I've had a lot of early starts in the last week and so although I had decided I would leave early for the drive to Lancashire, I also decided that I would leave it up to my own body clock what time I would actually leave. I was really tired yesterday so I was pretty sure this meant I would leave about 7:30am.

I was on the road at 5:20am.

I was in Lancashire, fuelled by a lot of coffee, at 10:30.

I was on a hilltop by 10:50.

That's me, on a hill, in a t-shirt, in December, in the North. Not because I'm tough (though I am tough) but because I was sweating a lot!

Still very unfit!

Day 183 was, roughly speaking, the middle of my year long odyssey to lose weight. I had previously promised that I had something planned for this point but, when it came down to it, I didn't. And then Denise finished her NaNoWriMo and that seemed more worthy of celebration. 

However...

I'm going away for a few days. Up to Lancashire to see my Mum and Dad and the rest of my family and then I'm going on a course in sunny Telford. These things will probably present me with the temptations of food. I'm going out for a meal with my folks and when I go to Telford I will be staying in a hotel where they will offer me a cooked breakfast.

In the run up to these sorts of events in the past I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about what food I will eat while I'm away. Especially the thought of a massive buffet, all-you-can-eat, dripping-with-butter full English Breakfast.

In the run up to this little trip though I've been quietly obsessing about whether I can get a bit of exercise done while I'm away. There's a big hill (there's a lot of big hills) near to where my Mum and Dad live that we used to go up and I quite fancy a quick jaunt up there. This would be good.

And when I got my employer to book me a hotel in Telford I asked for one I've been to before because, although I know its rooms are bog-standard and not all that nice, it does have quite a nice swimming pool which has always been empty every time I've been there. It's quite a small swimming pool and I reckon I'll have to do about 250 lengths (it's a really small swimming pool) for it to amount to anything worthwhile. 

But I reckon I can use exercise to offset the temptations which will besiege me. 

I don't know whether I'll be able to blog while I'm away so, until I blog again, farewell and keep it up!

Sometimes you have to celebrate the achievement of somebody else who is absolutely fabulous...

If you haven't been reading it (why not?) just click on the certificate for a copy of the entire text in an easily downloadable form to read on the e-reader of your choice. If you like old ladies stealing donkeys, burning down theatres, pretending to be Santa Claus and blowing up stuff, then this is the novel for you. If you like not so old women getting up to assorted high-jinks, this is also the novel for you. If you want a gentle read for the bath or the beach, this is the book for you! And, for now, it is free! Until it is snapped up by a canny publisher.

There was a phase, a few years ago, when, if you went to the trade exhibition at a conference, somebody would have set up a Wii Fit as a competition in an attempt to tempt punters in. This would usually be the hula hooping game.

Yes, that's me! Giving it some hula!

Or rather this is me, in a photo I just found on Facebook from several years ago.

This is terrible! What face am I pulling? Could I possibly look more like a sad old man?

In my defence, I was pretty good at Wii hula-hooping. But not when I've been given some free booze by a drug company.

And in answer to my question, yes I could look more like a sad old man. I could look like a sad old man pulling a face and doing weird pelvic thrusts in public.

Answer: no.

But it is the closest weigh-in so it seems worthy of some sort of celebration. Round here every celebration involves something which looks like this...

I should have taken a photo but I was overcome by greed and ate it very quickly.

But today isn't all about celebrating, or even hardly at all about celebrating.

I was hoping I would be down at my target by now, but this last stone and a half are being a bit of a slog. But I keep on going, keep on feeling a bit worried about my health (e.g. today I said to a work colleague, "I think I may be developing ascites." "Why?" "My trousers feel suddenly tight this afternoon - my abdomen must be getting bigger." "Or you've tied the drawstring too tight?" "Okay, maybe that."), keep on yearning for that massive cheese sandwich (that is not what I had today).

And I will get there in the end.

However...

...still obese!

Pretty happy with this! Only 1 pound away from 5 stone weight loss.

