The Wagon Training

Hey there, Disappearinos.

Well, I went from Christmas to almost New Year still glued to the office, so the food-richest time of the year was compounded by ass-boil-growing levels of physical inactivity.

Which makes sense of yesterday's weigh-in. 17st 11.5. Up three-quarters of a pound. Not by any means where I wanted to be, but given both the factors at play, I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears, go 'Lalalala' and claim (in the entire absence of evidence) reasonable positivity. Up less than a pound between Christmas and New Year - yeah, I'll take that.

Yesterday, the morning after a hefty Indian banquet including rice, naan, bhajis and a cocount milk-based sauce, my blood sugar was a smidgen over the double-figure goal, coming in at 10.9.

This morning, 2nd January, nudged it back under the line - 9.3. And, more significantly, kicked off the walking habit of 2019. Not an enormously long walk - my Samsung Health app tells me it was 4.03 km, so basically just 'over there and back again.' But still - further than I've gone any time recently, and hopefully the start of getting the numbers going in the right direction again.

January is of course the traditional time for starting new things, new plans, and particularly new weight-loss or exercise or 'cleansing' routines. In my case though, I tend not to put too much pressure on January - it's like starting a diary: if you go at it hammer and tongs in January, chances are you'll burn out by February.

In my case, it's just a coincidence that I happen to suddenly be free to get back to walking now it's January. The goal remains the same in January as they were in December - 2 pounds per week. So by the 8th, I hope to be weighing in at 17st 9.5. By the 15th, 17st 7.5 (or, as a bonus, maybe 17st 7). By 15th Febuary, my hope is to be in the 16s, and so on. I haven't gone enormously outside my rules over Christmas - though there was one rather glorious Fish And Chipfest - but it was certainly Christmas and New Year, and now it isn't that any more, so it's back to the focus.

I think that's an odd thing this time round. Long ago, when I was doing this the first documented time, I had my rigid 'perspex boxes' - I couldn't go even slightly wrong, at all, ever, because if I did, the whole thing would come tumbling down. And indeed, it was a fish and chipfest that eventually broke me, and things DID come tumbling down in a mass of self-fulfilling prophecy. When you get to 48, you realise the sun goes down every night, and comes up every morning* and it's up to you what you make of it. If you wanna carry on as you've been doing, you don't necessarily have to treat the new day as another day of addictive behaviour. Yeah, you fell off the wagon - at least with food, as opposed to almost everything else that triggers pleasure centres, you're unlikely to have a chemical addiction-trigger to have to re-fight (Although, sugar...). If you want to, you can just get right back up on the damn wagon, and start another day 1. So this is me - having enjoyed my Christmas, and my New Year, saddlin' up my wagon again and riding it through 2019. Two pounds a week should see my almost 7.5 stone (104 pounds) lighter by the first week of January 2020 - and that of course isn't counting the Brexit Famine. Around the 10 stone mark, or 140 pounds.

There's Probably-Not-Dying-So-Soon in that there weight-loss.
Giddy-up!

The Impatience Of the Long-Distance Disappearer

*Kicks stone, disconsolately.*

Hey hey.
Headlines first. Weigh-in today - 17st 10.25. Down two pounds.
Blood sugar - 8.5, after a week of mostly being in the 7s.

So, all is good and groovy, right?

Well...yeah...kinda. If you just look at the numbers.
The thing of course is to do that.

The other thing, unfortunately, is human nature. Normally kicks in at about this point, so it's hardly a surprise. I know the medical advice is that it's 'safe' and 'recommended' to lose at most two pounds a week. But the impatience of the long-distance Disappearer kicks in, and you start to want a fast forward button on your life, or a Rocky-style training montage to speed the whole damn thing up.

Perfectly natural, I know. Quite apart from the fact that we Eighties Teens were absolutely surrounded by training montages or friendship montages or skill-attainment montages (seriously, montages were big in the Eighties. Hell, everything was big in the Eighties), once you've been on a changed lifestyle path for a few weeeks, all the entirely invented viciousness stored in your fat cells starts to release into your bloodstream, and things seem so toddleristically unfair! You start to whinge and chunter - if those around you are lucky, you only do this in your head - about how him next door or her two doors down eats more than you and never puts on a pound. There's every likelihood that this is when you start making the voodoo dolls, of course.

But more than that, you start looking up. You look up at the mountain, rather than at your moving feet, and the whole mountainous nature of the mountain takes your breath away, and the 'safe' weightloss recommendation starts to feel like an artificial hand brake applied to your efforts to climb Mount Fat-Fuck. If you can afford it, and don't have a heart condition, this is probably also when speed starts to feel like a viable diet option.

