The Satiation Excess

Yesterday was weird. Weird being in London and not looking forward to walking through my own front door at the end of the night. Weird finding a hotel to crash in overnight. Weird walking – as I did, for no real reason other than the doing of it, to prod myself into some idea of nostalgia maybe – up almost the length of Oxford Street by night…singing Train songs, in case you’re interested.

There’s a word you probably know that has a strange resonance to me, and probably to all Disappearers. The word is Satiety.

It means fullness, satisfaction, contentedness. I have a slightly weird relationship to it as a word because when we were trying with increasingly bright desperation to get my Dad to eat something and build up his strength to battle the infections he picked up in hospital (yep…still rankles…), the doctors said he “had” satiety – the sense of being full, of not wanting more, and that was why he found it so difficult to eat, and why he often threw up what he did.

I think many aspiring Disappearers have a weird relationship with satiety. Eating the way we eat is not often about reaching a point of contented fullness. I know myself I’m often goaded on by a whispering uncertainty of hunger-to-come, if that doesn’t sound entirely mad – the notion of “Yeah, I might be full now, but if I don’t keep eating, I’ll be hungry later…”

Yesterday, walking up Oxford Street by night, I found a Starbucks that was open late. I’d hate a couple of coffees that morning, and nothing of substance till then. I was actually walking up Oxford Street looking for somewhere to eat. Place after place though turned me right off. One place didn’t, but I couldn’t bring myself to go there without d, so I walked on, sated, with my coffee in my hand, to find my hotel.

That was interesting. Apparently, they’d “upgraded” me from a single to a double room. Hoorah – except the double room was exactly the width of a double bed, so I had to get in and out of the thing by climbing up the bed from the bottom. I called d, and felt my emotions twinge for home. I also knew if I told her I’d lived the day perfectly happily on a couple of Starbucks, she’s have given me a firm look, and she’d probably worry. So, late at night though it was by then, I went to the Indian restaurant a couple of doors down, and had some food I didn’t particularly want – but which the whisper was saying would stop me waking up in the night hungry. Once I’d eaten it though, I was sorry I’d gone – simply because light though it was, it was an infusion of late-night calories I could have done without. I still felt the same satiety, but now my brain was working out columns of calories and work, and giving me its own interpretation of a stern look.

Sigh…

There’s no pleasing some brains.

Today, I’ve had a coffee and a bagful of assorted fruits and nuts from Cranberry, but I’m on the way home. On the way home with a good supply of editing commissions for the business too, as it happens. Now that’s a kind of satiety I can really truly get behind. More than anything, the contentment of home is quite enough to fill me up for a while.

There will of course be no weigh-in this week – Next time will be 16^th, prior to another two-day stint in the Smoke. Deep, deep joy…