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We got home at 2.30am and what a pleasure it was to see my wife and my cats and talk to my baby, through its eggshell. Unsurprisingly the late night on top of the stress of this week’s travel meant that most of the day was spent in bed or lounging around.
My monthly weigh-in sees me at 84kg, 0.3kg down on last month, but still somewhat higher than I had got down to in August. To be fair I haven’t been trying too hard for the last two months. In spite of running the Half Marathon I have either been too busy or too ill to keep up the exercise and though I stopped drinking alcohol (until Friday) I wasn’t keeping on top of the diet. I am glad that my weight has not gone up, but sense that I am a little more out of shape than I was a month ago. My show suit feels a little bit tight. 84kg is the top end of what I think would be an acceptable weight to be (still 12kg off my 72kg target), but I hope I can push back down to closer to 80kg by the end of the year. It’s getting exciting now for all those of you who took part in the weight sweepstake. It seems unlikely that those who went for 97kg or 72kg will be the winners. But I have not been filling in myfitnesspal app and so I am going to go back to that and 1530 calories on aggregate a day and see if I can get sub-80kg by 2015.
Tonight we walked up to Notting Hill for a meal. On the way back we popped into the supermarket where, perhaps because their shift was nearly over, the staff were unusually happy and friendly. One of them had a big bucket of bunches of white roses which were starting to go slightly brown. She offered us the lot for 99p. Given there were a few good ones in there that wasn’t a bad price, but we were going to walk home and I am not sure we could have carried them and our shopping. So she went off, Apprentice-at-the-end-of-the-day style and sold them off to other customers. Making Ian Waitrose several pence that he would never have seen. I hope he rewards them accordingly. Or actually disproportionately.
They had lottery tickets on the counter, something that I wouldn’t usually countenance buying due to the fact that they are a clear rip-off, a terrible gamble and an attempt to steal from the feckless and desperate. But I had read on the news that there were £4 million prize tickets and that only one jackpot remained. Even though all logic dictated that this made a terrible bet even worse, a voice in my head told me that I was going to be the lucky one. I would be like Charlie Bucket finding the golden ticket, you know about from the fact that I am comfortably off and was shopping in Waitrose and don’t live with my grandparents. But I really like chocolate. And anyway by the end Bucket is a capitalist factory owner (spoiler alert), and I notice that since he’s taken over the Wonka brand has been exploited and commercialised in a way it never was in the past (when you couldn’t even buy Wonka stuff in the shops) so I am like a Charlie Bucket compared to Charlie Bucket. If I could win the £4million jackpot that would pay off nearly half my Edinburgh debt. And once I had bought myself a massive mansion and sportscar and some sex slaves I would use all the rest for good causes like making low cost internet content. I also resolved that I would magnanimously give every employee who had made me smile at that supermarket £1000 if I won. Leaving me just £3,997,999 for myself. I am literally nicer than Jesus (who had the power to cure leprosy but then selfishly only cured six lepers - he is worse than Hitler, Pope Benedict was right).
I was so sure of victory that I decided to not scratch the scratch card immediately, but to wait until I got home. I could thus enjoy the last thirty minutes of my life as a non-millionaire schmuck. It felt good to be so normal, at least for a few more minutes. In fact I felt so normal that I felt a bit extraordinary which ruined it all a bit for me. I decided that if I won I would opt for anonymity. Then I could carry on pretending I was normal, before secretly heading back to my mansion (I then checked London house prices and realised that the mansion idea might be unrealistic. It’s quite something to be living in a city where having £4million wouldn’t mean you could spend the rest of your life in complete luxury. I am not knocking it, I would still take it. But seriously, that’s fucked up.
The lottery ticket cost a tenner, so even if winning the jackpot might be unrealistic, surely at that price each ticket must come with a prize of at least £5000. So it would still be a good day either way. My dreams were shattered though when I got home and I didn’t win on the first game on the card, or the second or the third. As I got towards the end I began to think the whole thing might be fixed. And my wife, who had thought I was an idiot for buying an expensive lottery card and who I was going to punish by not sharing my winnings with, started to look quite smug about it all.
The card was a loser, as was I and I had to return to my humdrum life of relative wealth and luxury.
Although to be fair, I would have claimed that was the case to you even if I had won. So you will never be quite sure of the truth. Unless you see me lighting my cigars with £50 notes.