Objectively, I'm 3.25 pounds away from my next milestone at 17 stone 7 pounds. Subjectively, it's two...more...bloody...weeeeeeks before I get there. Two more weeks of eating and watching and walking and bleeding, and around and around and around we go, like a hamster on a pigging wheel.

Christmas Day, in fact, is when I should hit the next milestone. So that'll be jolly. Then another three, or more likely four weeks before I dip under the 17 stone mark. That feels like aeeeeons away right now, let alone looking at the bigger chunk of mountain still left to go.

Sigh. Buck up, Fyler, you're depressing everyone. Objectively, as I say, the news is all good and groovy. It's just that, in Disappearing as in life, to quote Douglas Adams, 'the last thing, the very last thing you actually need is a sense of perspective.'


And today feels like a very perspectivey day. 

The Lifestyle Constipation Question

Lalalalalalala - not talking about the Orange Idiot, not thinking about the Orange Idiot: it's his day, he can have it, it doesn't mean he gets to colonise my world. Today at least, this will be a Trump-free zone, because let's face it, nowhere else is going to be, ever again, unless we choose not to let him in. We have our own chunks of electronic real estate, and he can only go there if we let him. So, Hail to the Thief, and let's move on.

The worrying thing is that in Disappearing terms, very little actually happened today. But then, the rhythm is developing that very little happens any day - I work, I eat fairly sparingly, I go out and walk my daily 10,000 steps+ in the dark, what adverts for weird living yoghurt call my 'digestive transit' has slowed right the hell down, I have my main meal later than would probably be advised, mostly because I don't go walking till I finish the day-job at 5 and the walk is currently taking me over two hours, and actually, in my faintly obsessive weighing, not a whole hell of a lot is happening to my numbers. But what is happening is not particularly good - though whether that's due to the whole slow transit thing is a fairly disgusting question on which to spend too much time, so let's not.

Right now, the Disappearing seems indicative of a more general pattern in my life - so much to do, so little actually seeming to get done - three edits to do, a day-job with its own challenges, reviewing work for a geek site, writing two audio adventures, trying to sell a flat, trying to deal with all the stuff we packed up when we moved OUT of the flat, Disappearing and actively thinking about taking on new challenges, like Booktubing - oh yes, I'm thinking of moving into Youtube and doing a Jefferson Franklin Booktube channel (ask someone young - I had to). I have a kind of lifestyle constipation right now that needs a kind of motivational enema - it's all doing what I need it to do to some extent, but every day my To Do List, not to mention my To Give A Crap About List, seems to be getting longer and more unbeatable.

Sigh - is there a lifestyle guru in the house? Or, come to that, a handful of To-Do List laxatives?
Still, on the positive side, I'm not, at the moment, this time round, letting the Disappearing fall by the wayside simply because there's too much other stuff to do.

Of course, the counter-argument to that is that perhaps - just perhaps - that's a big contributing factor to there still being so much else to do, but I can't afford to think like that at the moment. This is the first phase of KBO this time round - "Keep Buggering On," as the phrase has it. And as the options are digital, with KBO leading to success and SBTIA or "Say Balls To It All" leading to failure and backsliding, O we jolly well have to KB.

Positive thoughts, positive thoughts, positive thoughts - still a stone lighter than I was when we began this journey again just before Christmas. Just need to dedicate the crap out of some time to the job. Anyone know where I can get some?

The Elevator Plunge

Never underestimate the power of liquids.

Had a mostly Starbucks day yesterday, and weighed in the night, before getting on the bike, only to find myself - let's just say, worse than before I started all this.

Much biking later - well, I say much biking, by which I mean a meagre 400 calories of biking later - I got back on the scales and found myself 2.5 pounds lighter. A hearty pee lost me another pound and a half. And so it went. By this morning, I'd lost a whopping great six pounds in a kind of middle-of-the-night where-the-hell-did-that-go elevator plunge. I'm still heavier than I was last Tuesday, but given the week I've had, that's pretty understandable - and tonight, there's a baked rice in my future, along with more biking. I guess the lesson of this is that weigh-ins, useful as they are as stakes in the ground by which we mark the direction of a trend, are like taking a Polaroid of ourselves as we are that minute - a heavy meal or a massive quantity of liquid probably won't make us feel like we've put on weight, but the scales will record it because it's all part of the system we're capturing a snapshot of at that moment.

