just a little. Then he saw my Interest…and raised it.

“Or a Walk?”

“I’ll get my shoes on,” I said, a little unsure about who had just called who’s bluff.

Now, as the countdown to my Night Hike does that scary comedy movie thing where the hands start whizzing round and round on the clock, I should like to point out one very important thing. I…am an Urban Walker. There, I said it. Give me pavements to pound, give me parks to cross, give me Stuff To Look At with a reassuring tendency to stay still, and stuff to stand on that carries that tendency to something of an extreme, and I am a Happy Walker. The Great Outdoors, on the other hand, seems to me to rather miss the point of tarmac and walls.

Nevertheless, we started off quite promisingly – we went to Cyfarthfa Park, which you’ve read about me walking around and around until the G-force or the ducks or the crazy people got me. Then we started heading towards Cefn, which was the launching point for my accidental walk one mad weekend to Cwm Cadlan. Then he grinned at me again.

“Tell you what?” he offered.

“Do,” I said, still in relatively good humour despite the burning calves of lack-of-practice.

“Let’s follow the river!”
“O…K,” I said, in notosmuch good humour as a sense of gently dawning dread.

It turned out that “following the river” involved a bridge, a dark muddy path, the negotiating of a moderately steep downward bank, a single file procession along a somewhat dubious wall running along the side of what was either a sewage outlet or the secret spring from which all leek and potato soup is sprung into the world, and another bridge.

“We should ignore the bridge,” I said, my habitual cowardice coming to the fore.

“Yes…” said Geraint. “I’m sure you’re right…” And he walked over the bridge.

“This is exactly how the first twenty minutes of a low-budget east German horror movie would go!” I told him. Then I sighed and followed in the young buck’s bootsteps.

As it turned out, we weren’t so much “following” the river as “stalking it, going through its garbage, taping its bank records together and sending it creepy love letters in which we cut off its head.” The river – sometimes sluggish, sometimes intense and thunderous, was right beside us, though, just for safety’s sake, it did keep its distance at the bottom of a steep damp muddy ravine which was always just one mis-step away from taking us down to meet its wet friend.

“I know where we’re going!” said Geraint with the practised confidence of a parent used to bullshitting a not-entirely-gullible five-year-old about the world.

“Really?” I demanded.

“Welll,” he said, waggling a finger experimentally in his ear. “I know where the river comes out, so…erm…yeah, let’s say I do and crack on, eh?”

“Yes,” I muttered darkly. “Let’s…”

So on we cracked, following pathways while there were pathways, and tracks when there were tracks. When there weren’t tracks, he forged ahead, largely powered by bullshit and optimism (which, now I think about it, are probably one and the same…). Then:

“Ah.”

“What?” I said, immediately alerted. “What’s ‘Ah’? That sounds like a bad ‘Ah.’”

“Wellll…” he said again. I prepared for more bullshit, but this time it was worse. This time he tried The Truth.

“I’m a little concerned,” he explained. “You remember back there, where you said there was an uphill path, and we chose the downhill one cos it was closer to the river?”

“I do remember that, yes,” I said. “I remember that really rather vividly. What about it?”

He sniffed, gazing across the sudden expanse of field that had made itself recently known to us. The river ran through it

“I think that might have been a mistake,” he said.

“I have to get back to the accepted definition of civilisation by seven,” I reminded him. “I’m singing tonight…”

“Hmm,” he nodded, mystically. If we hadn’t been miles from anywhere, and if I hadn’t been entirely dependent on his optimistic navigation skills, I might have gently stoved his head in for that mystical nod.

“Tell you what?” he said again. This time I just raised my forehead at him – the eyebrows came reluctantly with it, as if roused from sleep at far-too-early o’clock.

“Let’s cross the river here, and…erm…see, shall we?”

I should say about my brother – he’s not always this godawful gung-ho spirit-of-adventure type. With a good slouch up, he can be as wretchedly, sullenly cynical as the best of us. But there’s something about the Fresh Air that I do my best to avoid that gets him all…fired up. We cross the river, and yomped on, upwards, the ground getting perversely muddier and squelchier as we went.

“Ah! Bastard!” he yelled suddenly. I saw him do a kind of gazzelian quick-step, from squelchy bit to rock to leaning-on-stick to dry land. It was very impressive, but I figured I had a better way. There was a ridge, and I went up on it.

“Aaaaaaaaargh!!” I yelled.

“Yep,” he said, too calmly for my liking, “that was why I…”

I’d walked straight into a patch of clawing, evil bramble I stepped sideways to escape its clutches.

SQUELCH!

“Goddamnsonofabitchin’bastard Great Outdoors!” I yelled, adapting my wife’s favourite obscenity to fit the occasion. There was a cold, inevitable glooping sound as my left foot sunk beneath a ripple of liquid mud that filled my shoe. “Aaaaargh!” I yelled. “Did I mention Aaaaargh?!”

