The Surprise Benificence

Ha. Well, OK.

Wasn't expecting that.

Have done precisely buggerall to deserve that.

Down today to 17st 8.25.

There's no really plausible explanation for that, as I seem to be building a hibernation nest around myself. Sometimes, I guess, the universe just likes a tosser. Not often. Certainly not often enough to depend on. But occasionally, it throws you a bone and allows you to throw victorious V-signs at the Nazi Scales. Honestly, as weeks go, this has been another stupid one, with occasional bits of sense flung into the abyss of fried breakfasts and Valentine's Day gorgeousness and suchlike.

Blood's been haywire this week - the morning after Valentine's Day it was up to 16.0 - which is basically two people's ideal blood sugar, coursing around one system. #BadTony

But otherwise, if this blog isn't to deteriorate again into just a series of posts of what I should do, what I intend to do, and what I didn't do again because Reasons, there's not an enormous amount to report from this week. Stayed indoors a great deal, edited a great deal, ate a faaaairly great deal. So no - no real idea how I'm even down at all on last week.

Thanks, Universe!

I supppose the motivating point from all this is similar to what it was last week. If I WERE to get my shit together, knuckle down, eat more sensibly and maybe, just maybe, move my ass a little this week, I technically could break a barrier - could go beneath 17st 7, into the lower half of the 17s, which would feel like disproportionate success, and would also, not for nothing, deal with the blood issues.

Yeah - that's motivating as all get-out, and I knew that this morning after I got off the Nazi Scales. Which didn't, somehow, stop me having chips for lunch.

Yes, absolutely, sometimes I need beating upside the head.

Onward though - with a little wink from the universe - hopefully to a more sensible week and even better, less fluke-based and therefore more rational results next week.

The Belt Of Potential And The Pizza Stupidity

Been an interesting week.

On the one hand, I decided, round about the middle of last week, to dress up. To eschew my usual slothery in clothing and get back into trousers with all the complexities of the 21st century - zips and a button and suchlike madness.

All very well, but the pair into which I got were what I euphemistically describe as my 'comfy trousers.' Which is to say, 'big trousers.'

To give you some idea how long it's been since I last swanned around in them, I put them on, went out of my front door, annnd immediately had to grab at them to pull them up. Step, step, step - GRAB. Rearrange, seemingly firmly in place. Step, step, step, SLIP- GRAB!

So, I finally had to acknowledge to d (who loves nothing better than to try and get me into belts, despite my fundamental loathing of such masochistic items) that I needed a belt to stop myself from becoming a local scandal. A belt was procured and I slid it round myself.

One of the reasons I hate belts is that I'm always scared of the humiliation when they turn out to be human-sized, and do not go around the girth of me.

This off-the-shelf belt was very nearly that sort of belt. But importantly, not quite. I could just manage to pull it tight and fasten it on the last possible notch. As such, it became not a humiliation, but a challenge. We've started on the last possible notch. It will be another marker of progress as I become able to fasten it on tighter and tighter notches, and I daresay around entirely different trousers. A marker of progress, then, that doesn't rely on the Nazi Scales for its veracity.

All was going well. On one unofficial weigh-in this week, I saw a 17 in the 'Stones' column.
However, late last week I was stricken with a lurgi which saw my head become a bowl of snot and my chest a cheese-grater slathered in mucus. That rather knocked my walking schedule on the head, and replaced it with a lie in bed, whimpering, coughing and sleeping schedule, which affected my calorific-exercise balance more than somewhat.

Nevertheless, things were still going well - I've had blood sugar results in the 7s and 7s this week, which has been positive.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I decided I could risk having a carb-heavy early dinner (round about 4.30pm). Had myself a pizza.

Have yet to...erm...shall we say get rid of the remnants of that pizza, some 21 hours on.

Which is why this morning's weigh-in - one with which I sought to argue for some hours! - puts me at:
18st 0.25.

Technically of course, this is highly positive and worth a yippedee doo-dah - it's a loss of two pounds, which is the 'right' amount to lose, medically speaking, in the space of a week. It's really only the fact that I saw a 17 earlier in the week, and the inherent understanding that one productive half-hour in the bathroom would see me over the 18 stone border, that makes it irritating to still be officially trapped on this side.

