Another new beginning

14st 12lb; 4.5 units of alcohol yesterday. No, I know you don’t care and that this sub-Bridget Jones introduction adds nothing to your enjoyment (if that is the word I want) of this blog, but it serves a moderately useful purpose. I only managed to lose a respectable amount of weight last year because I could not face the daily humiliation of reporting my failure to do so on the Internet (making it a bit like joining Weightwatchers, but without the unpleasantness of actually having to be in the same room as a lot of other smelly fat bastards). While the alcohol count sometimes deters me from knocking back a second bottle in the evening after I have enjoyed one with my lunch, and on the whole that seems to me to be in my best interests, too. Having stupidly put on a massive and completely indefensible 16lb since the day I met the Less Tall Cheshire Brunette (or Mrs H as she is now known, somewhat more succinctly) I need all the help I can get to do the same again. Being as I don’t want to find myself back on the hypertension pills, statins, low dose aspirins and anti-depressants, and / or dropping dead of a heart attack just when Baby Charlie is about to do or say something interesting. If, of course, he ever does.

Mrs H put me on a strict regime of No Chocolate and No Pork Scratchings for Lent. Naturally I have not stuck to it, but I am getting recurrent visions of the bumper packets of scratchings piled on the counter of Bowers the Famous Pork Butcher in Clayton Street, which Mrs H and I passed during our last visit to Newcastle, as we made our way from the Persian restaurant by the Central Station to the Grainger Market. I had my nose pressed up against the glass and was making mewing “I want” noises, such as I used to utter when viewing the Hornby Dublo trains in the windows of Boydell’s toy shop in Percy Street in about 1962. And Mrs H gently led me away with a promise that she would come back herself and buy me a packet if I got my weight down to 13st 7lb by the time our son arrived in July.

Yes, I think she’s fairly safe, too. But it can’t do any harm to put it down in print, can it?

So from today I’m starting a new regime: healthy food, less alcohol (though frankly I could drink a lot less alcohol and still be what is technically classed as “a piss artist”) and a return to daily blogging. It won’t be what it was; I’m not hoping or expecting to die on 4 February 2012 now, for one thing, though I accept that it will be a pretty good joke at my expense if I do. No, it will be more about adjusting to married life and fatherhood after 18 years longing to escape from the family into which I was born, and another 36 mainly spent on my own. I’m not saying that it will be interesting, or inspiring. But there might, just might, be the occasional half decent joke.

See my wedding photos on 17 March for definitive proof that there is a first time for everything.

Then keep your fingers crossed and watch this space.