Tuesday 30 September 2008

From misery to free love

No idea what I weigh; 5.0 units of alcohol yesterday; 1,224 days to go; Zegg.

I am definitely in a downward spiral. I felt almost tearful this morning as I contemplated the dreadful prospect of returning to Northumberland. Even though my house there is, on more or less any objective measure, more comfortable than the LTCB’s in Chester. Well, apart from the objective measure concerned with the availability of central heating, obviously.

All right, so it may be no more comfortable than the LTCB’s, but it is a hell of a lot roomier and it hasn’t got a sort of Borstal right next door. Its critical failing is that it hasn’t got the LTCB in it, and I have grown very fond of her company. So much so that I would contemplate relocating to enjoy more of it, had we not met just before the housing market collapsed and the credit system froze up, making it impossible for either of us to stand a snowball in hell’s chance of selling or renting out our houses if we should feel minded to set up home together.

Life is a bitch, is it not?

I may not have got almost tearful just about going home, come to think of it. I may have sneaked a look at my bank balance and investment portfolio, too, the state of which would be enough to make anyone weep.

Fortunately the LTCB was on hand, before she went to work, and was able to point out with her usual brisk good sense that the only reason for going home was that I had scheduled it, and that there was no reason why I could not unschedule it again. So I did just that, and attempted to cheer myself up with a fine lunch in the Curmudgeon’s Arms. Sadly its positive effects were only temporary.

Most of the rest of the day passed in a useless blur, though I did stir myself to take radical action in the early evening and go out to buy a couple of 100 watt bulbs, one of which raised the light level in the LTCB’s sitting room from sepulchral to merely gloomy, and made it possible to read a newspaper without the sense that one was straining one’s eyes and that blindness would inevitably follow. I’m sure my mother warned me about that risk, as well as the other obvious cause of blindness in teenage boys.

The LTCB was out on her own this evening, at supper with some girlfriends, but returned in time to watch a Channel 4 programme which had caught her eye in the schedules. She had billed it to me as a load of filth calculated to appeal to elderly blokes everywhere, but had omitted to mention the dread words “presented by Dawn Porter”. The appeal of this woman to commissioning editors is completely beyond me. Predictably we ended up with a programme in which pretty much f*** all happened, and nothing of interest was revealed. During her time at some German free love commune she kept asking, rhetorically, why she let herself in for these things and did not get a proper job. Why, indeed, Dawn? Why, indeed? And, more to the point, just how does a nice enough, not particularly attractive, conventional, dim middle class girl manage to land series on two different, publicly funded television channels in such quick succession?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Keith.

Found your blog via my mate, Drayt.

Fell in love with your elegantly simple vital statistics:
"14st 9lb; 5.0 units of alcohol yesterday evening; 1,226; Flintshire."

I must say given the divide between our two peoples, I haven't a clue what a 'unit' of alcohol is...nor "1,226 Flintshire."

In my wife's ex-Soviet land, everyone refers to their consumption in grams. Here in the State's, perhaps half a bottle or a whole if one is really spiraling into the abyss.

Anyway, it sounds like you're still in merry olde, England and should count your blessings for that. Your counterparts up in William Wallace land are too decayed to blog anymore.

I've heard their age old 'success formula' is unchanged after all these centuries.

1) Join the Black Watch.
2) Go to the City for a few years to work for a merchant bank.
3) Come home and drink oneself to death.

Anyway, thanks for the cheerful dose of depression!

It's dawned on me that LTCB is not
the Long Term Credit Bank!

Cheers,

Lawrence Bernstein

Keith Hann said...

Dear Lawrence

Comments on this blog are rarer than positive stories about the Conservative Party on the BBC, so yours is much appreciated.

To clarify my opening notes each day, I started recording my weight at a time when I was pursuing a surprisingly successful weight-reducing diet. This has sadly fallen into abeyance since I met the girlfriend known as the LTCB or Less Tall Cheshire Brunette (a title of her own choosing, designed to distinguish her from the Tall Cheshire Blonde she originally picked out for me as my ideal partner).

The LTCB is by no means a Feeder, intent on keeping me in thrall by ensuring that I become so obese that no other woman will look at me twice. But I have rather taken my eye off the ball since I have been happily spending much of my time with her. I keep up the daily record as a clearly ineffective memo to myself that I really ought to be doing something about it.

I realized when I read your comment that I did not know what a unit of alcohol is, either, but I can tell you now that it is 10ml of pure alcohol by volume, or 8g by weight, and is the British Government's preferred measure for frightening its population, who are told that they are doomed if they drink more than 21 units per week or four per day (if male) or 14 units per week or three per day (if female). If you have an idle moment, you can depress yourself by seeing how small a ration this is at http://www.units.nhs.uk/unitcalculator.html

The number quoted towards the start of each daily entry is the days to go until Saturday, 4 February 2012, when I shall be dying, at any rate according to www.deathclock.com

I tried going back to the site for a second opinion, but it only made it worse.

Even I have forgotten why I put a place name in the first sentence each day. It started off as a sea area. It now usually relates to where I have been that day, and sometimes it is a moderately clever joke relating to something in the text. But I am probably the only person who will ever spot it.

I started this blog in November 2007 when I was massively overweight, terminally single and seriously depressed, not least by my failure to attract readers to my writing. Now at least I am only averagely overweight, have an attractive and much younger partner who was predisposed to like me because she enjoyed the blog, and am a bit more cheerful. I still do not have enough readers for my taste, but you can't have everything. Feel free to nudge a few more in this direction.

I set myself the task of writing an entry every day for a year. I currently seem to be about three weeks in arrears on that pledge. If I were a mortgagee with Northern Rock, that would be enough to get me evicted. Best crack on with clearing the backlog, then.

All best wishes

Keith