What happens tomorrow? Who knows? Heaviness in all probability - I have to be on, at the latest, the 8.38 train to Cardiff in the morning, which means I probably will still have tonight's rice meal in my system as part of the result I record as my third official weigh-in. The important thing is to let these things be what they are, rather than to go massively off the rails of "It's not working, I'm crap, fuck it, bring me chocolate!" Bad results come sometimes from bad behaviours or routine slippage. Sometimes, later in the process, they come from doing absolutely everything you can and your body clamming up and saying "Na-uh, fuck you, I'm not playing any more." The point is they come. The trick is to not let them become the only thing that comes. Good results come too, if you stay on the path, or, if you've fallen off, if you get back on the path.

That's probably the weirdest thing about the whole weightloss game. If you have a system that works, and you stick to it, success is actually mathematically likely over time. It's the million things that can sway you from your course that bring you failure.

So - tomorrow will be what it will be. I'm back on the bike tonight (though off it again tomorrow - long story short, the theatre show we were going to see last week is actually happening tomorrow instead). But the continuation of the Disappearing is not put in jeopardy by a bad result. We go forward from here.

Well, we go to the bike from here, technically, but you know what I mean...

The Biking Breakdown

Got home from an odyssey to Cardiff yesterday (rail replacement, local bus cancellation, yadda yadda yadda, scuse me while I yammer on like that boring guy you avoid at parties) fully intending to continue my unbroken streak of biking for an hour.

Then didn't.

For those who don't know already, I've joined a political party for the first time in about twenty-five years. It's called the Women's Equality Party, and I've joined it because it's the 21st century and I'm utterly sick of the fact that an organisation like the Women's Equality Party still so appallingly necessary. Yesterday was the first Branch meeting to which I've been able to make it - hence the odyssey. Set out at 9.30, got home around 7.30, mostly because of a stunningly straightforward journey made staggeringly difficult by British engineering ingenuity.

Anyway, whether it was the insane prolongation of the travel or the challenges inherent in the meeting itself - it was manifesto time, there were focus groups to, erm, focus on - by the time I got home, I thought about climbing the stairs and pedalling for an hour, and while the spirit was at least half willing, the legs were all placard-waving, slogan-chanting 'what you playin' at, fool?!' rebellion. 'Sit your ass on the couch,' they said. 'Watch yourself some Gotham and shut the hell up with all this pedallin' stupidness.'

For some reason, I appear to have had 70s Blaxpoitation legs last night. And if I have one guiding principle in life, it is simply this: never argue with 70s Blaxpoitation legs.

So couches were sat on, Gotham was watched, legs gave self-righteous 'that's right, don't argue with us again' snorts of satisfaction and all was good. Couldn't quite understand why I was so exhausted though, until, on getting up to walk over to collect d from her twelve-hour shift (it's incredibly difficult to whinge about your own discomfort when you're picking someone up who's worked a twelve-hour shift on her feet. I still do it, naturally, cos that's the kind of sticktoitiveness I have, but still, it's not easy) and my wrist vibrated, as though someone had decided to chainsaw my hand off.

No-one had decided to chainsaw my hand off. My Fitbit was going nuts. 'Arriba!' it said. 'You've just walked your daily ass off, muchachos! Congratulations on being Senor Fitnesse. Let us dance the Maraccalacca, the famous Dance of the Smug Bastard.'

So that explained that - for the first time since I started Disappearing again, I'd walked my designated number of steps in the day - 10,000, I think, equating to five miles, and at least double the 600 calories of an hour's biking.

'That's right, fool, that's what we been tryin' to tell your dumb ass,' muttered my legs.

That made me feel significantly better about missing my appointment with the bike. Ideally of course, and eventually, I intend to move to a regime where both the Fitbit and the bike feel the love on any given day - the walking and the biking. But this is the difference this time round - as with the original Disappearing, I'm refusing to obey the nagging instinct to go at this thing like a bull at a gate. This thing takes time. It demands a sacrifice of some lifetime when this was a thing you were consciously doing. As I think one of the very early entries says, I was a kid raised on 80s movies, and the inevitable 80s movie montage, where people achieved things to a kicking rock track, and a year of hard effort was compressed into about two or three minutes of inspiring highlights, but real life doesn't have a fast forward button so you have to go the slow way round. There'll be a time to step things up a notch. That time is not freakin' yet. I know this because of the chatty legs.

Today, I haven't walked nearly as far, but I have just Gothamed my bike-pedalling ass off for another 600 calories. Will it be enough to allow me to announce a first milestone tomorrow?