And this is my graph of weight loss over the last 6 months...

I remember almost nothing about my 30th birthday. Except for 3 things. I went into a corner shop in Preston to buy some okra - I'm not actually sure if it was this but I remember that the name had something to do with fingers (I thought it was dead man's fingers but that is something else) and okra is, apparently, also known as lady's fingers. So it was probably okra.  Number 2, it was  lovely sunny day. And number 3, Douglas Adams died.

Really, how many of my heroes had to die before I paid attention and started to lose weight? 

I'm not saying that Douglas Adams was fat. I remember him as being a large man, but probably tall rather than fat. But I know that he died while exercising. And he died of some form of cardiac disease, presumably some kind of myocardial infarction. He was 49 years old.

There are many reasons why he was a hero of mine. This is a clip from one of them.

I know it looks terrible, but really this is one of the best Dr Who stories - written by Douglas Adams, round about the time he was on the cusp of being famous. And he reused the plot, and the plot of his unmade story, Shada, as the basis for his second greatest work, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which I also love!

The book and the radio series were better than this! But this is still pretty good.

Why am I going on about this great but dead writer? I've been listening to the radio version of Dirk Gently (featuring Harry Enfield) and it was making me feel all nostalgic for what Douglas Adams might have achieved - if only he'd been good enough to stay alive. If only he'd taken better care of himself. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but I'd love to be reading or watching or listening to something new by Douglas Adams.

And we only have one life. We are here and then we go on to something else - which in my belief system is a something else where I won't be achieving very much. So I should make the most of my life, in every interpretable way.

Did Douglas Adams really have to die for me to learn that lesson? 

You will be pleased to hear that I made up for yesterday's faux pas when I saw my friend again today.

'I'm sorry I said you've got fat,' I said. 'Because obviously you aren't fat.'

This seemed slightly inadequate as an explanation. However he brushed the whole incident away as something he hadn't dwelled on.

I wasn't happy with this.

'It's just that you used to cadaverous, skeletal,' I explained, 'and now you look normal.'

He drew attention to his bulging tum.

'No!' I said, 'you are sticking your tummy out! You are normal!'

'Not fat!'

I then went on to compare him to a bloated spider crouching at the centre of a web of money. I don't think he can have been offended by that though.

I have been convinced that Wednesday is my next official weigh-in until this morning, when I realised that if yesterday was day 189 then that would make Thursday day 185.

Ah well, I thought, that means I can get in a 5km jog on Wednesday morning and I will be well on course to a good bit of weight loss. And this is useful because last night there was something of a calamity.

We had everybody round for dinner last night and I was quite incredibly restrained. I took the kitchen scales to the table and weighed out my slice of pork, my roast potatoes, and my roast parsnips. I did not bother weighing peas or carrots because I consider them to be almost calorie free and I just added a bit on to the quantity of parsnips. And then for pudding I exhibited restraint again and had 1/6th of a strudel and 1 scoop of ice cream. I was very good. I showed that I will be able to maintain a change in my eating habits, oh yes!

And then, just before we went to bed, Denise pointed out a damp patch around the front door. And then we both saw dampness on the wallpaper at the top of the stairs. Given the ongoing saga with our, if you don't mind me saying so, bloody roof this sent both if our morales into a tailspin.

This led to Denise sleeping very badly, worrying and to me deciding today that I wanted to eat everything. This morning I sent a sarcastic text to the man who replaced our roof. He replied quite quickly that he would fix it today. I let out a hollow laugh. I have heard that kind of story before. The dampness was probably nothing to do with the hole he had left in our roof, but it wasn't helping our morale that we still possess a hole where we should have a no-hole.

We had decided that the dampness was due to condensation from drying clothes on radiators. So I went and bought a tumble drier and then used a drill to enlarge a vent hole so that the drier would expel its moist air into the garden for the amusement of chickens.

