Category Archives: In the here & now

Has Anyone Seen My Spear?

In the here & now, , ,

I’m still in the hole.

On Sunday I managed to reset, and I went to bed feeling like a food survivor. I was pre-occupied with the thought of food all day but although I succumbed to the trifle, I trod carefully and acted like I had mud stripes on my forehead and a spear in my hand…I was a warrior, digging in and ready to fight one food battle at a time.

Monday was going to be my sugar-free ground zero, remember? It was a great plan, only I accepted a piece of apple cake at my Godmother’s wake, which had been baked by one of her good friends. Her friend’s need to find comfort through feeding people fitted hand-in-glove with my need to seek comfort in eating what she’d baked. The scones were good too, in case you’re wondering.

At that point I dropped my spear, and it was all downhill from there. As if the apple cake and the scone hadn’t done enough damage, my boy and I had promised to take mum out for lunch afterwards, and although I’d deliberately suggested eating at a great restaurant which has one of my favourite healthy menus, I went and ordered a dirty great gourmet burger with sweet potato fries, which wasn’t helpful.

I had a word with myself, and agreed to forgive the false start on the basis that Monday had been a particularly emotional and difficult day, and maybe I’d expected too much of myself under the circumstances. I made a new plan to start over on Tuesday.

Which I did. And it was all going really well until I hit lunchtime, when the wheels came off again. I allowed myself to be seduced by the idea of eating the same as the girls in the office who were visiting a local deli to pick up something good, and I almost broke my neck to join in. That, together with the five cookies I ate mid-afternoon meant I hit suppertime with barely any calories left in the bank, and bang on cue another fuck it moment happened when I went all out and cooked a calorie-laden supper for me and my boy.

Followed by ice-cream.

I’m going through the motions of saying I’ll reset again today. Except already I can hear the Asshole in my head pissing himself laughing at my intention to win back the upper hand. Whatever, whatever, whatever…let’s see you try, bitch.

I know where the booby traps are. I have to travel up to Scotland this afternoon on business. Three hours each way on a train with a trolly service and a buffet car, and I’m overnighting in a hotel with a room service menu. It’s got fucking disaster written all over it and I feel massively, helplessly out of control.

I’m home late tomorrow and then…then I’ll have a golden window of opportunity to reset the dial properly, since I’m going to be forced down the road of nil-by-mouth from twelve o’clock midnight.

My knee surgery happens on Friday morning. I imagine when I wake up afterwards I’ll feel as rough as toast due to the anaesthetic, which usually knocks me sick and I won’t feel much like eating. Nor will I be able to drive, so hobbling to the shops to buy Haagen Dazs isn’t going to be one of my options. So, here’s the plan.

When I get back tomorrow evening I’ll do a healthy food shop, which I’ll be stuck with until I’m mobile again. And that might take a while. There’s no point in asking my boy to bring me naughties since I have already formally appointed him as the fun police and no matter what tactics I might wheel out he’ll point blank refuse to help me wrap my chops around anything I shouldn’t be eating.

This isn’t me giving myself licence to throw caution to the wind for the next forty eight hours by the way…if I can find my spear, I’ll crack on with the business of being a warrior. All I’m saying is, if I can’t there’s a plan B.

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Until We Meet Again

In the here & now

We had a wonderful day today. Sad in parts, and very emotional but at the same time it was lovely to share memories and celebrate the life of this remarkable woman. Thank you so very much for all your lovely messages of support, and I’m touched by the way you’ve all surrounded me with this blanket of care, and propped me up.

You’d be proud of me…I managed to get through my eulogy without falling apart. Well, I say that…I lost it a bit right at the end, but by then it was okay. I did her proud. One or two of you have asked me to share some of the memories that I talked about, and I’d be happy to.
Most people knew my Godmother as Audrey. To us, she has always been Elsie. She was my Aunty Elsie, and she’s been my mum’s best friend for the last eighty years.

I won’t dwell on Elsie’s childhood, but it’s fair to say that having lost her mum at a very early age, it wasn’t without its challenges. Never comfortable with the role of ‘victim’, her formative years put the steel in her backbone, and she rose above it all. At her first opportunity, Elsie reinvented herself as Audrey, determined to live life on her terms and show the world that she was a force to be reckoned with.

In many respects, she was a woman before her time. In the 1970s, that same backbone, together with her razor sharp intellect and drive saw her rise to the very top of her profession, and her career as Chief Export Sales Manager for a large printing firm took her all over the world. This is a picture that she and I found earlier this year when we were clearing out some of her old papers. It was lifted from her international driving license. I mean, how many women do you know who had an international driving licence almost fifty years ago? Exactly!