The first milestone, for anyone not familiar with my propensity to throw myself a typical man-party every time I achieve even the slightest thing, will be getting beneath the 19 stone mark.  Similar revolting look at me and what I did' events will crown every half-stone (or seven pounds) lost on the journey back towards vaguely healthy. To throw my first party, I need to have lost 3.25 pounds from last Tuesday by the morning. Place your bets, Disappearers. Place them now...

The Third Step

People who tell you the first step of any journey is the hardest probably haven't actually achieved anything.

The first step is great - it feels like decisiveness, control over your own destiny, bold, positive action against a sea of whatever troubles you think are dogging you where you stand. So's the second step, to be fair - that's when you get that slight 'Look at me, I'm actually doing this' smugness.

Step three - or lap three, or circuit three - that's when you have to shake your head a little to clear it of the new reality that settles on you like malicious snow. Really? We're doing this now? At which point what you absolutely mustn't ever do is take a long view of the horizon, because the horizon, or the finishing line, or the moment of completion and success is so astonishingly far away, still, that it will aactively demotivate you.

Step three, or lap three, or circuit three, is not by any stretch where things get hard. Not even slightly. But it's the step at which, if you like, and changing metaphors completely, you've jumped off the high board, and you get that sense of questioning whether, all things considered, that was the best move you could have made.

Whether it is or it isn't, of course, there's precisely nothing to be done about it at that point but head ultimately onward, and downward, and try not to break anything too important when you get there.

Day three is always a little tricky because it's when things start to call to you. Comforts, or in my case, carbs, sweet things, all the lines and lines of unwisdom that can keep me bound in this body and ultimately kill me ahead of all the other contenders that fancy a crack at the gig. It's simply the body reacting to a change of circumstance of course, a body that's been used to living one way, and has let you have your fun for three days, but now really would prefer the old life back, thankyouverymuch - the lazy life, the sweet life, the reach out and grab it, say "fuck it all" life.

I've been down this road enough times now to stick my fingers in my ears and sing "lalalalala."
Day four is always better. You get the horrendously premature sense of trophyism, the "Look what I've done" sense of having beaten day three. It's more than a little pathetic of course, but it works like anaesthetic to make the next few days easier. You amass your three pathetic little days and they become the beginning of something, and you don't want to spoil them. You begin to weigh three days against whatever it is that's calling to you, on that whole "one day at a time" principle, and you begin to think you're going to win.

So, having just done my day three biking, let's be having day four along quick smart, if you please.

The Harry Attitude

I deleted the first four paragraphs of toight's blog entry, simply because I annoyed myself so much. I was complaining about this and fretting about that, and whinging like a whingy thing about something else entirely, and on, and on, and on it went.

Then I thought of my mate Harry. And the whinging went away, because it couldn't lift its head for shame by comparison.

It's a big day for Harry today. Today, he starts a course of treatment that will take him from how he looks and how he's perceived today to how he feels inside and wants to be perceived in the future. He's already been through a lot, because generally, our society likes to poke people with sticks when they're not what we think they 'should' be, and yell 'Waargh! Different is wrong, go and live under a stone and stop confusing us!' 

We really need to grow the hell up, as a society.

Harry's quest to match biology with psychology is a long, hard slog, partly because it's a complex process and partly because we're nowhere near as evolved a society as we think we are, so institutions and expectations make it harder than it should be. He's got a hell of a journey ahead of him, that needs him to be stronger that I'll ever have to even contemplate being.

Yet today's a really exciting day for this 28 year-old mate of mine, because it's the beginning of a new phase, a new push towards the version of himself that has to be. That just, absolutely, has to be. That's the difference, of course - it has to be.

I'd never be as crass as to compare our journeys, but I look at Harry, smiling and excited and on his way, and I look at myself whinging about this and fretting about that, and I just think 'Shurrup Tone, stop being an arse.' There's a lesson in his attitude, in his excitement and his smile, because whatever he's about to go through on his journey, his destination is set - it has to be. Everything in between is the getting there. That kind of vision's enough to make any whinge die on your lips, I promise you.

I'm not about to make saints or angels out of any bugger - I'm sure Harry can be a cantankerous sod if he wants to be, though I've never seen it. But neither am I above looking at my friends, and seeing the journeys they're on, and shutting the hell up from my point of ridiculous privilege, and raising a glass in salute of their strength of character, and the attitude that carries them on. And today, I look at Harry and think 'That's a dead cool attitude, man. Thanks for showing me that.'

