“When two events happen simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.”

– Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

I had a scary moment of the holiday period. I started becoming ill on Boxing day, just the usual trivial stuff – nose and throat, and by New Years Eve it had settled in good and proper. Now, I’m not someone who subscribes to Manflu and I tend to handle illness relatively well. However, by New Years Day it was well and truly getting on my proverbials…

New Years Eve had been a late night, going to bed about 4am, and then New Years Day involved going out for a walk. So by 9.30pm I was well and truly knackered – soaked in the bath and early night.

I woke at about 2am to the smell of some kind of burning. It wasn’t the smell that had woken me, it was just there. As I woke I noticed that the whole room was misty/smokey. I jumped out of bed and rushed into the kids room. I checked all the rooms upstairs – everything ok apart from the smoke.

My rationale at the moment of time was that I didn’t think there was a big roaring fire, just some kind of small simmering type fire, or more likely, something bigger outside that was filtering in through the windows.

Anyway, I rushed downstairs and systematically checked all the rooms – everything ok – except for the smoke. I looked outside, but there was nothing obvious. By the time I returned to the kitchen Victoria was there wondering what was up. She wasn’t at all panicked by some smoke, more likely by my irrational behaviour.

[Paraphrasing a strange conversation that followed...]

“What’s up?”
“The whole house is filled with smoke or mist or something,” I said.
“Go and look in the mirror,”

I looked in the mirror, and my eyes were filled with yuk! A few minutes of vigorous washing later, and everything had returned to normal.

So the smoke turned out to be my cold coming out of my eyes, or a possible reaction to the bubble bath!

The smell – Victoria had lit an incense thingy when we’d got in on New Years Day to attempt to remove the smell of the stale house.

I didn’t sleep anymore that night…

Needless to say, Victoria bought extra smoke alarms and stuff over the weekend…

I’m four weeks into my lose weight regime. My gym work has been good, and my eating has been mostly good. Actually my eating is not too dissimilar from normal, however I have managed to cut out the hunger cravings that normally lead me to chocolate and crisps and rubbish. And my quantity control is better. So I kind of feel balanced.

One major milestone for me is drinking water. As a rule I don’t drink much water – as I don’t like it. To drink water it has to either be ice cold sparkling water on a hot day, or flavoured sparkling water. So at home I drink Bottlegreen cordial with sparkling water. But I generally only drink one large glass with my evening meal; that and a couple of coffees over the day is all I drink.
I don’t go in for the mantra of how much water you must drink, I think everyone is different. I’ve gone 38 years without problem and I can count the number of water infections I’ve had in that time on 1 finger…
That said, I decided that I needed to force myself to drink more during the day as I no longer drink coffee while on my current contract. So I now take a litre bottle of made up flavoured sparkling water to work every day. The thing I’ve noticed is that I grab the drink quite frequently during the morning and I wonder if previously that would have been an urge to eat, which often meant I would get to lunch having already eaten my lunch!

Anyway, 4 weeks ago I was 94kg ( 207lb/14″ 11) approximate BMI of 27.3 ( overweight ). I use approximate here because the BMI calculation is a croc really, because it doesn’t take into account physical size rather than height. A tall muscular person is going to show as overweight based on their BMI, despite the fact that they are relatively fat free.

First week I lost 1.5kg ( 3.3lb ), then 0.1kg ( 0.2lb ), then 0.4kg ( 0.8lb). I was a little dissapointed after week 3 that the trail off had occured as I wanted to lose about 2lb a week. However I knew that over those 2 weeks I had gone to the pictures and had a meal with friends. Which although by my standards I had done very well (2 bottle beers and 2 glasses of wine, and a more than wanted but less than previous, quantity of food), they were nevertheless still potential blips. I took solace in the fact that my stomach ( not waist ) measurement and gone from 41 inch to 39.5 inch. So every movement down was good no matter how small.

Weigh in this morning – 91kg ( 200.5lb ) down 1kg ( 2.2lb ) on last week.
So in four weeks I have lost 3kg ( 6.6lb ). I am below target but very much happy with that, it’s not just that the weight is going down, but I already feel better for it; I no longer have the hunger which means I am less likely to fall off the wagon!

I’m overweight. I’ve been overweight for about as long as I can remember now. I’m not obese, I’m just a little chunky around the waist, a little too much on the belly, and a smidgeon of a extra chin.

