The Big Stick

Anyone got a big stick I could borrow?

The plan for last night was to get some dinner inside me, get on the bike and go collect d from work.

In the event I got some dinner inside me....and went to collect d from work. The flaw there, really, is that while my mind is as 21st century and progressive as you like, my body appears to still be a cack-handed 1970s unreconstructed dickhead, who stopped off in student digs along the way to blow up a few cookers.

Yes, really. At least two cookers exploded while I was using them. With a blithe self-regard that I like to think is charming, I succeed in not taking that personally, or indeed seeing it as any kind of message from the cookers of the world to stay the fuck away from them at all costs.

That means that while in the reality of the world, my none-too-ambitious dinner - chicken, brussell sprouts, rice - should have taken a maximum of 25 minutes to cook, and at most the same again to eat, leaving me plenty of time to jump on the bike and pedal, in reality, our kitchen looked like something out of a Buster Keaton movie during the more than forty minutes it took me to persuade the food to become...well, food, really. The kicker of which is that while I cooked two pieces of chicken, I ended up throwing one away, being both full and calorifically conscious.

So that's at least two nights, possibly longer, when I've done no biking. This could eeeeeeasily become a pattern - I have plenty of work to do that whispers seductively to me that sitting on my ass and getting it done is far more important than 'wasting' an hour on the bike, plus showering time, plus yadda yadda yadda.

Which is why I need a big stick. Made of, y'know, willpower and beatings.

Sigh. Tonight, goddammit, there will be biking.

Biking.

Right...

The Lone Potato Gambit

Garfield - essentially me with more fur.

Another Sunday, another 'Proper Dinner' - though this time at a local buffet that we found a handful of weeks ago, rather than with my mother and her insane Valleys generosity. Left to our own devices, both d and I chose to build a dinner that was mostly vegetables and meat, feeling less bloated as a result and hopefully not scuppering this week's Disappearing, as I like to delude myself that Sunday dinner did (in isolation, as I did nothing nothing nothing else wrong whatsoever, na-uh) last week.

In fact, I ended up having just carrots, peas, brocolli and meat with gravy, and two lonely potatoes. Then, halfway through, for some unknown reason, I handed one off to d's plate - where it sat equally ignored. Flipping my natural carbophile instincts on their head, I left the potato till the end, and eventually couldn't be bothered to be as full as I'd have been if I'd eaten it. So it remained, a lone, forgotten potato, a testament to my instincts that say a meal's not a meal without carb, and the new behaviour with which I'm trying to replace them, that say it has to be.

No walking round the local lake today, but this afternoon I did a session as Mr Shifter - Ma is moving, some time later this year, in to a new bungalow (I'd like to think it's only my mother who can buy a bungalow for its simplicity annnnnd then decide she wants an upstairs), so there are boxes to fill and hike from one part of the three-storey house in which she currently lives to another, either for eventual transportation to the new place, transportation to a charity shop, or transportation to the local recycling centre.  So I did that for a while, then came home and did a half-hour of biking - as I say, it's a little odd, but at the moment, it's not willingness or energy that stops me biking more, it's time, which needs to be filled with other things.

Back to the early morning walking tomorrow though, as the Disappearing Ripples continue to surprise me.

I love carbs. In the immortal words of Garfield, I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like. And so far, while temptation has been very weak compared to normal, and indeed compared I'm sure to what it will become as this process goes on, it's been savoury carb-heavy dishes, rather than sweet ones, that have spoken to me and threatened to lure me from my resolve. Pizza seems to be a big thing at the moment, though I'm still not far enough into this thing for it to be of any consequence.

But that sad, lone potato gave me nothing but a shrug. I do realise that Disappearing messes with your brain chemistry, but right at this moment, I don't care if I ever eat another potato. It's just one of those things - you never know quite how a diet plan or a change of lifestyle is going to affect you,  and maybe I'll wake up tomorrow craving nothing but spuds all day long. But right now, this fels like a break-up with the world's most versatile and friendly tuber.

Let's see if that becomes a 'thing' or if I'm just talking out of my ass. And if it does become a thing, let's see what else is in store - never had the urge to swear off potatoes before, even at my most Disappearing crazy, so who knows. Another day, another Disappearing Ripple.

The Queen Regime

Disclaimer: Not my actual mother.

I was raised by four people - five if you count the Doctor from Doctor Who, but that's another story entirely.

My bio-dad had the constitution and the bloodline of a serious alcoholic - he could never stick at anything, but he was a great laugh, and for the price of a pint he'd do anything you asked him to - jump off a cliff - yes, really, and this was in the 70s, before suicidal stupidity was an extreme sport - climb up a flagpole, do a headstand on a pint glass. You name it, he'd do it, if it meant not paying for a round.

My mother was, and happily still is, five feet buggerall of demented, focused, Welsh Valleys Mother, who introduced herself to my then-fiancee (who was American and who grew up in a household headed by a second generation Italian American) with the words 'Hello love - now, don't you worry about us, we're just like the Mafia.'