We don't of course see more than a snapshot of each other's lives as we go through our days - this person, that person, their strength, their excitement, their optimism, their fear. Only those closest to us get to see the whole of us - that's the point of that closeness. But I know enough, I think, about my mate to say that a healthy heaping tablespoon of Harry's attitude in all of our minds and make-ups would do all of us a load of good, and me more than most. 

So enough neurotic whinging. Here's to Harry, and to all those people you know who are on journeys of their own, but who always make the day a bit brighter by also being a part of yours.

The Disappearing Ripples

Ripples are cool.

Clothes Maketh The Man. Tidy Desk, Tidy Mind. Fake It Till You Make it.

Gotta love a good aphorism.

They’re worth of course precisely as much as we invest in them – if they mean nothing to us, if we invest nothing in them, the world turns and nobody gives a damn.

On the Tidy Desk principle though, I've got one of my own: Disappearing Body, Disappearing Life - the more lean the body grows, the leaner, the more productive, the more focused grows everything else in my life. It works (for me, because I invest in it) on a kind of Disappearing Ripple principle.

I’m starting to feel the ripples of being the Disappearing Man again. I’ve been doing it now for, what? All of nine spectacular days – hardly enough to effect a particular life-change, you might think, and indeed you might be right. But just as when a rusted wheel first tries to turn again, there’s sloth and screeching, but the more it turns, the less noticeable the complaining noise becomes, so with Disappearing – nine days of following a routine of sorts, a rhythm, an image of how the personal world looks now, and I’m less inclined to see it as ‘a thing,’ as something where every tiny triumph or massive personal disaster (it seems to be entirely within my nature to magnify the drama of potential failure) needs to be trumpeted to the world. This might, just conceivably, make for even duller blog entries going forward. With any luck for the reader, they may also get significantly shorter.

Nevertheless though, the ripples are fun when they start, and they're also good fun when they start to bubble. 

‘Wow,’ said d this morning when I went in to kiss her goodbye for the day before beggaring off to walk around the lake. ‘Good outfit choice. You’ve gone from blah-’ She held her hands out wide. ‘-to schlung,’ she said, pulling her hands closer and bringing them down relatively straight.

She was referring to a mistake I’d made some months before. I’d bought a T-shirt with a slogan on it (no, really – I’m 43), but rather gloriously (glorious in that such a thing was still possible) overestimated my size, so it looks essentially like a nightshirt on me. What’s more, it pulls a particular con trick on the eye – because it’s so big, there’s a sense that I need it to be that big, and so it cons the brain into thinking I am that big. I’d worn it yesterday, changing today into an older but plainer and smaller black T-shirt, which, with black trousers, almost has a stealth effect – it’s no secret that bigger people wear a lot of black to minimize the effect of their size on the eye. So she’d noticed the difference between the ‘mu-mu shirt’ and the ‘big human shirt’, and suddenly I’d lost a bit of bulge, and assumed a better shape.

This in itself is not a Disappearing Ripple – I’m actually at least 14 lbs away from the effect of the Disappearing Ripple that makes me, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘be at charges for a looking glass, and entertain some score or two of tailors, to study fashions to adorn my body’ – in other words, before I start being able to look at myself in the mirror and think of clothes as things that might apply to me beyond the Comic Book Guy style of slogan shirts. But I felt the familiar memory of that ripple in my reaction to her comment – a bit of a spring in the step, and a bit of grit in the step as I went around, and around, and around the lake to burn a breakfast’sworth of calories. It's not yet a ripple, but it's the bubble that will eventually rise to the surface of my life and cause the ripple.

There are other Disappearing Ripples too. They all work like dominos lined up and ready to fall. I have a number of projects that have been idling, and today, more than at any point in recent months, I’ve felt them sink into my bones and become part of me. There are To Do Lists, and Sub-To Do Lists, but more than that, the Disappearing discipline is beginning to spread through my veins and my brain. To achieve C, I’m putting A into action, and setting up B to follow. 

In a way, as I’ve mentioned before, the Disappearing Me is a rather less amiable, less pleasant human being, the open-handed bonhomie of my nature shrivels somewhat under the constraints of discipline, but on the other hand, the hippie in my brain rather burns away too – I begin to stop thinking ‘Some day, I’ll get my shit together…’ and actually begin to get my shit together, lining up the dominos between me and achievement. Which, on reflection is probably just as well – we’re already almost a third of the way through 2015, and I have a lot of stuff to do, to achieve, to be a part of. The Disappearing Ripples in my brain have just about begun to warm me up, to oil the engine of my potential, and to start me back on a path where things don’t slide beyond me on a river of enjoyably contented days.

