Winky

So – hoorah. Started pre-Disappearing today. For the uninitiated, pre-Disappearing is what happens before the first official weigh-in, which given that d made a mercy dash to a local hardware store this afternoon, will now be tomorrow. Pre-Disappearing is nothing terribly special, it’s just not doing the things I used to do, and doing some new things instead. 

Was going to be up in time to growl at larks on the wing and flick snails off the thorn and all that, but…what can I tell you, I live at the seaside now, and that seems to bring a lethargy with it that allows larks and snails to race about the place unimpeded. To be fair, I was up at 6…something-or-other to enjoy that delightful middle-aged need to pee in the night, but it was still pitch black outside at that time, because  it’s November and the sun’s having none of it either. So, I turned over, listened to an episode of Survivors (a bleak audio drama about the world after a pandemic plague wipes out more than 90 per cent of us – check it out, it’s from bigfinish.com, and it’s excellent), and then, when d woke up, all smiles and bounciness and greeting the day, I felt the need to humph, turn over and snore. Cos I’m just Mr Personality like that.

So – got a post-lark-and-snail start on the day, but, determined to make it at least a Disappearing start, got dressed and naffed officially off on the first walk of the week. Nothing dramatic, nothing overly taxing, just a slowish walk from Saundersfoot to Wiseman’s Bridge and back, but my phone (Oracle of All Things as it is), tells me that amounts to 7691 steps, 5.89 km (with a twiddly uphill bit at the end), and a somewhat cracking 543 calories burned – which given that it felt like more or less tokenism, I’m happy to take before breakfast. It only rained torrentially down on me twice during the walk too, so that was a result, and something else happened along the way.  

You know how, if you’ve been desperate to pee, and worried about making it home in time, you reach your bathroom, finally, blessedly, and it’s like all the pressing concerns of the world condense into one thought – that you’ve made it, and you’re alright – and as you pee, you smile because something that was in doubt has been safely achieved, and for those moments, you don’t care about anything else in the world?

It was like that, only less urinocentric. On the way back from Wiseman’s Bridge, I felt the sudden need to look out to sea, and did, and it was like crossing the point of no return, only for a different kind of relief. I breathed deeply in, and slowly out, and the stress of the last year, of trying to sell our flat, and having buyer after buyer frustrate us, of being made redundant right at the point when we were hoping to start looking at mortgages, of the last undotted i’s and the last uncrossed t’s that meant further and further delay as the money ran out and we were flung upon the kindness not of strangers but of friends and family, all shuddered out of me on that out-breath, and the smile that grew on my face probably disturbed the ever-living fuck out of an elderly couple coming the other way with the perverse determination to walk a Dachshund.

So, in stress, if not in actual blubber, I feel lighter today.

Then, of course, the deep fat fryer arrived, like the Fuck-You of the Gods.

I’m joking, really – I knew it was coming. d has phases of learning and re-practice where she feels the call of the culinary deities upon her shoulders, which is why, for instance, she makes kickass bread, and fudge and the like. When the money from the flat came through, her single indulgence was to get a deep fat fryer. It’s not that she’s about to set herself up in competition with the many exquisite fish fry restaurants in the area – honest. It’s more that there are things called cannolis, and these other things called doughnuts, and so there’s a need for deep domestic fat.

Not, now, of course, for me, but in general these things are needed, and so now, we have one. I’m calling it Winky…or possibly, for reasons no-one will understand, P’diddle, at least until its presence becomes a giant mocking outrage in my grease-starved life, which is at least a little down the line. And at which point, I’ll probably start calling it ‘Pieces of Winky.’

Popped into the local Tesco Express on the way home, and the attitude adjustment hit me. ‘Ooh, chocolate biscuits,’ I thought. ‘Fuck that, fool, the chocolate bars are right here,’ said a different, rather more Mr T part of my brain. Then in floated the Inner Hippy. ‘We don’t do that any more,’ he said, in precisely the tone of voice most likely to get the shit kicked out of him. The thing is of course, in my recently post-stress relief, he was easy to listen to. Things will by no means always be that way, but today at least, in what I like to think of as the real battle of Man Versus Food…Man won.

Man came home with a box of Weetabix in fact, for easier, more measurable breakfast cerealing than Rice Krispies allow. To show willing though, I downsized the size of my Krispie bowl this morning. And didn’t add a base layer of cookies. And didn’t ‘mount’ the bowl with double cream and sugar, so as to get that ‘Executive Rice Krispy Treat’ coagulation going on.

No – really. That’s been my breakfast, and occasionally lunch, for weeks now. You want lessons on force feeding, come to Papa.

Lunch was going to be beans on toast, but as it happened, d grew increasingly busy with an editing client on the phone, and lunch became dinner prep. I’ve just eaten two home-made cheeseburgers – as in patties made from scratch, grated cheese, bought buns, along with two small but gorgeous potato cakes, which were technically shallow fried, and so which, gorgeous as they were, I won’t be having again for a while. And some beans, left over from the beans on toast idea.

And that’s me done. When I finish and post this – broadband is still non-existent here in our new place, and the wifi’s ropy at best – I’m going to jump on the exercise bike and pedal for at least half an hour, so as to begin reintroducing my body and my brain to the idea that this is a thing it does now. That’s the game for now, I think – reconditioning. No chocolate biscuits, but a short walk and a short biking session each day, so the brain and the body start to build new patterns of expectation.

Thankfully, as I say, entirely due to a mercy dash from d, there will be the first weigh-in tomorrow morning, which is when the Disappearing starts in earnest.

The deep fat fryer may be winking at me, but tonight at least, I have a date with a bike.

Disappearing Tip #1: Retrain your brain.

Disappearing Tip #2: Yes, this will suck.

Disappearing Tip #3: It’s supposed to suck. Get through it, and eventually, it will feel like normality. This is a good thing. Honest.