“You did, in all fairness.”

“Then double aaaargh with bloody bramble-thorns on!”

He lent me his impromptu walking stick and I punted my way to safety, if not to dryness.

I sighed, gave him back his stick, and we yomped on.

About a hundred yards further on, he paused.

“Can you hear banjos?” he whispered.

“No I bloody can’t, what are you on about?”

He grinned again. “I’ve never actually seen the end of that film…Deliverance. Our DVD player wasn’t’ up to much at the time we rented it, it kept stopping.”

“It probably didn’t want to spoil the surprise for you,” I said, pushing past him and taking the lead for once. A few hundred yards further on, I stopped.

“Er…Ger?”

“Yeah?”

“Y’know that idea you had?”
“Which one?”

“The one about ‘following the river?”

“Yeah.”

“There are two rivers.”
“Are there?”

“Yep!”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m almost certain that’s not supposed to happen.”

“So now what?”

He came and took a look, surveying data from scouting trips over two decades earlier that had been implanted in his brain by some distant Akelah.

“Well…if that’s what I think it is…” he said, gesturing at the side of a valley with his stick, “then we’re almost certainly nearer to civilisation than you might think. Let’s go this way,” he gestured, striding boldly forward and taking one of the two paths.

“You’re sure?” I asked. “Cos we could always split up and die separate horrible deaths…”

“Well, we could…” he agreed, “but you’ve got choir practice tonight.”

“Good point. Well said. Lead on, Macduff!” He led on, letting my misquote pass in silence. We walked, and in some cases squelched, and then he turned rapidly right, up a pathway I hadn’t seen was there…and civilisation gave a friendly pat on the back. Tarmac! Beautiful, black, a ribbon of Man’s indomitable determination to conquer the squelchy bastard that is Nature. We walked some more, and eventually, there were houses, and pubs, and chip shops, and little bastard urchins on scooters, and all of it was tinged with a wonderful new light, because we’d lived to see it again.

Later on, he came to sit in on my first choir practice. It’s worth bearing in mind at this point that the last time I was at one of these practices was just last Wednesday. I was convinced the hall where the choir practised was attached to a car park. I walked around and around the car park, peeking in every building that abutted it. Geraint followed now in my footsteps. Round, and round, and round again.

“They’ve moved it!” I declared to the car park.

Geraint wandered off. I did another dog-like circuit of the car park, refusing to accept what was becoming increasingly inevitable.

“Ant!!” he called to me (like many people, he calls me Ant, having known me since before I decided to truncate my name to Tony). He waved. “Found it!!”

“HOW?!” I called.

“I followed someone that looked like a chorister,” he explained. Man, I hate it when people do sensible things and turn out to be right. Clearly, the hall was nowhere near where I’d thought it was.

Wednesday, OK? Four days, and my brain had wiped all accurate route information from my memory. Meanwhile, my brother relied on hazy recollections from over two decades ago to ensure we didn’t die in the godless wilderness.

“Ant?” he said.

“What?”

“You are…and I say this in the kindest of ways…but you’re completely clueless, aren’t you?”

“You say this like it’s new information,” I muttered, and we went in. I sang, he listened. I had a great night. We had a pint together before going home and collapsing.

Without getting hopelessly sentimental about the thing, it’s been horribly good to have my brother home for this time. Horrible inasmuch as the reason he’s home is unabashedly grim. But really good too, inasmuch as it’s been like an evolution, like our boyhood projected forward through time into a fashion of manhood. When you’re separated by distance, it’s depressingly easy to forget all the good stuff about your family. This time, sparked by Dad’s illness and subsequent death, has really felt like a welding experience, a re-melting of our family unit together (with my sister-in-law and nephew calling in on Skype from Real Life.

The next two days are the peak points of this experience. Good and bad together, in all probability. At least I know though that if I get lost in the cemetery, at least one of us will know the way….

Fifty Shades of Sundae

As I mentioned, two nights ago, we went as a family (minus one...and no, still not even remotely used to that) to the Harvester, where Ma had her multi-salad meal and the rest of us had...y'know, real food.
When we finished, d picked up the dessert menu. I snatched it from her, and perused. It's been the kind of week where everybody's wonderfully understanding as you stuff your face, and make reassuring noises about "getting back on track once all the turmoil's over". And they're all absolutely right of course. But I figured - with the kind of evil, twisted, advantage-taking whisper in the brain of the truly addictive - "Wellll, if you're gonna be getting back on track when the turmoil's over anywayyyyy..."