But there we are. Week 1, 2 pounds. Keeping to the schedule, next week I'll be well and truly into the 17s, rather than just barely so.

Having slept through the night for the first time in half a week, I feel better and stronger and all that happy Six Million Dollar Man crap today, even though the lurgi is still there on my chest. So the likelihood is that tomorrow I get back to the walking again, and on we go, pushing on down, two pounds and perhaps fewer stupid pizza moments at a time.

The Hunger Games

Hello again - apologies, rather fell out of the blogosphere over the weekend.

Everything seems to feel different on the weekend, even though technically, working for myself, there's little to really mark one day out from another, or one block of two days out from any other.

And to be fair, there was little that was actually different about the weekend - walked every day, minimum carb, etc.

I suppose the only thing that really felt different was hunger.

So far, since Tuesday, I haven't really felt hunger per se. I've had automatic proddings to say 'Ooh, you could eat now,' or 'Ooh, you should eat now, but nothing that would really class as hunger until this weekend. And only then at night - eating a main meal relatively early in the evening has left me with urges to eat something later. Naturally - or at least naturally for me - those thoughts have turned to sweetness and carbohydrate. The idea of toast and jam, or a big bowl of cereal, played over my brain on each of the two nights of the weekend, round about 9.30-10pm.

This wasn't real hunger of course, just a sharper kind of whiny craving. Waah, I'm doing all this good stuff, reward me! It's absurd, and it's the pampered cry of the overfed, overindulged inner child who shoves every available thing down my throat, just to quell that odd sort of panic that rises at anything less than feeling entirely full.

It's funny, really - hunger seems to be a primal fear in the west. If you get anywhere close to it, anywher less than replete, there are triggers: eat more, eat heavy, eat sweet. Store up anything inside that keeps that absurd-in-this-situation fear at bay.

The thing with Disappearing is that the arrival of that kind of hunger-like craving, as opposed to want-like craving is a potential pitfall. It's like looking into the eyes of your toddler and telling them no. Turning your back on a whining puppy. That's how it feels to me - denying an innocent, who depends on me for their happiness, the very thing they require for that happiness.

Of course, the inner me is ludicrously overpampered, overindulged, to the extent that while it is quite happy to keep munching, keep taking in all the foods it likes and loves, the things that make it happy, the outer me is suffering, staggering under the weight of the wide-eyed inner toddler.

So - sternness has to be the order of the day if you want to Disappear. The inner you will whine. It will cry. It will argue like every righteous wronged child in the world that it's not FAIR.

At which point, you have to put it on the inner naughty step - drink water, go to bed if that's an option, do something else entirely if not. distraction, diversion, every trick you have at your disposal is needed to parent the little sod and not give in to its whining.

So far, so good - didn't cave this weekend. Things will of course get much, much harder than this.

Tomorrow, we weigh in. I genuinely have very little idea of how the first week has gone. I'm only really looking for the 2 pound loss that's supposed to be healthy, even though usually, you get a bump in the first two weeks as you lose water-weight before your system really kicks in and realises you're serious.

Now then - to the walking path!

The Obsessive Compulsive Potential - Part 2: 12/1/17

Hello folks - been absent for a couple of days, but the blog entries have written themselves on the inside of my skull, so just catching up now.

When last we saw our Disappearing Man, he'd been brought a mug of hot chocolate, had a bizarre internal dialogue between Fat-Self and Disappeaing-Self and determined not to worry about it.

The thing is, that very night, while out on a walk and stopping in to what is now a familiar gas station, the voices of temptation actually WERE much more potent than I'd expected. 'Oh go onnnn,' whispered a chunky Kit Kat from the shelves. 'You might as well, you've got a taste for it now. Chocolatey goodnesssss...'

