The rumble not in the jungle

14st 1lb; zero alcohol; 1,413; Last Push.

I was woken at the crack of dawn by what sounded like an avalanche, momentarily creating a vision of the house lying under a deep carpet of snow, as in a pre-Global Warming Christmas card. But a level-headed investigation quickly established that the noise was in fact the result of a comparatively small amount of ice descending from my bedroom skylight.

I believe that it’s always a good idea to focus on something, and today I decided to focus on being bloody cold and losing one last pound so that I could claim to be just 14 stone on Easter morning, and to have met the challenge I took up with another columnist in the local paper in January. He had pledged to lose 21lbs by Easter, not realizing at the time that we were in for the earliest Easter since 1913 (and, indeed, as people keep telling me on the wireless, almost the earliest possible, since the formula of the first Sunday of the first full moon after the Spring equinox can throw up any date between 22 March and 25 April). He wasn’t doing too badly, albeit not as well as me. Then he went off on a two week jaunt to California, which proved less than helpful. He e-mailed me this evening, graciously conceding defeat. I was almost too weak to open the message.

The brain-numbing chill must surely mean that I am consuming lots and lots of calories just to stay alive. But I do miss the howling wind that came with the snow yesterday. In its absence, the background noises of the log fire crackling and my grandfather clock ticking are comprehensively drowned by the sound of my stomach rumbling.