The Long Road to Lightness

Half a kilo may not be much, but given that it was a week that included the New Year celebrations, I think that I can be satisfied.  I am not sure that I am still on track to meet one of my spurious targets by April but I have survived the festivities and there is less of me now than there was.  Result.

            The fact that I am resorting to half kilos is significant in itself.  I cannot believe that I have got rid of all the easy stuff and the rest is going to be hard slog and denial.  I suppose that the wine with the meal is the next thing to go, but I firmly believe in the health-giving properties of red wine and playing with the conflicting concepts of indulgence and health. 

I have just discovered my ‘ideal’ weight and, even at the most generous estimate from the friendliest formula I would have to be in comestible refusal for another umpteen months.  Assuming a steady weight loss I would be looking at next autumn before I was anywhere near!  Finding this out was something I should not have done!  I will therefore do a brainwash and revert to my arbitrary goal which is reachable by April.  Then (and if) I am anywhere near what I am aiming at, I will look again at the Forbidden Numbers!

            How can one be a symbol of rectitude when visitors and meals and celebrations and Other Events will combine to divert me from my chosen path?  The April thing is doable, I think, and that is the one that I am going to stay with and aim for and congratulate myself mightily if I get anywhere near it.

            Today, apart from my swim, has been a lazy day. 

My swimming is getting better; my strokes are more powerful and my energy level is rising.  I do not, however, stay in the water for longer than half an hour, so I stand the chance of becoming the best 30-minute swimmer in Castelldefels. 

I am not pushing myself further because although I enjoy swimming, I also find the sort of swimming that I do intensely boring.  For half an hour I can stand it – even like it – but for longer and I am counting the seconds. 

I know perfectly well that, to gain the most from the exercise you have to go that little bit further each time.  I know it and that is as far as the knowledge goes, it does not influence action.  The only times (in the distant past) when I have actually trained for swimming I was almost crying with boredom and fatigue at the end of each session.  Even rugby training (and I hated that with a vengeance) wasn’t as boring as swimming with some dry Fascist holding a stopwatch.  So what I do is what I am going to continue to do and I shall comfort myself with the knowledge that it is more than most will have done!

            The OU story is getting no further.  The bones of the bloody thing are in place, or rather in places – they do not add up to a full skeleton as yet and there is no putting flesh on it until the bones make some sort of sense.  At least I have the title.  What I don’t have is too much time left to get it all done.  I must knuckle (I wonder where that particular bone is on my structure at the moment) down and get on with it and submit something on time.  I really do not want to ask for an extension – though I am sure that many of my fellow students will be asking for exactly that.

            What I really need to do is get my Kings card done.  I have the photograph and I could easily email it to those kind people who sent me a Christmas card.  I suppose it would make me feel just a tinge less guilty – although I have not sunk to the depths of one of my friends who sent me a Christmas card with a British second-class stamp on it.  Now that is what I call optimism! 

Interestingly the card did arrive with a large printed sticky label on the back from the British Post Office informing me that the postage was insufficient and therefore the card had been delivered by an alternative service which may have taken a little more time! 

This is the first time that this has happened and it is a direct encouragement to be mean with the postage, underpay and let it be delivered a few weeks late.  I wonder what the alternative delivery system actually was.  There was no indication that it was anything other than the Spanish postal service, so one is left to speculate.  Does this mean that there is a human side to the postal system that we had never previously suspected?  Or is this something which only occurs at Christmas?

Tomorrow Christmas will be officially over – though it turns out that Twelfth Night and the taking down of the decorations was a Victorian invention to encourage workers to get back into the right frame of mind to start working again.  In days gone by decorations might have been left up for a month or three, thereby adding a touch of warmth and festivity to the cold and bleak months of winter.  However, the Christmas cards (our only concession to the festive season) will be taken down when I get up tomorrow and that will be over for another year.

Next year I am determined to put the Christmas tree up.  I actually bought some new decorations from Lidl (!), put them in a cupboard and have done nothing with them.  Next year they will come out with all the delight of something new and strange.  Yes, next year the tree will be there – even if Christmas Humbug is much more to my taste.

Next week my next box set should arrive.  This time it is a bargain box of ballet music which would be ideal to put on my swimming mp3 player.  Unfortunately my computer refuses to recognize the thing as a hard drive and so I can do nothing with it.  Luckily it is full (and I mean full to the last atom) with music and it will take me a considerable time to have exhausted the possibilities of the number of tracks that are contained in it.  Though I have to admit that some parts of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ do seem to come round with suspicious regularity, together with ‘Hit me with your rhythm stick.’  The one thing you can say about my choice in music is that it is inclusive – with the exception of Rap obviously.

Now I have to decide: card or story?  Choices!

Knowing me, probably neither.