Voyage round my parents

Good Friday 2012.

(I'm still fat, by the way).

So, I've come back to London to spend Easter with my parents, reconnect with home, eat some food with vitamins in it rather than carbohydrates.

And one way of reconnecting with my mother is to allow her to do some mothering (reconnecting with my father just needs copious amounts of sarcasm). So she cut my hair. If I felt it made much of a difference, this would be a considerable gamble, given that she's "getting on" now, and sometimes, in the evenings looks small and old and in danger of getting lost.

Anyway, she dug at a "flake of skin" on my scalp. Ouch. The flake of skin was my scalp.

So, she said, I think you should put some oil on your scalp.

Oh, I replied. Will it make me look like Gene Vincent?

No, she said. You won't have some greasy quiff. It's special oil for your scalp.

What is it?

It's oil for your scalp.

Really?

It's called Scalp Oil.

Round and round it goes... I think sarcasm offers more efficient bonding.

Good Friday 2010 Where am I?

So, it's Good Friday. I'm ravenous - combining the start of trying to control what I eat with some old fashioned religious penance.

I'm in my parents' house in Dalkey and looking out of the window I can see a Spring Irish sun warming the greys and ochres of the garden wall. Beyond it, there is one of my father's fanciful palm trees, it's fronds tousled (there is no other word) by the wind, and beind them all, the dappled blue-grey pacific expanse of the sea. The horizon is sharp enough despite a little haze, and some ships move slow into and out of the bay.

It's chilly outside and never quite warm enough inside this old granite house, unless you've stuck your bum onto the front rail of the Aga.

I'm here because my parents suggested I come out. They, I think, wanted to check that I'm OK, that I'm not in some state of implacable despair, stuck in Vienna. I also wanted to check on them, now that my mother is suffering from her chemotherapy medicines, and that my father seems finally to have turned the corner from irreverent middle-aged bonhomie to something more like conventional old age. Mortality is upon them, and I wish that I felt more youthful and fit and energetic to give them succour. Perhaps when I've lost more weight...

But I do feel so hungry, and I do so resent it when my mother encourages me. Or is it "controls" me? Or is there a difference? Is the intention different? But when do we ever really know our intentions? When are we ever clear about ourselves? When did my wife ever understand her own intentions, let alone what was happening inside me?

And yet I resent and bristle and seek to escape.

This gnawing feeling in the pit of my body and my will, this gnawing feeling will have to be my constant companion for the next year. My friend, my confidant. And I feel so old and so tired.

It feels so daunting.

I started reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road yesterday. I haven't read McCarthy before. I looked at one of his books. It can still remember how it started: "The flame and the image of the flame..." For anyone who's studied literature, this just felt too literary. But The Road is different. Even the sentences that make no linguistic or logical sense fit perfectly into the mood of the book.

So I'm close to despair and I'm reading The Road.

Good Friday 2010 278 Lb Introduction!

It's Good Friday, but I'll avoid issues of cosmic sacrifice and redemption, and skip right on to why I'm writing this. This will be a diary, in which I shall detail my efforts to discipline myself, avoid drifting and wasting time and money, and try and shed some weight.

There is a long-term goal. I've been given an introductory flying lesson (something I've dreamt about for years) but I'm too fat (heavy) to do it. Hence the title of this blog thing. [Too many hences?] I have until September (I think) to get myself into some sort of shape. I'm also tired of feeling unwell, tired of straining to bend over to put my socks on, tired of being shocked at my profile every time I catch my reflection in the mirror.

Frankly, I need to make myself over, so to speak, and I don't think I'll have the discipline and the self esteem to stay even a weekend on the course without the scrutiny of my future self.

So, I'm writing this not for public consumption (who would ever read something like this?) and more for myself.

(I also want to put in some practice at getting sentences down in a coherent form. If they have a passing eloquence, or actually make sense, that'll be a bonus.)

So I weigh 278 pounds. That's 19 stone, 12 pounds - just under the dreaded 20 stone. In terms of kilos, it's a lot (I'll check when I reconnect to post this). I'm definitely officially obese, I'm quite possibly morbidly obese. But looking down at my stomach, I can't really see how fat I am. Hence my shock when I see myself in the mirror. Looking down at my body, I can fool myself into thinking that I'm just heavy, or just chubby, or just... I can lie to myself.

How I came to be like this - a fat man trapped inside an obese body - will, no doubt, form a major part of what I'll write in days to come. It'll be a diary, but I'll probably meander onto other things that strike me.

I weigh 126 kilos.

There. I've said it.