If you've never imagined a chunky Kit Kat as the serpent in the Garden of Evil, you probably won't understand the allure of really pretty shitty, ethically dubious chocolate. That's something non-Disappearers never seem to quite understand. They think when you have cravings for illicit stuff, it's probably for the really good quality stuff. And to be fair, sometimes it is. But I've had many a long dark night of the soul pondering the attractions of really quite ghastly chocolate, or carbohydrate, or whatever. It's equivalent, really, to thinking an alcoholic must get champagne cravings, or a junkie can only really really want the finest Peruvian cocaine, snorted out of a hooker's ass-crack.
Nono, our pleasures are, for the most part, mundane and pedestrian, but it's precisely that mundanity that forges links in our synapses and makes us WANT them.

Probably needless to say, but I eschewed the cheap seductive delights of the chunky Kit Kat from Hell. I eschewed the malty deliciousness of the slab of Maltesers chocolate too (again, AS chocolate, a shockingly shitty invention, the slab of Malteser, but still, sometimes, you just want to ram one down your throat until you choke. (I once had quite a disgusting moment on a railway platform in the north of England with a couple of 'Malteaster' bunnies. We don't speak about it. No really, leave it alone...)).

Nevertheless, it's interesting, to me at least, that the idea that I might have transgressed one of my self-imposed and clearly whacko rules about what's verboten led me to feel the temptation to throw myself heartily off the Disappearing wagon and into a pile of shitty chocolate. Still - let's see what happens next.

The Madness of Disappearing Mathematics

Arrrrrrgh!

Hoping to see an 18, did I say?

This morning, in the positively chilly air that swpet majestically through our bathroom on its way to somewhere less scary, I weighed in, pre-bathroom (if you take my meaning), at 19st 1.5.

I waited.

And waited.

And peed. And weighed in again, just before lunchtime. Having pulled on a pair of heavy socks as protection against the cold, I then weighed in at 19st 2.25!

I discarded the socks, swearing calumny and a world of evils on their woolen soles. 19st 0.75.

Three-quarters of a pound away from the border, still 'pre-bathroom.' That, gentle observers of this Disappearing madness, is what I'm recording as my official weigh-in weight on this first weekly weigh-in. Down 6.75 pounds this week, still presumably burning up the excess stored water in my system.

Now let's be clear - this is pretty damn good. There's plenty to celebrate in this - it means since I began my week of 'pre-Disappearing' having seen a result of 20 stone, I've lost 13.25 pounds, probably all of it stored as excess water. But let's also be clear about the Disappearing mindset. This is one frustrating-as-hell result. One pound would have put me in the 18s, which, even if it's by the tiniest squeak, you need to believe me, feels a whole hell of a lot different to being in the 20s. As far as the difference is concerned, you might as well be talking centuries as stones.

And here's the extra-sepecially galling thing. I then had lunch, and for that lunch I had pizza. really quite a lot of pizza - there being no better time to have a heavy-ass day than post-weigh-in on a Tuesday, and there also at the moment being a shitload of really tasty homemade pizza left in our house.

So - much nomming of the pizza. Even before I was done, the urge to be 'post-bathroom' was upon me, and once I'd finished the really rather quite a lot of pizza, I fulfilled the urge in a rather prodigious manner. And yes, I weighed again.

Because I'm a monomaniacal nightmare, that's why.

After the enormo-pizza lunch, and the prodigious purge, I evened out at 19st 2.

Now, you're probably beginning to get a sense for the nature of my insanity, so it won't come as too much of a surprise to you to learn that as this aftenoon wears on, I'm inwardly bemoaning the fact that I didn't weigh the pizza before I ate it, so that I could claim with more legitimacy than hope that 'really' (and please not the absurdity of that 'really'), I'm under the 19 stone mark. I'm not of course, the official number today is 19st 0.75, but yes, everything in me (with the possible exception of the pizza) wants to claim this landmark. This is the madness of Disappearing Mathematics.

At some point, prrrrobably quite soon, I shall be needing to be hit on the head with something fairly heavy to break me out of this cycle of insane addition and subtraction. But for now, people tell me there are other important things to do besides worry about the weight of pizza versus the weight of really-not-pizza-anymore.

They're wrong of course, but I've found they go away faster if you smile and nod and pretend to agree with them.

