Virtual Friday

It’s the last day of July. The sun is shining and (even) Croydon looks relatively pretty today. Plus I am off work tomorrow in order to sing at a wedding, so I have a definite end of week feeling. Oh, and it seems we just won the Test match too!

The diet/exercise regime is obviously working because I have lost ten pounds in the month of July. And that’s dipped my weight down into a new number of stones which makes me happy.

Looking back at the month, what is odd is that there was a period of a week up until a week ago where I really lost very little, and I also really ate very little too. The obvious answer is that eating too little slowed my metabolism down and so I didn't lose the weight. Since then I have consciously upped the calories and the weight has started to shift again.

I think the exercise has a large part to play in this. In general I am at the gym four times a week or more, and there will be at least 30 minutes of fairly vigorous cardio involved in that. Plus I have also started to try and fit in a walk every day. It turns out it’s quite easy to fit in a walk of about 4km around Croydon over lunch, which certainly shifts some calories, and makes me feel better. And I haven’t been mugged once yet.

So, whilst I realise weight loss will slow as I move towards target, I am in sight of the goal now – the stones number is the right one. I may not make it during August, but a real prospect surely of hitting target by the end of September. And then comes the difficult part – maintaining it.

I can’t speak for women, but most men do like competition, and setting/beating targets. So I do walk more now I have a phone app that tells me how far I walked – “oh if just go that way that will get me up to…” and the little “yes” I express (perhaps out loud) when the weigh in is good. But maintaining will remove at least that second goal. “Yep – as is” is a lot less motivating. I’ll see how that goes when I get there.

In other news I've only three more days at work before I take some holiday. In part this gives rise to panic – as a just about manageable workflow looks anything but when I think I’ll have two and a bit weeks when I'm doing very little of it. But a larger part of me is looking forward to the break. I've started planning what I want to do – catch up with some family and friends, do some writing and quite a lot of music, and generally relax too. I suspect eating well will be harder – because it’s easier to be tempted by food when just at home rather than in the office. But then I have more time to spend burning calories too.

And I'm looking forward to tomorrow’s wedding – we are singing four pieces through-out the service, which will I'm sure be followed up by a catch-up in the pub. Happy days.

(Sort of) in Defence of the Daily Mail

I apologise for (or perhaps, see below, I only regret) the intermittent service at the moment. I am just incredibly busy with work stuff. Which I don't talk about here as a matter of policy - but lets just say i) not enough hours in the day and ii) fairly major expectation gap.

So I have just grabbed five minutes while I have a sandwich and, rather than looking out of window at sunny Croydon, I thought I'd drop in a few words.

I'm not really sure what is going on in the world right now (due to general busy-ness). But I saw one of those wretched interviews on Newsnight where Harriet Harman and Laura Kuenssberg got all semantic about "apologise" as opposed to "regret". Whilst I don't think that we can hold Harriet responsible for things she had little influence on 30 years ago, I was left thinking "oh just answer the f**king question" - my loathing of the political class generally has now evidently come so far that they have lost all sympathy.

Not (as if you would ever think it) that I have any time for the Dai1y Mai1 - how ironic for a paper that printed the famous Charlotte Church "all grown up" story to say anything about paedophilia (and if you say "that's different" then the answer is that legally, no, it isn't really). But of course it must not be the case that we disregard a story merely because of the vile rag it is printed in. Let's face it, if ten years ago we had been asked "which newspaper will break the MPs expenses scandal?" who would have said the Telegraph? That's as typical a Guardian (or even Eye) story as you would ever see.

So it is troubling when I here people say "ignore it, because it's in the Mail", knowing they would get all serious if it was in the Independent.

Print journalism is hugely under threat. Why buy a paper when the internet is free and mobile? And then to seek to limit freedom to publish reduces them to pictures of kittens and drunk slebs. But when it comes to the next expenses scandal equivalent - who else is going to break the story? Some blogger writing whilst eating his sandwich? A free press with some power (and integrity) is needed to hold governments to account, and like it or not, that does mean you have to put up with the Daily Mail.