It bothers me. Not in a great big way. I don’t get depressed about it. I would just prefer to be a little less. I’m on the border where a little sustained excess makes me feel bad and a little sustained good eating and exercise makes me feel really good.

Over the years I’ve tried to get my weight down without much success. Over the last 18 months I have kept my weight consistent despite know that my eating/drinking habits have been poor. On the whole I have a good diet – I just tend to pick out on crap every now ( usually when work boredom kicks in ) and my portion control is real bad!

So I’m pretty sure that a better eating regime, less pigging out and bingeing, and more consistent exercise should easily allow me to achieve the required weight loss.

So the aim is to drop 2 stone over the next 6 months. That’s nearly 13kilos or 28lb or 13 bags of sugar!

At the start of this last week, I was 94kilo, 207lbs, 14 st 11 lbs. One week in I have dropped just over 3lbs… watch this space… or not…

     Aunty Doris had a lemon tree.
     She didn’t live in Limone on Lake Garda, where the lemons grow in abundance in the rich fertile soil. Nor did she live in Sorento where the Ponderosa’s grow to the size of a small bowling ball. None of those places where the sun shines in perfectly blue cloudless skies for most of the year and the old people are wrinkled from years of working outside under intense sunlight.
     She lived in Shaw, a small densely populated mill town in the valley of the River Beal, at the foot of the Pennines. Famous for its forty eight dark satanic cotton mills — large rectangular brick built buildings that once dominated the panorama, making the area the powerhouse of textile manufacture during the industrial revolution. A town where the cold damp air caresses you, welcomes you, makes you feel like you belong, before its dark angry clouds dump their rain on you before they rise over the Pennines. A place of poor sterile soils and rugged terrain. A place described by Samuel Lewis as having produced ‘a race of hardy and laborious men’.
     She lived in a Edwardian mid-terrace opposite the Ideal Bakery. A two-up-two-down house that stood proud flush on the pavement, branded with years of smoke that bellowed from imposing factory chimneys and rows and rows of chimney stacks servicing cosy but functional coal fires.
     The house had a back garden, nothing more than a small yard that separated it from the cobbled alleys the interwove between the surrounded houses. Large slabs of stone – not the perfectly formed concrete paving stones of modern, but rough, nobbled, and discoloured slabs that might have been pulled from the local quarries — made a path between the neighbours yard wall and the small perfectly preened patch of grass, toward the back of the yard.
     There at the back, nestled between a low wooden fence and the outside privy-cum-coal shed, standing slightly lower than the outbuilding, and surrounded by misplaced homing pigeons, stood the tree. It didn’t grow those gnarly, fragrant, and fresh lemons that you find in the market stalls of Portobello Road, nor the perfectly dull and symmetrical more common to british supermarkets.
     The tree wasn’t covered in long dark green elliptical leaves, finely toothed. It didn’t have small perfect red buds or white purplish flowers with yellow anthers. It wasn’t a tall majestic well nursed tree with light yellow fruit shown beautifully against blue skies. It was nondescript, fitting of its place — in the corner of yard in a small cold Lancashire town. It was old, woody, and ever so slightly out of control.
     But on it, at the end of every branch, sat the most elegant lemons; perfectly formed by years of love and care. Tended for in a way that only a little old lady could.
     Every Shrove Tuesday when I was still so small that I could barely reach the fruit on the low hanging branches, we would cross the yard, propelled by excitement and expectations, to harvest a precious lemon to squeeze on our pancakes.
     I would lift my hand up and caress one of the many perfectly identical plastic fruits hanging from every branch by the thinnest of cotton. No matter which one I took it was always full of the most wonderful juice, the taste of which would always remind me of this special place, this special moment. We would take off the lid and check, just to make sure, before returning to the house to continue with our feast.
     Aunty Doris’s Jif Lemon Tree — a work of wonder and beauty.

Well it didn’t take long into the New Year to get a new contract – which is nice! I decided not to spend any time looking after finishing at IBM; figured I’d have a christmas/new year holiday and then start again in the New Year. Which I did and it was quite refreshing to have a bit of a holiday.

Anyway, the new year started and contracting hunting ensued – and I picked one up within a couple of days. I start with Stannah Stair Lifts on Jan 26th – for 3 months.