Mmmmm...Sundaes. Lots and lots of sundaes. Single choc, double choc, double choc fudge, double choc fudge with chocolate stars, then banoffee sundaes, coffee sundaes, strawberries and a shitload of cream sundaes. Honeycomb sundaes, caramel sundaes, every-goddamn-thing-imaginable sundaes, and I wanted them all. I wondered about getting a kind of double, inverted glass dish, and pouring one sundae on top of another, to make a kind of sundae sandwich, then setting up two more either side and making a kind of ice cream viaduct, and eating my way through the many flavours of sundae available.

"Can I get the bill, please?" asked Ma, and the ice-cream architecture in my mind collapsed, and melted, and flowed away, and I was saved, one more day, from my own instincts.

That all said, everybody is right, with their soothing words and certainties. We bury my dad three days from now....Nope, still seems perverse and surreal, and like he should come in any minute and wonder what all the fuss is about...but once that's done, it's straight on to the Night Hike, and when we come back, I'm thinking of going back to a world of Perspex Boxes and Exercise. It worked before, and it can work again, and at least I'll be starting with a 3.some-odd stone head-start on the first time. Perspex Boxes seem to be the way for me - I'm sure Aristotle would be disappointed, and frankly so am I. But a failure of integration can clearly still be a success in terms of the impact it has on a lifestyle. So Perspex has to be the way to go.

Salad Days

There are days...like the day before yesterday...when the connection between Ma and I is unmistakable. We went to a Chinese buffet, and her first plate was an enormo-platter, a practical Vesuvius of rice with just a little curried goo and buggerall else. Apparently, when she was pregnant with me, all she'd eat was pasta, rice and dessert.

Thanks, Ma.

Likewise of course, my last plate of the night was an enormo-platter of what we here in the Welsh Valleys call half-and-half - half rice, half chips (fries if you really insist), with a kind of  curry sauce to delineate the boundary between carb and...erm...carb.

Like I said, thanks, Ma.

Then there are nights when I can't help but wonder whether I was actually born to this woman at all. Nights like last night. We all went out to the local Harvester, mainly, if we're being honest, because they have an unlimited salad bar.  Ma ordered her main - fish and chips - and then disappeared like a shot to the salad bar. After pronouncing that she'd chosen the wrong dressing, we all told her to go back and change it.
"Nono, I'll eat this lot, then I'll get more," she said. And she did. Geraint popped away from the table to answer a phonecall, and when he came back he peered at Ma's salad bowl.
"What are we on?" he asked.
I looked up. "Gotta finish your Main salad before you can move on to Dessert salad," I muttered.
"Ah," he nodded. "I wondered...See, when they dreamed up the 'unlimited' salad bar, I don't think they thought they'd ever come up against someone like you," he said, grinning at Ma as she munched her way through some unpalatable vegetation in a honey mustard dressing. 
"Certainly not in Merthyr, anyway," I added, looking around at the reassuring degree of Thursday night lardassery grazing at tables all around us. 
Ma shrugged, crunching on a piece of onion.

We eventually steered her out of the place, but not before she'd at least had her Dessert Salad. I think personally, she'd have stayed for Coffee and Cigars Salad, and possibly even Brandy Salad if we'd let her. The woman's addicted to raw vegetables, I swear.

Oddly enough, if you fast forward to right now, with me sitting at the kitchen table, Ma just made a round of coffees.
"Anyone want anything? Kit Kats? Cookies?"
"No, I'm fine, thankyou," said d. "How about you? D'you want something?...A small bowl of salad, maybe?"

Sadly, no-one understood why I just spat my coffee across the screen of the pet rock that is our iPad...

Big Sweater Days

As we work tirelessly and relatively frantically towards my dad's funeral on Wednesday, it's weird to see how thoroughly he was, and is, the real Disappearing Man. I've spent days disconnecting him from the life support of connection to the outside world - magazine subscriptions, coin collections, membership organisations, pension providers and the like. Today, Ma and Geraint are down the garage, confronted by assorted metal oceans of what, though undoubtedly useful and meaningful to Dad, are to the rest of us, without his skills in the world, Utterly Bleedin' Useless. They've just rung a scrap merchant to take some of this assorted metallic detritus to, and given away a chest freezer. As you do...

Part of this general getting-of-space-to-breathe is also a sort of clothing giveaway - clothes that he bought before shrinking under the weight of illness, and never put on in the most part - Ger's got a jacket and shirt, and at the moment, I seem to be inheriting sweaters. Big comfy winter sweaters. While it's not entirely beyond me to whinge, along the lines of "Oh sure, give the fat fuck all the comfy sweaters!", this would probably rank as the Stupidest Whinge of the Century, biology and fat fuckery being what they undoubtedly are, so I'm absolutely not going to bother. Fact is, right now, while it's not exactly Big Sweater Weather (except in the mornings, when it certainly is), these big comfy sweaters are something of a not-exactly-God-send. A Deathsend? No, that sounds monstrous. What I mean is, I'm pretty grateful for them. Not, as I said, because I'm a shivering little snowdrop, all cold and unprotected against the Arctic blast, but more because my body is re-assuming a kind of Weebloid, or at least Wombloid (Non-Brits, look up the Wombles - even on this blog if you like - for this reference) shape, and it's good to have something fairly formal-looking that once belonged to a good tall man. Tall men and short fat fucks have a lot more in common than people might assume. If it has to cover a greater area vertically, there's at least a reasonable chance of it working to cover an expanded area horizontally too.

