The deep disappointment of the questing dogger

14st 1lb; 2.6 units of alcohol yesterday (one lousy pint of 4.5% ABV bitter with lunch); 1,399; Justnot Fair.

I put on 2lb thanks to my Big Lunch on Wednesday, taking my weight back above 14 stone, which is exactly where I didn’t want it to be. So I dieted rigorously on Thursday, and nothing happened. Yesterday I not only ate for lunch a plate of fish and chips that could have fed a family of four quite comfortably, but bought a packet of toffees as a present for an elderly neighbour when I was in the Co-op on my way home. Only they were on a “Buy One Get One Free” offer so I naturally picked up two of them and had just the one sweet while I was driving back to my house. Then another. Then the whole sodding packet (636 calories). After which there seemed no reason not to eat for supper the ham and egg pie I had bought from the baker in Rothbury, because I can never resist a ham and egg pie. I got on the scales this morning with considerable trepidation, but am still 14st 1lb. What the hell is going on?

When asked at lunch the other day what a man on a diet thought he was doing by ordering the most fattening things on the menu, I cited a cheering article from the Daily Telegraph which told the affecting tale of a man of about my original size who had lost just over a stone at a “diet boot camp”, whatever that is, and then found that his weight loss stalled. A specialist told him that this was because he had adopted an absolutely consistent low calorie diet, and his metabolic rate had simply slowed down to reflect that. The answer was to start eating normally again so that his metabolism would speed up. He tried it, with the aid of some crisps, a bottle of wine and a big portion of fish and chips, and duly started losing weight again. Unfortunately I failed to read the thing properly and thought it said that you could lose weight if you ate normally 80% of the time and dieted for the other 20%. Today I looked at it properly and found that the 80/20 split was, as I should have suspected, the other way around. This was a bit depressing, to be honest. The dog was a bit depressed, too, because it started snowing heavily just as I was about to take him for his daily walk, and I then refused to go.

While nothing happened to raise the dog’s spirits, I was cheered by watching the legendary production of The Naked Civil Servant starring John Hurt and introduced by the real Quentin Crisp. I’d heard so much about it over the years that I almost felt I had seen it, but I hadn’t, since it was first broadcast in 1975, my Cambridge period when I watched no TV at all apart from Monty Python. What a strange priority that seems now.

I am also deriving much pleasure from a splendid new time-waster I have discovered. Irritated by a friend boasting about the number of visitors to his blog, I installed a discreet little gizmo on this one which keeps a tally of visitor numbers. There are around 130 of you a week, apparently, spending an average of 2.5 minutes each on the site. Which seems pretty feeble to me, but then you do have approximately 112 million other blogs to choose from, so may I take this opportunity to thank you for your interest and support?

I don’t want to put you off reading this in any way, but the gizmo also reveals how you found your way onto the site. I am amused to note that, on the strength of one passing reference, several people have ended up here after typing into Google “dogging northumberland” or, even more optimistically, “dogging rothbury” or “dogging wooler”. I feel for you all in the depths of the disappointment you must have experienced. I realize that you are in a hurry, reflected in your average 0.00 minute stay on this site, but if you do strike lucky with the real thing, please feel free to leave a comment sharing the details with the rest of us.