So this is me, smiling and nodding and pretending to agree with them, and not obsessing at all about the calculable weight of cooked dough...

The Burned-Bank

Ow.

Ow.

Did I mention, ow?

The feet were fine last night, then I jumped in the shower, and the deadened areas came screaming back to life. If I've learned one thing over five years of succeeding and failing at this Disappearing lark, it's that if you push things too far too fast, you end up blistered or injured and falling back simply due to an inability to keep up the exercise.

Now this morning, I had an appointment at the hospital. Got a cab up, tipped a coffee over myself, had an audiology test (mostly involving squeezing the skull and pressing buttong), and got discharged. Then decided it was important to get steps into the day, and walked home.

The hospital's not that far, really, from the town centre. I appear to have had a brainstorm, going a different way to normal, ending up wandering around a houseing estate called Cefn Coed, and ultimately, walking 3 km. By this point in the day, I've done over 4 km, or two miles and a stretch. That's not very far. I've also had a takeaway tonight - Indian, chunks of meat in a relatively dry sauce, and a supposedly 'healthy' roti bread. Also, almost inadvertantly, a chapati. So, perhaps a little bread-heavy.

So - in an attempt to a) give myself an alternative for more inclement days, and b) focus the exercise in terms of time, because as I write this it's gone 8pm and I don't have two hours, I'm about to jump back on the bike and sweat my face off.

Suffice it to say, this morning, the Nazi Scales were happy with me. For two days of active Disappearing, the 'first-week water' was Disappearing reasonably quickly. What they'll think of me after a day with less walking and more bread is anyone's guess. But I'm facing forward and adding calories to the 'burned bank' - the collective of calories burned in activity - against which the day's food intake has to be set. So who knows? All I can do is push, and stay committed.

(Adopts fighting stance). Grrrrrr. To the burned-bank, Disappearing Man!

The Tale of the Disappearing Man, Aspiration and Reality

Once upon a time, there lived a Disappearing Man, and he was strange.

The strange thing about him was he was never sure, from one morning to the next, from one moment to the next, where exactly it was that he lived.

Most mornings, he thought he woke up in a town called Aspiration.
Aspiration was a lovely place to wake up in - it had soft beds, comfy pillows, a friendly bear or two, and even a Mrs Disappearing, whose restless legs were like a friendly alarm clock to get him out of bed.

The Disappearing Man liked living in Aspiration. He had fun, and people paid him to do things that came naturally, like Sitting Down. He was extremely good at Sitting Down, so people paid him nicely to do it, and other people would stop as they rushed by on their way somewhere, just to admire his impressive Sitting Down technique. It was a happy place, with surprisingly few douchebags, because, when he wasn't Sitting Down, the Disappearing Man enjoyed nothing better than clipping a few douchebags round the ear and asking them kindly but firmly not to be douchebags any more, and so they weren't.

The best thing about Aspiration - aside from Mrs Disappearing, and the pillows, was that no matter what the Disappearing Man ate, he never seemed to put on weight. He ate, and he Sat Down, and still he Disappeared. And all was well in Aspiration.

Occasionally though, and without warning, the Disappearing Man would find he wasn't in Aspiration any more, but Reality.

Reality was very much like Aspiration, so at first he hardly noticed the difference. True, there were more douchebags there, but he reasoned that he'd get around to clipping them round the ear as soon as he was done with this important bit of Sitting Down he had to be getting on with.

But Reality, it turned out, was a very long way away from Aspiration, adn they did things differently there. And when the Disappearing Man did his Sitting Down, no-one stopped to admire his technique. They ran about in shorts and told him to 'feel the burn' or else he would most surely turn into a big block of lard with tiny squat arms and legs, so that the only thing he could do was Sit Down.

The Disappearing Man scoffed, and Sat, and ate a little more. And a little more after that.
And when he went home to his house in what he thought was Aspiration, but was actually Reality, Mrs Disappearing looked at him sideways, which it turned out was not a good way to look at him at all.