All of this serves to strip away the layers of surreality that have been surrounding us for weeks now. Wednesday is Just There, like the heartbeat of a big throbbing creature, threatening to swallow us up. The Order of Service for his funeral came across to us today. I've given the details out myself, time and time and time again, and yet somehow, they haven't seemed like A Real Thing...you know, that will be Happening To Us. But it is. I'm wearing his sweater - not as a loan till he comes home, but as a kind of woolen inheritance, because he never is coming home.

Going away now, to take some good deep breaths in and out.

Through A Full Glass Darkly...

There is a truism about the Welsh that takes some understanding.

When I married d, we had some Americans over for the wedding. It was really something to see these fine, good, generally rather lovely people...meet the Welsh.
The Welsh, like most Brits...enjoy a tipple or twenty. The Americans' jaws slowly began to sag in amazement as they watched the Welsh at play and celebration, downing pint after pint of ale, and bottle after bottle of wine. Some of the Americans still look back on that day and shake their heads in a kind of bewildered admiration, wondering where the Welsh put all that alcohol. And of course, how they managed to do it again without missing their mouths.

Another part of the truism concerns this house. My folks' house. When d came over to live, she'd done her drinking decades ago and was by this time fairly abstemious.

Then she met my folks' liquor cabinet. It took a little experimentation - and I mean that in a vaguely creepy evil scientist way - before my folks found the drink that she would call hers. Madeira's the one. (Any Flanders and Swann fans, knock yourself out!). d has long half-joked that she daren't stay over at my folks' house any more, because she'll be absolutely rat-arsed for a majority of the time.

This week, I have to admit, the same has been true of me. Since discovering a new cider on the day of the Pontypridd walk, I have found myself more and more partial to a pint or two. This of course is godawfully catastrophic in Disappearing terms. I have to wear my Master suit on Wednesday, and perhaps oddly, we bought it when I was about 17.5 stone. My sole real goal this week is not to be entirely back to that weight by the time I slip into it Wednesday - for Dad's funeral...although somewhat sweetly, I remember pulling the Master suit on for the first time and think I looked like the bee's bollocks in it, so hopefully, it'll still look alright as we say our soooooo-not-final goodbye.

Here's hoping anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a pint of cider with my name on it...

Making Enchoiries

Let me stick a hand in the air, first of all, and say today was for Disappearing shit. Went home to the flat for a bit this morning, and decided, quite deliberately, to have chips from the Fountain Fish Bar for lunch. The way you can tell it was deliberate is that I came home and told everyone, rather than hiding it and disposing of the evidence.

Still I say, this week will turn out to be better than last week. It's just that this week hasn't really started yet.

This evening, I got a kick in the arse from Fate.

Since we started planning to come home to Wales, I'd had the idea of doing a thing.
What I didn't want to do was the obvious thing - which in my case would be to join the local am dram society. Quite apart from anything else, it's now run by a guy I used to know as a teenager, and whose life I schemed to...well, not to put too fine a point on it, to fuck right over more than once. And while I have a couple of friends who are in the am dram society, I've sort of done that when I was a kid. Going back to that seems not to be something that appeals to me. What I did think about though is something terribly, terribly grown-up. I thought about joining a choir.

In fact, I thought about joining a very specific choir. The Dowlais Male Voice Choir.
The Dowlais Male Voice Choir is famous. I mean....world famous. Has been for decades - it's even mentioned in Dylan Thomas's acme of Welshness, Under Milk Wood.

A guy called Chris popped in tonight to commiserate with Ma and console with her on Dad's death. He'd known Dad from the Masons. As he made to leave, he mentioned he was going to choir practice, with the Dowlais choir. A handful of questions later and I was in his car. I listened to the choir practice, and knew I'd like to be among this band of brothers. I'm going again Sunday. They're putting me into Top Tenors to start with. This will be too high, I guarantee you. But it won't matter. I can't wait to be a part of that wall of adjustable sound.

How grown-up is that?!

List-o-Vision

Today was...interesting. Interesting in the kind of way that having bamboo shoved under your fingernails is interesting. We were expecting to be able to get Dad's death certificate today, but got a call at 8 to say that that wouldn't be happening, as the death had been referred to the coroner.