She would breeze into our house on a cloud of Chanel No 5, and fire my imagination with stories about places I’d never heard of. She blazed a trail through South America, and Japan and she made friends around the world. Some of those friends became our friends too.

To an impressionable little girl living an ordinary life, she was fascinating. She would float around in brightly coloured kaftans and I vividly remember her green eye shadow, and her brightly painted nails. Mum used to call her The Duchess Of Cock-a-Leekie, which Elsie found infuriating and hilarious in equal measure.

She loved to cook. She had a very temperamental oven that we nicknamed Vesuvius, and visits to her house generally involved her trying to recreate recipes that she’d encountered on her travels, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes Vesuvius would burn dinner to a crisp and she’d make me cover my tender young ears whilst she turned the air blue.

When I was seventeen and learning to drive, she would pull up outside in her very big and very fancy company car, stick the ‘L’ plates on the bonnet and throw me the keys. We’d set off, me behind the wheel, Elsie directing operations from the passenger seat and mum chewing her knuckles in the back, praying that both car and occupants would arrive home unscathed.

Elsie took her responsibilities as my Godparent very seriously. To mum’s despair, she taught me how to season a sentence with just enough salty language to drive home a point. In my teenage years she could always be relied upon to provide a steady supply of cigarettes. Sorry mum. She taught me the art of French inhaling, which felt like the height of sophistication back in the 1980s when smoking was cool, and it made me the envy of all my friends. She dispensed words of wisdom when I dated unsuitable boys, and she instilled in me a curiosity about the world which has never gone away.

In the same way that Elsie’s colourful life seemed full and rich and exciting to us, our quiet and altogether less exciting life provided a bolt-hole for Elsie in the more turbulent times of her own life. The enduring and symbiotic friendship between her and my mum which had its roots in childhood has been a beautiful thing over the last eighty years, and these two very different women, both amazing in their own way, have been the biggest influences in my life.

I will remember my Godmother as spirited, stubborn, intelligent, sometimes difficult, always determined, proud, independent and wise, and I will miss her beyond measure.

Elsie Audrey Woodhead, August 1933 – July 2017

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Sweeping Up The Mess

In the here & now

Well that was a turbulent week. The storm appeared from nowhere and blew the shit out of me, but I think the worst of it has passed now. Yesterday morning I faced the music and had a Come-to-Jesus conversation with the Shitbird Scale, which wasn’t pretty, but it is what it is. I’m philosophical about it, you know? I made a mess, and now it’s time to sweep it up.

Something had to blow, and it did. Spectacularly. The sugar monster got me right between the eyes, starting with the coconut slice last Monday, and ending with a cheese and onion quiche and three peanut butter Magnums on Saturday night. I don’t need to go into detail about the six days in between, but nine pounds and change on the scale tells it’s own story. I’m such a fucking plank.

I’m done though. I rebooted yesterday, and the time was right…I’d started to miss the discipline. I’m not making excuses – you all know me well enough to realise I don’t do that ever – but sometimes giving yourself the chance to miss something is not a bad thing. It’s kind of like the acid test to see whether it’s a keeper, right? It’s a dangerous game, because if you don’t miss that thing you’ve walked away from you’re screwed.

Thankfully, I came full circle. I went from feeling relieved that I’d relinquished control, to craving the control back again. Yesterday, I took mum and visited some of our extended family so I couldn’t be fully in control of the menu per se, but I was in control of what I chose to eat. And I did okay. My choices weren’t completely sugar free – come on, there was home-made trifle up for grabs, and I’m not made of wood – but the trifle was duly calorie-counted and logged, and today will be my sugar-free ground zero.

This morning, we lay my beloved Godmother to rest. It’s going to be a very emotional day, so please forgive me short-changing you a bit. My head’s a tad wobbly and I can only really manage half a post. I need to go read my eulogy to Charlie dog a few more times, so I can desensitise myself to some of the memories and give myself a fighting chance of sharing them in the moment without snot candles 🙂

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Falling Down The Hole

In the here & now, ,

I’m having a proper bare-knuckle fight with myself at the moment, as I wake up to day five of pure anarchy. What is it that tips you out of the sweet spot and forces you under the wheels? I can’t even sit here and tell you that I feel out of control, because actually I feel completely, dispassionately in control except I’m doing all the wrong things.

As I was ordering my lunch yesterday from the deli, having deliberately walked out of the house without fixing lunch,  my adopted mantra was running through my head – if I eat any of that I am choosing to wake up weighing more tomorrow than I do today…

The words I’ll have a piece of quiche please with some potato salad, oh and a slab of chocolate cake found their way out of my mouth anyway. And as I looked at my reflection in the shiny glass dome of the food display I was definitely flipping the bird to myself. I mean come on. The chocolate cake wasn’t even that good, but I ate it anyway, along with a kit-kat and two fingers of shortbread.