"I say, my dear, you'll be getting your arse on that there exercise bicycle then, will you?" she asked. And the Disappearing Man said that if it was all the same to her, he had quite a bit of important Sitting Down to do, and if there was a bit of cake going spare, that would be just the thing to tide him over till suppertime.
"Arse, bicycle, now. Dear," she said, explaining that while she herself cared naught if he were as big as a house, that he would take it much unkindly when the children came to throw things at him and call him a Big Fat Bastard, as children in Reality were wont to do.

"Oh," said the Disappearing Man sadly as he climbed the stairs to his fate. "I thought this was Aspiration."
"No dear," Mrs Disappearing corrected him. "You're awake now."

14th February - The Valentine Conundrum

Part of the point about Disappearing is shifting your mind from a state in which you're doing something you don't want to do to a state in which you're doing something you either do want to do it, or you just do it because it's what you do.

Holidays are legendarily tricky as far as that's concerned, because the messages you get from everywhere, from every societal norm there is, are all geared towards consumption. It's one of those scattergun scenarios where the social convention assumes that every other day of the year, you're a sensible person, despite for the most part a staggering absence of evidence of any such thing. Food that's technically unwise for Disappearers is also imbued in our culture with all kinds of messages of its own - Thanksgiving food equals plenty and togetherness. Christmas food equals...well, plenty, togetherness and screw it, we have January to cope with soon enough. Valentine's Day of course equates sweetness with love.

All of which is something of a lazy introduction to the idea that this year, d and I made each other our Valentine's gifts. Because d has mad wicked skills as a baker, she made me some cake. And it was glorious, thankyouverymuch, and I enjoyed every minute and every mouthful of it.

The point is not "Waaah, I had caaaaake!" Cake is good. We love cake. Especially cake as a representation of time and effort and skill and love. We are entirely pro-cake.

The point is that I've been that guy this week - the guy who's by no means a sensible person the rest of the time. Seem to have developed a fetish for roasted cashew nuts this week, and not just a passing handful of the beautiful salty bastards. Nono - a bagful. At a time. Most days of the week.
This means, effectively, I'm too stupid to eat love-cake this week.

What's undoubtedly more is that I've fallen into that state of deadline panic where I can take time to do all the fun things, like going to see Deadpool twice in one day (which, as a way of spending some time, by the way, I heartily recommend), but when it comes to getting on the bike, I've been all "Noooo, don't have time - have a deadline to meet!"
So - yeah, too stupid for love-cake. But let's not get maudlin about it. There will be consequences. They will be dire. And we pick ourselves the hell back up and Disappear again.

6th February - The Caterpillar Paradigm

I rarely take a day off from anything – the day-job, the editing, the geek writing, the Disappearing. When I do, though, I take them right the hell off and in another county.

Today, I took a look out the window at the stormy, pissing-down weather and thought a handful of single-syllable words: “Sod that for a lark,” more or less covers it.

d had a day off too, and while we thought about doing any number of things – new coffee shop, breakfast out, movies – in the end, we decided on the warmer, cuddlier option of sitting, snuggling on the couch for hours long enough to get ass-carbuncles, watching recorded TV, Netflixing and chilling. 

Lunch was a small pizza and chicken strips. Dinner was curry and rice. Biking was contemplated, annnnd then frankly not done. This makes actually the second or third night in a row where I’ve done precisely nothing in terms of exercise, and overall, a day containing both pizza and rice is massively unwise. Essentially, today, I emulated The Very Hungry Caterpillar – sitting extremely still in a duvet-cocoon, occasionally pouring food into my face.

Of course the trouble with the Caterpillar Paradigm is that rather than turning into a butterfly, one turns rather more into a slug if one follows it too often or too assiduously. Tomorrow needs to be significantly different. Am I likely to have made progress in my Disappearing come Tuesday? Not on the basis of today, or any recent days. Am I likely to in fact have slipped back some? Yes, absolutely.

It's incredibly easy, contemplating this, to say “Fuck it!” and simply eat what we like. I’m not going to do that. Tomorrow needs to be a return to Disappearing form, before a couple of days of busy ass-sitting turns into a slippery slope to Reappearing.