I then put sealant around the uPVC doorframe because there was a very obvious bit that looked like if would be letting in water. I then had lunch and ate a lot. I then went to the gym and jogged 5km. As twilight approached I sent another sarcastic text to the roofer, who had not appeared.

And then, as Denise came through the front food, she told me that the roofers had also arrived. I put the kettle on to make her a cup of tea, and by the time the tea was made the roof had been fixed.

Probably less than 5 minutes it took him. I have some words to use at this point, but I shall not. Denise knows what they are. It wouldn't surprise me if she is typing a blog about this event even as I write this.

That's probably what she's doing in this photo (though she has just asked me a NaNoWriMo related question so maybe not)

So all the problems have been addressed in some way. Which should make me feel better.

Except I have already over eaten. And as I started this blog I noticed that I had duplicated day 191. So Wednesday is weigh-in day. And in correcting the dates on the blogs they seem to have gone out of order.

It has been a long day.

I've been up in London the last couple of days, attending the London Vet Show. I had a feeling that there might be free food and drink around so I had made a decision to walk from London Victoria to the exhibition centre at Olympia. This is a distance (according to Mr Google) of 3.1 miles and should take about 1hr and 8 minutes. I also intended to walk back at the end of each day. These plans meant that I had to set off from home at 6am in order to get there and attend the first lectures at 9am. As a result, I was and still am very tired. I didn't take a map because I have done this walk every time I have attended the London Vet Show - I know where I'm going...

I should say that I really like London. Denise hates it - too many people, too much noise, and I have a tendency to make her run across roads when traffic is bearing down on us. But I love the feeling of history and the buildings and the parks. I love arriving in London early in the morning before it gets busy. I've always loved this, since I first took the overnight coach down to London in 1987 so I could attend another convention (a Dr Who convention which was much more enjoyable than a vet show - sorry, vet show!) There's something about the empty streets that feels weirdly fantastical to me - like 28 Days Later.

But because I have done this walk frequently, I like to take little detours. I've got a frankly astonishing sense of direction so I know that I will always get to where I want to be. So I ended up wandering down quiet backstreets with little expensive boutique shops. In the morning here were often small children being shepherded along the streets by ladies who I believed were very likely to be their minimum waged nannies. Or possibly their maximum waged nannies. None of them had much of a Mary Poppins look about them. Most looked harassed and like the small children held the power of life or death over them.

I always wonder what is going on in these houses that I walk past, how much money is swirling around behind those expensive front doors. I am, unfortunately, consumed by envy a lot of the time. It isn't an attractive characteristic but I can't stop myself. Maybe that can be my next challenge, once I've lost the weight - to unburden myself of all my negativity and just be a lovely mountain of positivity.

On the last walk back across London, I was really tired. Really, really tired. And I got distracted by a very tall man walking a Bassett Hound. There are a lot of tall people in London. It is possible that there are just a lot of people in London and I happen to notice tall people because they are tall. But it really seems to me that there are a lot of tall, well dressed, possibly expensively dressd, people around. And I always wonder whether tallness is a trait that gets people good jobs in the City. Because it is stereotypically such an 'alpha' male place to work that towering over everybody maybe confers some psychological advantage either in the hiring process or something.

So, a lot of tall people.

Not many of them walking dogs.

Not many of them using a dirty pair of trousers instead of a leash.

I was so distracted by this that I got hopelessly lost. Maybe just really tired and distracted. But it took me nearly twice as long to get back to London Victoria.

On the plus side, I had burned a few more calories. On the negative side I had started to form more theories, fuelled by envy and tiredness.

What if the greater level of tallness amongst successful Londoners was due to something else?

What if David Icke was right? And the 10 foot lizards are already among us?

What if this sort of thing is going on all the time?

If I don't blog tomorrow, you will know that I was right.

The giant lizards took their revenge and this morning, at my unofficial weigh-in, I had gained 2lbs. Curse you, giant lizards!

Though it might have had something to do with the cake I made yesterday, sourced from the Texan recipe book that Denise received in the post -a kind gift from one of her friends.