Take one cricket bat. Apply to the day, liberally and with speed.
We had to go and visit the coroner's officer, to discover that the cause of death is not listed as annnnnnny of the multitude of things from which Dad was actively suffering in the weeks leading up to his death, but in fact was something called an intercranial haemorrhage. That's a brain bleed to you, squire. A brain bleed probably, but not by any means yet conclusively, suffered as a result of one of the falls he had while in the hospital.

Sigh...
We all had a bunch of other stuff to do too, so we went our separate ways. I popped back to the flat to do the weigh in.

As predicted yesterday, the results of this week of Ease Eating were dreadful.

17st 0.25

Guaranteed, it'll be less than this next week. I'll be back in the 16s next week. No really, I will.

The rest of the day has been lived in List-o-Vision. It's a slightly anodyne process, writing someone out of the world. It's a big long list of all the financial connections they made while they were alive, where you have to call up all the other ends, and tell them that the person has gone, and things need to change. That's what I've been doing, on and off, for the last 48 hours. Tonight, out of the blue, Geraint suggested that, as he had to drop an invitation in to a house in Pentrebach (a little way down the Taff Trail), we should walk it. So we did.

Jeepers, I'm out of practice. It was barely a five mile round trip, but I found myself wheezing like a grampus by the end of it.

No, really, I'll be back in the 16s this time next week. I have spoken, dammit!

The 72 Hour Day

You're not imagining things - do not adjust your brain. There was no blog yesterday.
That's because all in all, there was no yesterday.
Yesterday started some time on the 7th of September. The first night of the Night Shift with Dad, following his having a hypo and falling out of bed...again. My brother Geraint and I went up and stayed with him all through the night. The next morning we got to bed for about three hours before starting up again. By the time we went back that night, the 8th, there was something...wrong. Or wronger, really. His breathing had turned into a rasp, his speech of the night before had slurred and turned more into a grunt or two in the right direction. By the time Ma left at 3AM, we'd spoken to another doctor - Dad hadn't passed any urine in over 12 hours, and the doc mentioned that his kidneys were marching towards failure point.

Oddly enough, he had a quiet night. As Geraint put it, while the night before, we'd been necessary to stop him falling out of bed, that night, it was just all about being there.

Which means we were still there at 6.15 AM yesterday. His breathing had become laboured and heavy, and then - very suddenly - there was no labour. Geraint and I looked at each other, hoping for a moment that the ominous silence simply meant he was breathing easier.

He wasn't. He wasn't breathing at all.

We called the nurses, and on their advice, called the family. After so much fighting, the end was quick, and painless, and peaceful.

Today has been a day of mainly dealing with some of the mountain of Stuff To Do that comes attached like a John Doe tag to the toe of a dead person. Tomorrow is likely to be the same.

In Disappearing terms, this has been a crapulent period - odd hours, the feeling of being beyond the boundaries of normal life, and a really quite impressive hospital canteen have resulted in my eating lots of stuff I'm not supposed to, and justifying it as Comfort Eating. Or at least Easy Eating.
This means tomorrow's going to be an unmitigated disaster - although such terms are of course entirely relative. There is only one disaster this week...and to paraphrase Shakespeare, it can be truly said that "the loss of such a man includes all harm." I'm not going to turn this blog entry into an obituary for my dad. Maybe, a little down the line, I'll try and give you a picture of the man as I experienced him. But then again, maybe I won't - it almost seems a little tacky to pay tribute to so impressive a human being on a blog that includes entries about craving for chocolate sundaes and essentially shitting myself...

We'll see. All I know right now is that the man who gave us all our core principles has gone from the face of the Earth. While we have breath in our bodies, he will never be gone from the world though, because his standards are imprinted on our brains, and we take them forward. Every time we see something through, every time we make good use of our enthusiasm, every time we think hard or act with passion, or do something with no thought of reward for people we hardly know...that's Dad, living beyond the years of his life. That he does so is the best tribute we can pay to the man.

Disappearing Nation

Saw a story on the BBC News a few days ago. Been meaning to tell you about it ever since but puffballs and buttons and zombies have rather got in the way.

Wales, apparently, is rising rapidly - well, as rapidly as a nation of wobblebottoms can rise - up the ranks of Obese Nations. Apparently, we're nipping at the USA's heels in terms of the percentage of people in the country who are overweight or obese - about 60% of the population fall into these categories. We are a nation, it seems, of truly Fat Fucks.

In some ways, that's pretty cool - certainly in the local gym, among your body-builders and your insano-fits, you'll also find a good solid number of people who actually need to be there - a great incentive to use the thing. On the other hand, knowing the information about the country means that one's vision is rather skewed and tinted. Many's the time since coming to live back home I've thought to myself "Hmm...well, I'm probably not as fat as him," or "Phew...she's a big lass even by my standards..."