The Myth of Captain Healthy

While I'm thinking of it, the other reason not to weigh every goddamn day or chance you get is that, in case you missed this, scales are Nazi bastards, and they'll try and upset you and make you reach for your "Fuck it all, I'm leaving home!" treat of choice.

Last night, d and I were in Cardiff, and, as you do, and as is one of the great pleasures of liking any one or number of human beings more than the general mirthless, remorseless crowd of fuckwits, dickheads and douchebags that make up the human race, we had a meal together, sharing time, exchanging days and breaking bread. Breaking literal bread in my case, as we ended up in an Italian place that we've always walked by to get somewhere else, every time saying "Y'know, we really should try that place some day. Anyway..."

So last night, we said "Y'know, we really should try that place some day. Anyway...", walked on, discovered that the place we were heading for was about as attractive as a bullfrog on a blind date, and doubled back to finally cross the Italian off our List of Places To Eat At Before We Die.

It was...good. Not great, but good. Not fine dining, certainly, but fine if you found yourself in a particular part of Cardiff and seized with a sudden dangerously low blood-carb content. I had a brushcetta starter piled with tomatoes and raw onions - yeah, technically it was date night, but what you have to understnad is it was eleven year married date night. d had meatballs that were OK, but with which, should the need have arisen, you could at least have taken out the eyes of your first few attackers, come the zombie apocalypse. She added a side of garlic spinach, because, as I say, this was an eleven year married date night, dammit. For main, she went lasagne, and I went penne amatriciana - pasta, following bread, I know, sue me.

She went chocolate cake for dessert. I went smiling and a decaff latte.

All was good and groovy, except that in the aftermath of the meal, d wasn't well. Something had disagreed with her, and it wanted out any which way it could. I'm not sure a swaying bus ride home in the freezing cold especially helped either, but it was that or stand around for half an hour as her spine turned to one of Elsa's ice sculptures from Frozen. So we swayed.

Me - all I can tell you is that something must really have agreed with me, because 24 hours later, I still contain absolutely all of a bruschetta starter piled with tomatoes and raw onions, and a plateful of penne amatriciana.

Which is a real bastard if you're weighing every day, because then you wake up the morning after an official weigh-in, and weigh, and want to kill yourself when you see two weeks of pedalling run away yelling  "Fuck you, Disappearing Boy!" and throwing you V's and one-fingered salutes, giggling as it goes. I'm not getting on the scales tonight because something seems to be knitting itself a raft or a trap door in my colon and to have determined it wants a never-ending lock-in.

All I can do is continue as normal, get some dinner, get some biking done, try to get some sleep and move the hell along.

On the upside, I had my annual diabetic review today, after which you can kiss my ass and call me Captain Healthy. They bled me last week, and apparently, all is groovy. I have an HBA1C level of 54.

Impressed? Yeah, I didn't have a clue. "All good," said the nurse. Having just checked online, I can tell you the HBA1C is a measure of glycated haemoglobin - different from blood sugar in some...erm...crucial way, apparently. Now, the online stats say you should aim for an HBA1C of 48 or below, unless you've been advised otherwise - which to my nowledge, I haven't. So either my diabetic nurse knows more about my condition than she's ever bothered to let on, and I fall into the "below 59 is fine" category (which does appear to exist), or it was after 5PM when she saw me and she just couldn't give a shit any more. Pretty much like me in my current predicament.

Annnnnyhow. All good is what she told me, so all good is what I'm going with for now. The more I lose, the more the system is likely to come under better regulation, and the more optimal my HBA1C will be.

So, with d set to finish work just two hours from now, I need to get my clogged ass up and get some dinner and biking done. Catch you later, Disappearers all!

28 January - The Bread Head

Bread, so they tell me, is appallingly bad for you.

Never mind that it’s been the staff of life since before the Roman Empire was the Roman Empire – things have changed with our lifestyle, meaning bread is the enemy. It stays around too long in the system, is apparently quite hard to digest, and is essentially just a carb-bomb waiting to explode in your system and turn you into The Blob.

Of all things, though, the first time I did this, bread was the hardest thing to cut down or give up. And why?

