Something For The Weekend

Fuck you, cold weather!

Not because you stop me from exercising - clearly, you don't, this is...what, day eleven of this grand and glorious enterprise, during which, for the most part, I've hauled my gigunda-ass out the door and gone walking. No, fuck you, cold weather for the clothing.
It's cold, and while I might look like Brian Blessed's flabbier cousin, I'm a Grade A wuss-ass with diabetic feet, meaning I get cold sometimes even when people are disrobing and fanning themselves. In this kind of weather, fucking forget about it, I'm the shivering hair dumpling in the corner under a pile of blankets, shaking its doughy little fist at the Ice Giants and telling them exactly where to go as I guzzle my extra hot, wet skinny decaff sugar-free caramel misto. Venti, baby, because I need it!

But here's the thing. If it were just a battle between me and the wintry elements, I'd have this shit down. It hasn't gone unnoticed by people who actually know me that I have the body of a polar bear - covered in blubber with a thick coat of hair over top (everywhere except my head, thank you gods of never-getting-laid-again-ever!). So in some respects, despite the wuss-assery, the winter is my playground. I mean, I'm not about to break out my claws and display my astonishing ice-skating prowess, because - get the catch that is me - I have weak ankles, and have broken many bones south of the equator, down Mexico way. What's more, I've always had the balance of a penguin on a butter-strewn barrel, and have subsequently sustained what my specialist described as 'a severe insult to the organ of balance,' so ice skating, not my thing, but the winter, generally, more my playground than the summer, which serves mostly to render me down into bacon and lard.

But it's never just a battle between me and the elements. It's a battle between me, the elements and other people's reactions to the elements. I dress for winter when I go out - which today, when forcing a little over 8,000 steps into my day, had me walk down to town to collect my meds. And then, I had the bright idea of going for a heair and beard cut.

This was long overdue - I did Christmas and New Year mostly looking like an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck alco-Santa, and have inexpertly hacked at the facial fur a couple of times with scissors, just so that I had a fighting shot of getting my Christmas dinner in the right hole.

But of course, it's cold.
That means a) I'm dressed like Nanook of the North, or like Ralphy from A Christmas Story when sent out to play. I can barely move my arms, I'm so wrapped and covered. And b) people in shops have got their heating on high, to ensure they themselves don't have to dress like Scott of the Antarctic going about their daily business.

This is a bad combination for a fat fuck going for a haircut. By the time the lady behind the counter told me to take a seat, cos someone would be with me imminently, my forehead was throbbing and pink and drenched in rivulets of sweat, made more emphatic by my knowing they were there and knowing the lady was about to touch my head and get slicked with my fat-fuck head-sweat and ohhhh gooooood.

And so she was. I used to make up some excuse or other - believe it or not, I actually tried to con a Turkish barber, relatively recently, that I'd been caught in a sudden rainstorm. He laughed, playing along, then took a quick look out of his window (entirely unbedecked with raindrops), and went back to shaving my head with a rather more gruff tugging motion.

Now I don't say anything. She know it's head-sweat, I know it's head-sweat, she's just trying to surreptitiously trim my overgrown nose-hairs without letting on she knows they're not part of my moustache, and were she to trot out the old barbers' trope and ask me if I needed 'something for the weekend' - a euphemism I almost hope will be lost on the Americans in my readership, I'd probably opt for a shotgun, to put an early end to this particular 'fat fuck in cold weather' nightmare of utter grimness.

Om the one hand, I don't think she charged me anywhere near enough, at £9.50. On the other hand, neither did she get the moustache-trim right, so I suppose all's fair in money-making and ickness.

Still, far from acknowledging my own part in this mental melodrama, and realising if I weren't quite so fat, it wouldn't be quite such an issue, I'm going to turn the anger outward and say, as I did when I began, fuck you, cold weather! Fuck you, Jack Frost. Fuck you, in fact, winter, for the dastardly games of hot and cold you play.

Sigh. Right - 8,000 steps later, time to get on with the day. I'm still having a little trouble with post-Christmas day-recognition - which is what happens when you go back to work on the third of January, then take the fiftth and half of the sixth off, and then it happens to be the weekend. But as far as I can tell, today's Saturday. Three days to the next weigh-in. There will be an 18 in my near future, dammit.