Lose A Stone In Just 8 Weeks!

I really don't like having to rely on chemicals. I thought I'd get through this with simply Epsom salts and weed but they're no longer touching the sides (Epsom salts to bathe in you understand, not to ingest. Christ I'm never doing that again). It's back with a bit of a cunting vengeance, and not only that, it's starting to invade my left hand side now. Until now I’d been fairly lucky in that only my right hand was affected. But now my left shoulder feels heavy, my clavicle, once so light and graceful, seemingly replaced with an iron bar that presses mercilessly down on my scapula. When I shrug my shoulders the pain flashes the clichéd image of a milk maid through my brain, the one where she’s smiling in a meadow, probably the same meadow The Laughing Cow grazes in. Of course her buckets are filled with creamy cow juice, sloshing around by her knees as she races back to the farmhouse. Whereas mine are filled rocks and sand and molten lead. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for my battered feet.

No, I tell you what it feels like. Imagine some sadistic kid somewhere has found a soggy voodoo doll of you and is gleefully setting about you with his collection of rusty bulldog clips. You can try and shake them loose with some shoulder rolling and toe curling but they don't budge one bit. So you reach in your big paper bag of pills and take one more than you should of the ones that sound the most heroic (Tramacet is my favourite, he sounds like a Viking king!) and eventually the grip loosens a little and you’re left with just a dull ache where before there were tightening, vice-like talons. Of course it doesn’t last, and all the while it does you’re too spaced-out to do little more than watch TV through one eye and dribble into your tea. Which I suppose is fine if you like that kind of thing, but I think it’s giving in too easily.

On the plus side I have lost weight. About a stone. Don’t get me wrong, I was never what you’d call a ‘big man’, not ‘hefty’ nor ‘stocky’ nor ‘beefy’ nor any of those other bovine euphemisms that naturally attach themselves to males who look like they may do you in just for glancing into their tattooed eyeballs. I am and probably always will be my ideal weight for someone of my height and build – the lightest my adult frame has ever weighed was 9 stone, and that was during what I like to call my ‘Amphetamine years’ (1996, in case you were wondering, when that look was last in). So now I’m about 10 stone. Not unhealthy, and to be fair when people started asking ‘have you lost weight’ I found it quite complementary. ‘Cause you’re supposed to these days, right? I found myself saying, ‘Why yes. Thanks for noticing. I’ve been on a strict diet of analgesics and anxiety. It’s taken years off me’! It’s only when people stopped asking and started actually stating ‘you’ve lost weight’, usually prefaced with a ‘fuck me!’ and ‘Christ!’ and ‘ooh dear’! that I really started to take notice. But hey, what I am I supposed to do? It’s not like I can actually start eating food or anything like that. You’ve got to be hungry to do that. And anyway, what’s the point in eating food when all it does is make you too tired to operate even the simplest mechanical device. Like corkscrews, bottle openers and lighters. No. Far easier to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast then conveniently forget to eat anything else for the rest of the day. So at the end of all this I’ll have this skinny frame onto which I can build the man I’ve always wanted to be. Actually no, because that’s probably Charlie Brooker, and he’s a fat cunt. Charlie Sheen in ‘Hot Shots’ maybe? Or Ed Norton in the new Hulk film (not when he’s green though, that would be ridiculous). Right now that seems a long way off, but I have bought myself an exercise bike so that I can get my knee working again. I ain’t got a lot of room for it but wherever it’s going, it’s going in front of the TV. It’ll be like my own personal gym, but instead of annoying MTV shite bleeping and bashing away in the background I’m going to have Columbo, The Sweeney and Italian Zombie flicks providing all the encouragement I need. Bring it on. Carefully.