So – I can hear you from here – what’ve you done, Disappearing-Boy?

As yet, very little: the sensation’s just beginning, the first drops of oil dripping onto the wheels in my brain. But I can feel them nourishing me. The rhythms are becoming normalized, so it’s less of a ‘thing’, less of a struggle to get out of bed at a time I previously would have balked at, less of a pain in the butt to exercise at that time, to get a start on the day. Less of a hardship to not have the things I would previously have wanted. Less of a burn of wanting them in the first place. I always said, the first time I did this, and I maintain this time, that I didn’t feel like I was really Disappearing till I’d got beneath the 18st barrier, till I saw my first 17. Readers will know of course, I’m still significantly higher than that, so I haven’t exactly had that superhero movie moment of ‘Game on, now we’re serious, let’s kick some supervillain ass’ that launches the hard rockin’ third act. But in terms of my mindset, I’m beginning to feel already as though the Disappearing Man is emerging, coming through, breaking out. I’m not by any stretch there yet, but my Clark Kent has I think taken off his glasses. My Tony Stark has made his kickass billionaire witticism, my Peter Parker’s Spidey Sense is tingling.

The Disappearing Ripples are the unexpected effects that the act of Disappearing will eventually have in my life and the lives of those around me – dynamic subsidiary changes that come from increased social inclusion and rising confidence. They’re not by any means here yet – but for the first time, today, I can feel them bubbling up inside, waiting their cue.

Feels good.

The Dessert Whore Day

A Non-Disappering Joyfest at Five Guys.

Another day, another dollar, another few hours spent working in my favourite Starbucks in all the world. Another day, incidentally, of meeting up with an old friend after work.

Today being her day off, d came with me, got her hair straightened, and soaked up some rays in the Welsh capital city. We met for lunch at a place that's new in Cardiff, but which has long been a staple in the States: Five Guys.

It's new, it's loud, and its food ordering system is reminiscent of the Starbucks way of doing things, but oh damn! This was not the place to go for a Disappearing Lunch.

Had a hotdog and a burger. Yes, two things. Ooooh, bad Tony! Gorgeous, fresh, tasty, the whole thing was a joy, frankly. I'd walked my usual five times round the local lake before setting off this morning, and all told have walked 5.4 miles today, burning 742 calories according to my phone's pedometer (anyone else notice how odd that word looks, written down? Looks like a machine that measures your propensity to be ickily attracted to kids). That's probably about three bites of hot dog, I should think. The point about having discovered Five Guys today though is that it really shows up the different mindsets of Disappearing and not-Disappearing people, even if those people are technically the same person. Now, I went in a perfectly ordinary Disappearer, and resisted the blandishment of french fries when d forgot I wouldn't be able to go near them. I'm reliably informed they were perfect.

Anyone got a cushion I can kick?

But what's worse from my point of view is the shakes. Oh gods, the shakes.
Now, it's important to understand that you don't get to be the size I am without putting some serious, probably quite messed-up, effort into it. It's actually almost as hard in its own way to put on my sort of weight as it is to start taking it off. Now - my name's Tony, and I'm a dessert whore. I have no discretion whatsoever when it comes to desserts. I want them half a mile high and covered in sparklers, with every slutty, calorie-rich invention you can imagine crammed into them somehow. If I'm going to have a dessert, I want it mechanised, I want it singing happy birthday and I want it gooooood.

Oddly enough, my dessert whore history came up in conversation later in the evening when we met up with our friend Karen, and d mentioned to her the kind of things I used to do.

Brief Dessert Whore Diversion
When you think of a bowl of cereal, what do you think of?

If you think of something like this...you're really not in the same league and I don't quite know how to talk to you. First of all, in my youth, I used to use a mixing bowl, rather than any of your paltry cereal bowls.

Then, you lay down a layer of halved Rich Tea or Digestive biscuits (Graham Crackers, Americans), to provide a kind of moist biscuit base.
Then you layer some Weetabix (I may lose some of the Americans on the way through this, just try and appreciate the quantities involved here), for a dissolving, thickened soupy consistency when the dish is complete.
Then a layer of dense but structurally sound cereal (for preference in my case, Shreddies).
Then you add a layer of broken chocolate biscuits - dark chocolate for preference, and I tended to favour Digestives for this layer too, though some of the fancier chocolate-coated biscuits - KitKats etc - would give a surprising bite of texture in this layer, as they'd be more resitent to sogginess when milked.
Then you start to build your flake layers - start with Bran Flakes, for that dark robustness and the laughable illusion that you're adding something healthy. Then add either standard Corn Flakes, or for preference, either Frosties or Honey Nut Cornflakes, for additional sugary joy.
Then, to almost complete the dish, add a puffed rice layer, slide a couple more dark chocolate Digestives on either side as textural out-takes for snacking, slice one banana and layer it carefully over the Rice Krispy layer, to help glue those demented little buggers down. Pour your full fat milk in at the side, allowing it to pool at the bottom, like correctly watering a plant, and ooze UP through the layers, rather than down. Then top with single or double pouring cream, to further adhere the Rice Krispies.