When my bio-dad pulled one stunt too many (for context I always feel I should mention that the week of my birth, he quit his job and went on a massive bender, only arriving at the hospital as my mother was being wheeled down for an early-70s Caesarian. He was carrying a carrier bag of loose sherry trifle and singing Engelbert Humperdink songs at the top of his voice. Six weeks later, once my mother'd been released home, he pushed her through the glass in a 70s partition door and smashed every other bit of glass in the house, including my feeding bottles - class act, my bio-dad), we left him one night snoring on the couch and went to live with the third of my initial influences - my gran. She was a woman more or less the size, shape and overall temperament of a wardrobe, and she was endlessly inventive company, except when it came to food, where a heady combination of staggering bone-poverty throughout the 20s and 30s, and the unmitigated joy of war and post-war rationing had never quite let her go. I am grateful to this day to have escaped the serving of her brawn (essentially boiled, pressed, vaguely fermented pig-scraps) that my mother and aunt only have to mention to turn each other deathly pale, but my gran's approach to food was that there was carbohydrate, and meat, and green stuff that you stewed for hours. She raised me on rice and macaroni while we lived with her, and it was frankly fabulous for a young boy with a tendency towards simple, sedentary (or if possible, entirely unconscious) pleasures.

Then, between living with my gran and my mother meeting the fourth person to whom I owe a chunk of my fundamental personality, who I think of as my proper dad, Ma and I lived on our own for a few years. She'd never really done that before, and those years are marked by all sorts of memories - her frequent decisions to move furniture around after ten o'clock at night, 'just because.' Her sitting with big piles of bills, a pad, a pencil and no earthly way of making anything amount to a figure she liked. Her at a stove, having learned from her mother that big pots of rice filled you up for very little in the way of actual money. But the most potent mental snapshot I have of her from those days is her with a vacuum cleaner, or her with a duster and polish, with the stereo cranked up loud, cleaning her flat, or later her house, to the strains of Freddie Mercury and Queen. She would shine the bejesus out of tables to We Will Rock You, she would feather-dust to Hammer To Fall, using the duster as her guitar for the solos, and she would, inevitably, vacuum to I Want To Break Free. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am well and truly a second generation rocker. When we left my bio-dad to his snoring and his 70s, maudlin Elvis ("Beeecause you're alllll I have, my boy..." was sung to me many a drunken time), we took three records with us - one album and two singles. Thin Lizzy's Black Rose was the album, while the singles were Queen's We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions, and Free's All Right Now/My Brother Jake. I used to play them endlessly on a salmon pink portable record player in my gran's upstairs front bedroom. To this day, my mother would dance any one of you under a table, and the last time I went to London (where for perverse reasons, my iTunes library is held), she texted me to say 'Oh do me a favour - rip me a Guns and Roses compilation will you?'. The famous adage says 'Dance like no-one's watching.' Ma dances, still, like every eye is on her, and to be fair, every eye usually is.

All this meandering remembrance is really a long-winded way of saying that, having walked six times round the local lake (3.5 miles), and in total, walked some 6.3 miles (692 calroies burned, my phone informs me), I'm not getting on the exercise bike tonight. Today,  instead, I submitted to the Queen Regime, and, while stopping short of technically dusting or vacuuming, I have had a headful of Queen, and Blondie, and a little GnR, and I have tidied the crap out of one floor of our flat. I have reached, and stretched, and shoved, and lifted and gone up and down stairs more times than seems possible, somehow, and given that my intake today has been 200 calories of porridge, three new decaff skinny mistos (note to self - find out exact calorific values of those, for sake of own obsession), a litre and a half of water, three slices of buttered (yeah, shoot me) wholemeal toast and a smallish dollop of baked beans, I'm going to say I'm still reasonably in line with the game, if not actually ahead of it.

At no point have I felt unduly hungry, and at no point, still, have I beaten small children to death for their Easter Eggs, nor wanted to. I mentioned this to my friend Gail.
'Ah,' she texted sagely, 'you're still in diet piety mode. That'll change.'
I told her I knew it would, but that as yet, I wouldn't tear her head off for the chocolate cake she was flaunting at me. The day will come when that won't be a safe thing to do, but it's not here yet, for which I'm grateful.

Of course, as I sit here, justifying my refusal to get on the bike tonight (which to be honest is more about time than will), the bike's handles and back rest are looming at me over the top of the computer.
'Come to meeeeee,' it's singing, like some siren of sweat and pain. 'Do more Innnnnsannnnnity...'

That's really not happening. I tried to do the Insanity thing last night - twenty minutes, they say. Work insanely hard for two minutes, rest for one, and so on for just twenty minutes. What they don't tell you is it's ten minutes of working insanely hard, followed by ten mintues of laying on the floor, weeping, begging for a friendly seal clubbber to come and put you out of your misery.

'You didn't get that from the name?' asked d, my wife, when I mentioned it to her before flopping, practically dead, into bed last night. I should probably mention that most of the time, she has the family brain.

I'm not saying I won't do the Insanity thing again.
Just that I won't do it again tonight.

Tonight I'm content to have rocked in my mother's strutting, Freddie-following footsteps, to have a tidier living environment and to feel like I've worked comprehensively out. Tomorrow brings a new challenge - tomorrow is the Day of the Disappearing Sunday Dinner.