Knowing that we're chasing the US in terms of the percentage of Fat Fucks we have kinda makes that redundant. It's like logic kicks in to say "Yeah, might not be as fat as him - BUT HE'S FATTER THAN HALF THE PEOPLE ON THE EARTH...PUT TOGETHER!" Which really puts a crimp in your self-comparisons.

Been a bad-ish day, in several directions today. In particular, in Disappearing terms, went for an Indian meal tonight, and didn't start it till late. Not sure how that'll serve me come Tuesday - or the postponement of yesterday's badminton, come to that. But on the other hand, was able to spend some time with Dad today in the period where I was Doing Buggerall in the Way of Exercise.

Have almost forgotten what the gym looks like. Have certainly forgotten was strenuous physical exercise feels like. Sigh...Must...Restructure...Routine...
Muuuuusssssst...re...structure...

Zombie Face

"Brrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaiiiiinsssss...."

Sorry - erm...did I say that, or did I think that.

Right now, if you could look at me, you'll see only the glassy, dead stare of the Undead. Didn't realise that till I just caught sight of myself in the mirror and squealed in alarm.

The reason I didn't realise it is because it's the same face I can see on every other person in this room right now. d, for some reason that makes sense only to her, is at the stove, making...of all things...cheese twists.
Ma is staring, glassily, into a glass of red wine the colour of vampire-blood. And my brother Geraint is sitting across the kitchen, in our Dad's Chair, blinking, realising exactly how long he's been awake. We are the Zombie Family tonight. It's been that sort of a day.

Ger arrived Monday night, a little while after I got in from the UberCommute. It was a good call - the doctor on our 12:30 stint with Dad told us to get him here, because of the uncertainty of Dad's condition.

Uncertainty was a big factor in today. Between us, we've operated a kind of rolling watch on Dad today, overlapping and taking shifts and making sure he was at least safe. In some respects, today has been a new low in his ongoing condition...which, when you consider we got a call at 12:30 a few nights ago, is actually saying something. So now we are all just sitting here, staring at each other with the stare of a bunch of zombies.

I'm going to stop now. I have a sneaking suspicion that we're all sitting here in the kitchen on the hard wooden chairs largely because I'm sitting here typing this to you lot. I think when I stop typing, we'll all simply collapse into our primal undead state and be unconscious for several  days.

Zzzzzzz...Braaaaaaaaaainssssszzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

RIP 34s

Yesterday, I rolled the dice - with Dad comparatively calm and stable, I went to London on the UberCommute. The thinking was "go while the peace lasts, because it may not be guaranteeable in future, and you might need to not go another week."

Which was kinda like stepping onto a frozen pond and trusting it not to crack under you - necessary, but not the most confident of premises on which to commit to your day.

As we're living with Ma this week (having all been rather spooked by the middle-of-the-night hospital call), d had packed a bag. She had demanded my trousers off me, and they'd gone into a wash, but had emerged in one piece and were ready. These are the big old fat fuck trousers, secured with the second of the two belts, which I'd been wearing around the place much as one wears a comfy old pair of pants - just because they're there and are full of memories and space. There were also two pairs of size 34s.
"Wear the big ones honey," said d, holding them out. "They'll be comfier for travelling..."
"Nnnnnnnah," I decided. "Wanna feel a bit connected to the older thinner me."
d raised an eyebrow. "Reeeeeally?" she said, waving the comfy pants at me in a moderately seductive manner.
I picked up the 34s, slid into them, breathed substantially innnnnnnnnn, zipped up and fastened the button.

It strained, rather more than somewhat. I could almost hear it grunting, digging its own little sulking trench into my no-longer-size-34 gut.
And off I went, walking with a kind of delicate John Wayne tread, not to put undue strain on the poor, put-upon (or at least put-on) 34s.

Got to Paddington in dire need of a pee, after two bucketfuls of decaffeinated pointlessness at Cardiff, and popped, as is my wont, into the Paddington Hilton to use their bathroom.

There are some moments in life that, if you saw them in a movie, you'd dismiss as funny but contrived and hokey.

I unzipped the 34s,  reached in, discovered that the trousers were  hiked too high to allow me what, for want of a more frankly filthy word we'll call access and pulled the 34s, still buttoned, down a little way to get everything correctly aligned. I reached in, got a hold of myself, and breathed out, relaxing in the knowledge that my pee-need would soon be no more.

There was a ping.

A little...something...flew past my field of vision, then dropped away. It pinged off one side of the toilet bowl, danced over to the other side, jumped a little in the air and then dropped with a discreet plunk! into the bowl, just as the arc of my pee-stream coloured the water a rich and vibrant cider-colour yellow.

The button stared back up at me. I could almost see it grinning at me. Hell, it was almost giving me the finger. Fortunately of course, the 34s were so crammed to literal bursting-point that they stayed up perfectly well, and rather more relaxedly than they did while under the enforced discipline of the button.