Voila - Tony's Breakfast Trifle.

All in all, it's a wonder I didn't die before I hit 20. I used the same sort of layering ingenuity whenever I felt like some ice cream at home. As I say, getting to be as fat as I am is not only a dark art form, it's a vocation.

Anyway, that was just a quick Dessert Whore Deviation. Oddly, the menu at Five Guys doesn't even have desserts, so why am I wittering on about them?

Because they have shakes, that's why. Shakes are simply liquid forms of dessert in my book, especially when, as at Five Guys, they're made with an ice cream base, and you're allowed to add in annnnnnny damn thing you like, for free - including the whipped cream that makes them properly desserty, and the bacon that makes them properly American.

d had a shake this afternoon, and went on to explain its deliciousness to me by through medium of mime. You remember that scene from When Harry Met Sally? Imagine that, but with the word 'Shakegasm' involved.

Seriously - cushion, anyone?

But again, when offered a sip of it, I had to refuse. Offering a sip of something like that to a dessert whore like me is like offering a drunk a shot of Johnny Walker Blue 'just so you can appreciate it.'
Believe me when I say we appreciate it. We appreciate it reeeeeeel good.

That's what I mean though about the different mindset of a Disappearer and a non-Disappearer. If we'd only gone to Five Guys a few weeks earlier...well, it would have been embarrasing, for a start - they only opened at the end of March, but assuming it had been there, and we'd gone two weeks ago, there would have been nothing that could have stopped me from piling in to those heavenly fries or diving face first into at least a couple of dessert whore shakes.

Today, I went, I ate, it was glorious, and after that, I was just watching the rest of Cardiff do the things I couldn't do. Now, I've always said, and always meant, that this is just the way with Disappearing - like recovering drunks at dinner parties, you don't get to bring everyone else's buzz down just because you personally can't indulge. That would be the behaviour of an anti-social idiot, and you don't have to be one of those just because you're going through some shit. But the point is, for all the Disappearing is necessary in my case, never be under any illusions that Disappearing makes you a better person, because in fact rather the opposite is true. I would have been happier, d would have been happier, and the staff at Five Guys would have been happier if I had gone in there today as a non-Disappearer, an embracer of life and calories and all the good things they had to offer. But no - on some fundamental level, Disappearing makes you the Calvinist at an orgy, a droopy, drippy, miserable figure while everyone else gets their foody buzz on. You can appreciate it all you like, but you can't partake, and to some degree that makes you the vortex of a downer. I'd almost forgotten how much to despise there was about my character when I'm Disappearing - not, as I say, that I was tutting at people or scowling at every fry they popped into their mouths - I ate what I wanted and thoroughly enjoyed it and the two of us had a wonderful day. It's just a sense of self, a comparison between the Ghost of Christmas Present and Ebenezer Scrooge, one laughing and jovial, the other, insular and cold.

Of course, there will be another day - that's what you have to keep focusing on in this Disappearing game. There will be a day when you're not actively Disappearing, and when the Ghost of Christmas Present will be you again, when you'll have worked hard, and achieved your goals, and be living a significantly less harmful life, when you'll be able to go in and enjoy everything, with the kind of joie de vivre that's more native to your spirit. In case that's not been clear, that's what I'm saying - I want to be able to throw open the doors and yell 'Hot dogs for everyone! Shakes all round and make mine a double!' That's the essential me. The Disappearing me is absolutely a lot less fun.

But we go on. There will be another day.
Another day.
Another day.

The Blue Sky Dilemma

There are some very peculiar rumours going around this town.

Some bunch of hopeless astrological tosspots appears to think it's Spring. What's more, they appear to have convinced the sky of this folly, because when I woke up this morning, all set to  jump on my exercise bike and bitch about the usual April drizzle outside my South Wales window (my American friends, you might have to Google it - Wales is sort of like New Jersey, a chunk of land attached to somewhere Much More Important, where everyone absolutely loses their shit if you try and tell them of their relative irrelevance), the picture here is what I saw instead. Blazing blue, Simpson-fluffy, and dazzled by some demented bright yellow ball of heat (it's just out of shot in the picture. Honest).

