Less filthy

14st 2lb; 7.0 units of alcohol yesterday; 1,264 days left; Home.

The Less Tall Cheshire Brunette is coming to stay for the weekend, and in a mad moment I volunteered to drive across to Cheshire tomorrow to collect her. We have also got some people coming to dinner on Sunday, which is a rare enough event for me to start preparing for it half a week in advance. I began yesterday evening by opening a bottle of the Chateau Musar 1995 and checking whether it was drinkable. I got through most of the bottle by the time I was absolutely sure, and by then I no longer cared either way. Before that I had made an effort to tidy up the garden by mowing the grass, something I had left for far too long owing to the fact that it has pissed with rain every day for as long as I can remember. It was still too wet to cut, really, and too long to tackle with a motor mower. But when one has octogenarian neighbours, it seems unfair to summon the help of a bloke with a scythe, who might so easily be mistaken for the Grim Reaper. So I persevered, with the machine groaning in protest, repeatedly getting clogged with wet grass and finally emitting a loud bang, accompanied by a sheet of flame. I applied my usual technological patch of turning it off and starting it up again. It always works with computers. Now I can report that it works with lawnmowers, too.

Although I had some hopes of the weekend turning out to be absolutely filthy, I sensed that the LTCB would not appreciate it if it did so when she ran her fingers across my kitchen work surfaces or sitting room furniture. So I passed an entire day of mind-numbing tedium doing the accumulated washing, scrubbing the kitchen, cleaning windows, ferrying in baskets of logs for the fires, watering the house plants, dusting and vacuum cleaning. Even I was bored, and I usually take so much pleasure in simple, menial domestic tasks that several of my Cambridge contemporaries suggested that I would do better to abandon my ambitions to become a don, and stay on a as a college bedmaker.

I had put on 2lb yesterday thanks to the bastards who run one of Northumberland’s splendid farm shops putting their sausages in 12oz packs for sale in the local garage, and making them so delicious that it is impossible to resist eating the whole lot at a single sitting. Impossible for me, at any rate. I tried to make amends today by expending lots of calories on my spring cleaning, and by not eating very much. In the evening I attempted to revert to my successful Iet™ (the No D for Dinner Diet), but finally weakened and opened a tin of corned beef. Luckily the second slice I cut contained something that looked suspiciously like a maggot, which killed my appetite completely. Perhaps there is a marketing opportunity here for a new range of maggot-enhanced delicacies to help the morbidly obese down the long and winding path back to something like normality.