Where the actual fuck has this come from? Last week I fought the good fight every day, and although every mealtime felt like a battleground and my calorie allocation was a feat of engineering, I pretty much managed to make it add up. Well, more or less. But I definitely came out of last week feeling like I was still in the fight, even though I was on the ropes.

Right now, I’m not even counting. And I know I should be. Even as I’m dancing with the devil I should be logging, tracking and facing the reality of what’s going into my mouth but the Asshole is behind the wheel, and in the euphoria of this food fug I’m confused about how it’s making me feel. I should feel guilty, right? Bad. What I actually feel is sweet blessed relief that I’ve relinquished control and fuck the consequences.

I laid there last night trying to find some words for today’s post, and no words came. So I shut my laptop and went to sleep…I never do that. This is my safe place, you know? It’s where I can tip out the contents of my head and work through what’s going on no matter how tired I feel or how reluctant the words are to arrange themselves on the page. But I didn’t even put up a fight last night when my own head shut me out. I just gave into it and checked out, in fact I was asleep by 8.30pm.

I feel quite calm, actually. And I don’t know how today’s going to be, but I do know that I need to do everything in my power to dig myself out of this hole I seem to have fallen into. I’ve done it before, and I know I can do it again. I just need to summon up enough will to pick up the shovel  🙂

 

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Coming Home To Roost.

In the here & now, ,

I had to take my mum to the fracture clinic at the hospital on Monday. I swear, her right arm looks like it belongs to a six foot tall navy blue body builder, it’s so swollen and bruised. My mum is tiny, I mean she can’t weigh more than about eighty pounds, so right now it probably outweighs all her other limbs put together. The doctor was fairly happy with her progress though, so I feel a bit more able to breathe, and a bit less strung out.

By the time we’d done the rounds of doctor/more x-rays/doctor/made-to-measure-sling lady, almost four hours had passed, and we were starving. Actually, that’s not strictly true… I was starving. Mum doesn’t have much of an appetite these days, and she’s so fed up at the moment she probably wouldn’t have even noticed if we’d skipped a meal. Like that would ever happen on my watch, right?

We agreed it would be nice to eat lunch together in the hospital canteen, which has a fabulous salad bar. I parked mum up at a table in her borrowed wheelchair and went back to join the line. Boxed salad for me, tuna sandwich for mum. Oh, and the puddings…sugar free jelly for me, and an off-the-chart awesome hand-made coconut slice with jam and pastry for mum. Oh my god, that coconut slice looked so moist I could’ve wrung it out, no doubt about it. There were about ten slices on the cake stand, and I wanted to lick every single one of them as I walked past.

Now, picture the scene. Mum, after half a tuna sandwich, was feeling quite full, and she didn’t want the coconut slice. She wanted the jelly. I may or may not have been able to predict that scenario in advance on account of the fact that 1) mum really loves jelly and 2) she’s not really that big on coconut.

Buying it was okay though, right? Look at this innocent face…it wasn’t for me. It was a treat for my mum. Except if I’d paid attention to what was really going on as I handed over eleven pounds thirty for my tray full of booty, I would have known immediately that the jelly was for mum and the coconut slice was for me. Of course it fucking was.

I tried to sigh and look disappointed, as I agreed mum could have my sugar-free jelly. I was prepared to let it go and take one for the team, or at least that’s what I was desperately trying to make my face say as my insides started breakdancing behind the scenes at the thought of all the coconut and pastry and jam that was coming my way.

I ate it. I ate every last moist coconutty crumb, and I’m here to tell you I was transported to heaven and back again right there in the canteen. It was the most awesome thing I’ve ever tasted. What I wanted to do was go buy the rest of them. Every last succulent slice. But I didn’t…I stopped at just the one.

And you know what, stopping at one is fine, I mean yey…go me.  Except one is all it took to tip me into dieting quicksand. Let’s face it, it was always going to, wasn’t it? That generous slice of heaven was loaded with sugar, and now I’m loaded with sugar, which means my inner sat-nav is trying to steer me towards disasterville. Again.

Sunday was so-so. Monday’s coconut slice was compounded by an un-calorie-counted chilli for supper, and yesterday there was an incident with an unplanned frittata at lunchtime, not to mention delaying tactics at the office engineered by yours truly which pretty much guaranteed I’d miss the exercise class I’d been planning to go to.

That’s the sound of wobbly wheels right there…looks like my anxiety is coming home to roost in the form of self-sabotage. Just for a change.

Today is a new day. It was just a blip. I’m not putting pressure on myself to be perfect.

Yes, you are…

No. I’m really not.

It happened, get over it and move on, right?

 

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