I seem to be back on track with the diet. I am now about 8kg lighter than I was before Edinburgh and probably about 12kg lighter than I was at the beginning of the year. I have hopefully made some changes that will stick. As I walked home tonight having had a couple of glasses of wine I was struggling to think of the last time that I had drunkenly popped into Chicken Cottage for an extra dinner. Hopefully those days are now gone. At the moment the whole idea of eating deep fried chicken seems disgusting to me, but then I am in a positive state of mind and things are mainly going my way, but who knows what effect some psychological knock may have on me. I should be fine as long as I never fall in and out of love again. I shall remain alone and (relatively) thin.
But since the return from holiday I have made an effort to cut my calorific intake down to 2500 rather than the 3000 I was averaging in September and to make sure I am doing plenty of exercise and it seems to be working well. I have set myself the target of being 80 kilos by the end of the year. That will be difficult, especially with Christmas getting in the way, but so far so good. Let's see how it goes.
I had done the Fortnight Club tonight and it had gone OK. I had come up with one joke in Tanzania that I started with and it went well, although slightly out of practice I stumbled over a couple of lines and accidentally disconnected my mike.
The club is really buzzing this season. It's been full every time and the audience have been lively but supportive. I had a bit of a friendly spat with a woman who objected when I was arguing that the legs of 30 year old women are not as attractive as the legs of 19 year olds. I was doing the bit about
my experience in Starbucks on my birthday and I did tell her that I thought the story reflected more badly on me than anyone else.
I got the tube home and negotiated the new changeover between the Northern line and Hammersmith and Shitty line at Kings Cross. It's getting quite swanky there now. As I arrived on the platform there was a team of men in overalls cleaning the walls with brushes. It was about 11.30pm and the tube was still open and it seemed weird that this was being done whilst customers were around. But it's not one of those things that you usually see or even consider. That it is someone's job to clean the walls on underground platforms. If you thought about it then I suppose it's obvious that there must be, but you don't think about it. The walls were surprisingly dirty though, not that I would have noticed if they weren't being cleaned. It seemed like an unpleasant and thankless job. And one that was annoying because even as they cleaned more trains arrived bringing more dirt from the tunnels. I don't know how many teams of men are out cleaning Underground walls on any given night. There were abround six men on this platform and they were working there for the twenty minutes it took me for my Shitty train to arrive. So let me give a little shout of thanks out to the tube wall cleaning men who must think that their work goes unappreciated and must occasionally wonder if there is any point in what they are doing as the walls are getting dirty even as they clean. But without them the walls would be really, really dirty and people would lean on the wall and get dirt on their clothes. So thanks for helping to prevent that happen. At least at Kings Cross. I have a feeling they might be just doing it here as the station is all refitted and new. After a while they probably just give up.
In November it will be the 4th anniversary of Warming Up, with still not a single day missed. Christ it's a long time. Jesus it's gone fast. How many Wellman pills is that? Not that many, I've only started taking them relatively recently. Anyway to celebrate the birthday I am going to have a competition. On each of the 30 days of November I will print a general knowledge question for you. At the end of the month I will invite you to send in your answers to these questions. Whoever gets the most answers right (or first out the bag in the event of a tie) will win a Sony PSP game system with a 1Gb memory card. That's right. It's worth a couple of hundred quid. And yet one of you will win it for nothing. I have one already, but was given this one when PSP sponsored my Eddinburgh show. So it only seems fair that one of you should get it. There might be some other prizes of junk lying around my office as well. So do make sure you check out Warming Up for the month of November for your chance to win and do let all your friends know about this once in a lifetime opportunity to win a portable games system. First question will be up in the 1st November entry in a couple of days. Good luck!