Because the little bastard’s so gorgeously scrummy, that’s why. So diverse, so multi-faceted, so much a meal in and of itself, there’s practically no limit to the invention, the wonder and the sheer, unbridled joy that bread can bring. Without bread, there’s no pizza, which pretty much invalidates all the anti-bread rhetoric in the world before we even begin. Then there’s the staggering pleasure of breaking a fresh loaf open. The smell, the texture, the job it does as a delivery device for all manner of other gorgeous things. No pizza, no sandwiches. How much worse does life become at the very contemplation of a world like that. No toast – no hot buttered toast. Absolutely no point to any soup in the world. And so very much on.

I mention this because bread remains a staple part of my diet, though I’ve been forced by the good if rather wretched sense of it to cut down to two slices with a can of soup – you’ll have noticed that’s become something of a standard lunch for me.

It was today – cream of tomato soup, two slices of bread, toasted.

Which in itself, is a Disappearing crime I’m happy to commit right now. There’ll come a time when I have to countenance a world with less bread in it, but damned if that time is yet.

I mention all this because neither d nor I really felt like the dinner of poverty and leftovers that was our lot this evening on the night before payday.

‘Y’know what I could really go for?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Grilled cheese and tomato soup.’

‘I’m so down with that it’s not even funny,’ I told her. So – more cream of tomato soup, and the classic ‘grilled cheese’ was consumed. Or ‘scranned’ as my Scottish pal Gregor would have it. Great word, ‘scranned’ – seems to denote a wordless urgency with which any Disappearer is probably familiar.

To the non-American, a ‘grilled cheese’ is by no means just grilled cheese. That would be too simple by some considerable distance. Remember, it’s food invented by Americans, a people who accept insane complication as a matter of daily life, who add tax to the price of things at the checkout, and who add mathematics to rugby, call it football and then at least pretend to both understand and enjoy it.

Nor, to the Brits, is it simply ‘cheese on toast.’ Ohhh to the mighty fuck-no. It’s essentially what Americans think of as French Toast (indicating a not entirely inaccurate assessment of the French capacity for luxury), and which Brits tend to describe with the bluntness of purpose of its more northern inhabitants as ‘Fried Bread.’ Only with gooey cheese in the middle of a Fried Bread sandwich, because, fuck, when you’ve fried a couple of pieces of good bread in butter, you need that extra gooey fat layer to really make something, you know?

It is, quite simply, a food too good to be of earthly design. In fact it’s well known in Clever People Circles that when the Greeks claimed the food of the Olympian gods was ambrosia and nectar, what they actually meant  was Bread and Cheese (This may not in fact be entirely true). The thing about which is, allied to a cup of cream of tomato soup (I also have no idea where this pairing was first discovered to be the source of all wonder and wisdom, I simply know that it is), you can scran a hell of a lot of it before you even know your mouth has been moving.

I’m fairly sure I downed four pieces of butter-soaked, cheese-welded bread with what turned out to be a cup and a half of soup, before looking up. Added to the two at lunchtime, that’s a pretty damn hefty bread day, even for me.

I compounded the issue, such as it was, by determinedly not biking. I mentioned having days off, and while I didn’t exactly decide not to do it, I did end up, somehow, with it being later in the day than was feasible, if I actually wanted to exchange any civilised words with my wife, and so the day became a no-exercise day. Saying which, I had done about 450 calories of walking by the end of the day, so it wasn’t as though I’d been entirely sluglike and slothful. Just probably, in all honesty, not energetic enough for a six-slicer.

The point is, I’m not claiming I was led astray, or that my grand plans were dashed by time or any such thing. You can certainly do that sort of thing when you’re Disappearing. No-one’s going to stop you, and no-one’s going to disagree. The point is it doesn’t actually do you any good to dwell on it, either. You did a thing, what will be will be, and you move on, resolving to have better days coming.

Will the day of the six slicer hurt me come Tuesday? Who knows? There’s a long way between now and then. The challenge is not to let that sort of day become tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. That’s why official weigh-ins are only once a week – if you took every morning’s weigh-in as official, you’d drive yourself stark raving mad before the week was out.

Onward, to better, less tasty days!