So I did the day with my trousers bulging open at the top, and technically, at least until it's worth getting a replacement button, the 34s are dead. They have ceased to be. Which doesn't make you feel particularly good when you're on a quest to lose your next 28 pounds.

Today though, I went to weigh in, and had something of a shock.

16 stone 10...dead. So somehow this week, I've lost 2.75 pounds. Granted, losing 2.75 pounds when you've put on 26 of the buggers is still hardly a reason to celebrate, but still - at least this week it appears to be moving in the right direction. 3 pounds and I reclaim the 4 stone sticker in my sad little collectormania heart. 7 pounds after that and I'm only a stone over where I'm claiming I "got to"...and on it goes.
Tomorrow night - apparently, badminton. For the first time in decades. That'll be fun!

The Puffball Horror

I walked into the room, sat heavily on the couch.

“What’s the matter?” said Ma. I hid my face with my hand, unable to speak for a moment.

“God, what did you do?” asked d, feigning suspicion.

“Too…too horrible…” I muttered.

“What? Tell us?” demanded d.

Regular readers will know I’m taking medically-prescribed Zenical as an aid d’weightloss. Zenical, for Americans or the new and innocent among you, is what Alli would be if it went on an intensive, Green Beret-style boot camp designed to turn it from a lily-livered pissant digestive tract fluming agent into something more akin to Agent Orange, that can almost literally kick the crap out of you at a previously unprecedented range of knots. It makes every stomach-gurgle a sound of impending doom, and it shoots a foetid orange oil out of your ass like a kind of no-waiting sprinkler attachment.

Often – and indeed in my case, famously - relatively unannounced.

We’d decided that Dad was calm enough and stable enough to allow me to make my Monday morning London trip, which meant that one way or another, I had to shower before we stumbled, bleary, to our beds.

I turned on the water, waited for it to heat up, and stepped underneath the stream. Picked up the washing puff, soaped up, farted a small, insignificant puff of a fart, and began to scrub myself clean. Worked down my legs, round my ass, up my body…

I looked at the puff.

There are some moments in life that are truly, stunningly, horror-movie horrible. This, I’m here to tell you, was one of them. It was like the moment in Carrie where she gets her period in public and has no idea what it is or what to do about it. It was like some Hammer movie moment where a guy gets in a cab and is chatting amiably to the driver, only to see the driver turn round and reveal he’s just a rotted, animated corpse. It was that level of body-horror that I encountered now.

The puff was orange. Really, really orange.

“Ohhhhhh godddd….”

I poured shower gel into the puffball like it was going out of fashion, and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed it against itself, willing the orange out. There was no other way of getting clean, so I scrubbed that thing like it hadn’t been scrubbed in years, got out of the shower…ahem…wiped…got back in and used it again to get myself at least theoretically clean. Then I got out, threw the puffball in the recycling bin, wrapped myself in a robe and came through to the living room, sitting heavily on the couch.

“Orange…” I muttered. “So…so orange…”

d, in that way that women have carte blanche to do, but which would get men into allll sorts of trouble, laughed her head off. Ma, who’s relatively new to the intimacies of Zenical, raised her eyebrows.

“Ahem…” she coughed.

“That’s OK,” she said, searching….realllly searching for a positive in the story. “I’ve got plenty of puffballs. Been meaning to throw that one away for a while anyway…

Today was pretty much grim on every conceivable level, but warmed more than somewhat by the kind words of friends in the Real World and the e-world, for which, to all those who sent them, I’m grateful.  But today, frankly, is something I’ll tell you about tomorrow. It’s fally-downy time again. Yay…

Sleepless In The Attic

What the hell day is it?

Anyone?

It's all become something of a blur over the last...some-odd...number of hours.
Watched Asylum of the Daleks, as planned. That was enjoyable. So enjoyable I watched it again immediately. Watched Thor, followed by Captain America - it was pretty much an evening of heroes.
Crawled to bed at midnight, but didn't turn off the light. Instead, we lay there, talking about how grim dad had been on the 3 o'clock visit.

Then the phone rang.

It is of course a truism that no good news comes by phone in the middle of the night. Just past midnight is of course by definition pretty damn close to the middle of the night, so this was pretty damn close to bad news.
It was Ma, with news from the hospital.
They'd said we should probably make our way up, because Dad had started throwing up what they called "coffee grounds" - stomach blood, to the gorily-minded.
We went. He had a temperature of 38.8, looked to be in significant distress, and was throwing up quite a bit. We spoke to a registrar, and he refused on pain of professional integrity, to be hopeful. He wasn't hopeless either - at least not exactly - but hopefulness, he said, was beyond what he could offer at the moment.

Again, the power of prayer came back to me. Ma said something of a silent prayer, and got a little hope from it. d said something of a silent prayer, and got a little hope from it.

I'm an atheist, I don't pray.

