Oddly unrelated events, occurrences, or whatever in the past week or so have all contributed to the formation of a new master plan for 2006:
The house has gone quiet. The daughter has moved into her new house in Portsmouth and I no longer have her tempting me down to the pub of an evening, nor is her boyfriend frying up calorific breakfasts. The only permanent residents are the cat, the wife, four bantams from next door (who seem to think that they own the place) and me.
The party season has come to an end. Christmas and New Year festivities are distant memories since during January we have celebrated birthdays of the wife, the daughter and the son. Following an excellent lunch on Friday (where a friend had me comparing the virtues of Italian and Portuguese wines for several happy hours) my diary has become alarmingly free of social, bibulous engagements.
At a rather gloomy meeting last week with a financial advisor I had to admit my real weight.
The (extremely good) blog of one of one of my ex-employees has disappeared. When I asked her why I could not find the site any more she told me that it had “gone private”. She is a singer with a band (in her spare time) and has had to close the blog to casual readers as she kept upsetting other band members with her views regarding their talents, looks, behaviour, etc, etc. Now to me a “subscribers only” blog isn’t a blog anymore. The fun of the thing is that you never quite know who is reading your words.
I’ve been displaying signs of lack of fitness (much tiredness), and have been just a little too serious about my evening gin and tonic, and (shared) bottle of wine, and visit to the pub if the daughter is around.
I’d really like a new laptop. I’d also like to go skiing again. And I should really replace my car(s) with something more economical and sensible (and fun).
So as you have guessed I put all that information into a pot, stirred and simmered it, and out come a diet and self-improvement programme based on targets and motivated by being an absolutely public diet with weight losses and gains over the next few weeks published on this blog.
The starting weight (gulp) is seventeen-and-a-half stone (about the equivalent to two double decker buses)and the target weight is two stone less by Easter. Yes, I’ll be fifteen-and-a-half stone and no longer “mortally obese”, just “seriously obese” on Easter Sunday.
The reward system works as follows. When I reach my first target of sixteen-and-a-half-stone I can buy myself an inexpensive new laptop. My second target is the ‘late booking bargain’ skiing holiday and that gets awarded when I dip under sixteen stone (the sooner the better before the snow disappears). The final target of fifteen-and-a half-stone will be rewarded with a change of car – just before the new round of MOTs, insurance renewals and tax discs start again in May.
Financing the scheme will of course be simple. My renewed energy will mean that I’ll work harder and earn more money. Just in case that doesn’t work I have a foolproof plan told me by a friend from Seattle – simply bet everything I own on the Seattle Seahawks winning Superbowl in Detroit on February 5th. With the price at 6-4 I think I may have the inexpensive new laptop covered.
And remember the results of the Ranting Nappa Diet will be charted publicly in this blog starting next week (by which time I’ll be able to see if a few nights of French food will help or hinder progress). I started yesterday and for those who are interested in the formula it is simply eat and drink less, exercise more. To kick-start matters I have temporarily renounced alcohol (and that includes gin), bread, potatoes and cheesey snacks (including nuts, crisps, Cheeselets, and Twiglets). My luxury (allowed) food is the odd liquorice allsort as they have a sort of F-Plan effect on me.
Book Review
I’ve finished (and enjoyed) Henning Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled. Dour Swedish police detective Kurt Wallandar shares striking similarities with Ian Rankin’s Rebus (drink problem, daughter, etc*.). Both writers have a keen sense of “place” and, to help us Brits understand what goes where in Sweden every Mankell book I have ever read seems to come with a map (in this case two). In the same way as tourists can now go an Inspector Rebus trail through Edinburgh (long pause at the “Ox” public house before St Leonard’s Police Station, etc.), so I’m sure you can now visit Wallandar’s Ystad. But while Rankin is pure Edinburgh, Mankell is a Swede who devotes a lot of his time to Africa, and this comes through in his books. They are very precisely written and the translations are always excellent. Recommended.
*No, this blog does not invite “comments”.