There are plenty of jokes to be made about the fact that Wales doesn't really have a climate, so much as a penitence for being really really bad in a previous life. I've made a few of them myself to d, my  wife, who's both American and a believer in the Fundamental Goodness of Things and People (still, after ten years married to me). To be fair, I only used to make the jokes because she used to get right up my nose every time we visited by prancing off the train like a fairy godmother and declaring "Oh, how beautiful and bright it is!" I think what really got to me about that was that for her, it was!

The usual Welsh weather, which is fundamentally like Scottish weather only less imaginitive, always used to fuck right off and hide whenever she stepped into town. Blazing Christmases abounded - one year, as if to give me the right royal meteorological finger, it began to snow the minute our train pulled out as we were leaving. Not for nothing, but people have pretty much taken to calling us the Sunshine Fairy and the Drizzle Imp.

But I'm a rationalist and I'm not about to argue with evidence, so yes, hip hip hooray, the Spring has come to our little South Wales town - at least for a day or two. Men and women of the Valleys are out giving their armpit-hair an airing, all wearing their shades, some 'proper,' some 'off the market'. The nation's children suddenly have nothing to do but run, and screm and cavort, like the little vitamin d-starved wretches they are, pointing at the sun.

All of which raises issues for your average Disappearer. To be fair, every season brings its own issues for your average Disappearer. In the Winter, there's a primal, instinctive urge to stay indoors with a big bar of chocolate and pretend to be mostly dead. In the Autumn, at least round here, there's a primal, instinctive urge to build an ark and start collecting animals. But Spring and Summer are the painted harlots of the calendar year (I should add that my wife tries to convince me there are actually five seasons, and that Autumn and Fall are two different things, but then she also tries to convince me that Ecru and Lobster are colours, and that's not happening either).

Spring and Summer make you want to not have deadlines or day jobs. They make you wistful for your youth (or at least for that bit after your youth when you'd gotten over your awkwardness and there were things like sex and pub lunches over which to linger). And they make you feel that nothing is anywhere near as bad as you thought it was when you began this silly Disappearing business, and you should just chill out, join the rest of society and have a choc ice and a beer.

Verily I say unto you, resist! Resist the tantalising winkings of the Spring and Summer both, for they lead only to satisfaction and chilling the hell out. These things are not for you, Disappearer! Shun them! Put them behind you! Now, say three gastric bands and an ex-lax, then go inside and whip yourself.

To be at least vaguely serious for a moment, there's a real dilemma beneath my cod-preaching. I remember it of old - the battle between long-term and short-term goals. Long-term means getting on the bike while all the cool kids are hanging out and laughing and having beer and pizza. Short term means joining them, then feeling that awful crunching moment of loathing and despair come weigh-in time, when all the cool kids have gone home, and there's just you and the truth.

Of course, there's at least a partial way to have your Disappearing cake and eat it. Rather than sticking to your indoor calorie-burners, get out there and do what you can do. I walked around our local lake six times this morning before breakfast, and enjoyed both the wonder of bottle green-headed ducks, and white apparently pissed-off swans, and noisy-ass, bawling the odds Canada geese (endless fun, incidentally, is to be had translating bird-noise into human speech, especially with a gift like Canada geese, eh?), and that smug self-satisfaction of having walked 3.5 miles and burned enough calories to make a porridge breakfast null and void.

d is by far the more sensible of the two of us. She's the one who, at midnight last night, dragged me away from the computer screen and told me to come to bed. And so it was she who this evening dragged me away from the screen again come enjoy the sociable world. We had dinner out together (Nandos, chicken burger (no skin), sweet potato mash, pitta bread and red pepper dip), and it helped me relocate the smile I'd buried since the geese under flotsam and jetsam and the joy of running my own business as well as having a day job (which starts again tomorrow). It was great to have that particular 'cake' too, a moment of normality in a day otherwise crammed with deadlines and to-do lists.

And now it's done, and so very nearly is this blog, and the big yellow ball of harlotry and fun has very nearly gone away, just a tinge of pink left on the soft blue horizon, which can mean only one thing - it's time to get back on the exercise bike and pedal my ass off!

Tomorrow is many things - weigh-in day, day-job day, Starbucks day and, rather pleasingly, reuniting with old schoolfriend day. At least two of these things have the power to quash my generalised bonhomie like a bug beneath its feet. But for now, Happy Springtime, people!