No, not even now.

I focused on the phenomenal strength and stubbornness of the man I know as dad. And got a little hope.

We went home eventually, when it became clear that after a change in antibiotics and a dose or two of painkillers and a reasonably constant flow of I/V fluids, he was calmer. And by home, I mean Ma's home. Dad's home. The home in which I did most of my not-quite-growing-up in. d and I went up to the attic which is, for now, the only spare room. And there we worried and hoped and did everything inbetween for a few more dawn-creeping hours.

Today, while in no way, shape or form being Better, Dad's a little better. A little calmer. A little more present. Looks like his most recent fever's broken, and at some points today, he's been Dad. Conscious, present, tracking and funny. Not, when all is said and done, many points. but some. We're back in the attic tonight, in case the call comes again and our family needs to scramble. It's like Blitz living, really, trying to live a normal life and waiting for the air raid siren that means running and panic and what-the-hell-now?

London tomorrow, against a large chunk of my better judgment. Here's to hope, however you find it, and to the perspective big problems give to the little ones, like Disappearing.

Asylum of the Disappearing

Blood was down to 5.6 this morning, which suggests...
Well, not very much at all, I suppose, but is good blood sugar control considering I've actually managed to get through this week doing abbbbbbsolutely nothing in the way of exercise.

Saw my pal Sian for a bit this morning. She's the kind of person who runs marathons...for fun. Climbs mountains "because they're there". Aims to do "UltraMarathons" in unlikely locations and so on. She's a nutter, essentially. Still, this morning she was relaxedly knackered, having been camping (again...nutter), with four kids for a few days. Was nice, actually, to have a bunch of time in which I didn't have to think "Bugger, I've put two stone back on..." - which is a kind of gnawing, high-pitched whine in the back of my head, pretty much constantly at the minute.

Went up to see Dad this afternoon too. Not his best of days, so there wasn't much in the way of progress there - though it did get me thinking about the power of prayer.

There's a school of thought amongst some atheists that when people say "I'll pray for you", they're not actually doing any good for the recipient, but they are doing good for themselves, by thinking that they've had an impact, and therefore making themselves feel better. This, to me, has always seemed a rather uncharitable way of looking at the thing. There's also rather a smug trope in atheist circles that says believers will pray for you, and atheists will do something for you. Again, this seems to be assuming that believers will only pray for you, rather than praying for you and calling a doctor. Again, hardly the most charitable (or logical, if you get right down to it) view of things.

Sitting there, listening to my dad sleep, not wanting to wake him because waking was such an effort, it struck me that the whole visit was a kind of practical prayer. Did him absolutely no good at all, but did me some good in knowing that if he woke and needed something, we'd be there for him. Besides, in real terms there was nothing I could have done to genuinely help him today - except the little things we did - handed him stuff he wanted, made sure he took some liquids, told the nurses when he needed some medication and so on. Hence a practical prayer.

I'd be lying though if I said tonight was about anything other than Asylum of the Daleks. Yes, geekboys and dweebgirls across the nation will be sitting on sofas now, taking phones off the hook or turning off mobiles, settling down because Doctor Who is back tonight. One of my favourite musical comedians even wrote a song to describe the emotion we all feel on the day the show comes back.

It's called Call Me During Doctor Who and I'll Kill You...Go ahead, Youtube it, you'll have a laugh.

So this is me, bogging off from the lot of you to indulge in some pure pepperpot-shaped extermination-based fun...

EX-TER-MIN-AAAAAATE!!!

BrokeToe MoonPain

Blood was 6.2 yesterday, and 5.8 this morning.

Tonight, there's a blue moon. And it's also the night of Neil Armstrong's memorial, which seems fitting.

About a year ago, d invited me out in the middle of an Amroth night "to see the moon" and I ended up falling over and breaking a toe.

Tonight, as midnight approached, we looked at each other.
"Sure, why not?" I said, and out we went.

Couldn't see the moon for love nor money, but as we wandered up, of all things, to the grocery store for a late night, we reminisced about everything that has changed in our lives since that time. It was on that Amroth visit that we first saw the flat we now live in. We've come a long way while that big toenail of mine has been growing and growing and finally falling off. I'm more than a little curious to remember what weight I was when the toe-breaking happened. Might even have been about where I am right now, which would kinda suck.

But the deadlines are kinda clearing, and for the next couple of days, I'll be able to get some proper biking done, to try and carve myself a psychological victory on Tuesday. Gotta get my ass in gear here, cos it seems to me the massive changes in our lives over the next year were driven by both of us, and some others too, focusing on what we wanted, and making it a reality. Seems like the way to fuck yourself over and drift to nowhere is to lose that kind of focus. Seems like I've been kinda drifting that way for a few months now. Thing is, my brain is right back in the right place. Just need to get the body back in gear.