My World Cup was Italia 90.  I was nine, and remember watching every England game with my parents.  I remember going apeshit when David Platt scored against Belgium, being confused when Gazza started crying, and wondering why Peter Shilton couldn’t have stretched just a little bit more to stop Andreas Brehme’s cruelly deflected free kick.  I remember England scraping through against Egypt and Cameroon, but not fully understanding how poor we’d been until years later.  My abiding memory of Italia 90 is Sir Bobby Robson (God rest his soul) in an interview years later mournfully saying, “We should have won that World Cup.”  You just knew he was haunted by that regret until the day he died.

After England failed to qualify for the farce that was USA 94, my next World Cup memory is of France 98.  I remember this one much more clearly, watching all the England games in bars and pubs in Nottingham.  I remember the locals in The Pelican in Bilborough throwing bottles at us during the Tunisia game.  I remember eating an entire tube of someone else’s Pringles in the Hilton (bizarrely) during the defeat to Romania, whilst trying to get off with some girl called Gemma (which was going well until Dan Petrescu’s last minute winner, when I drifted into a bizarre mood of put-on-for-effect melancholy and she left).

I remember the Argentina game; RKO’s playing “It’s Raining Men” over the top of the Argentine national anthem to much merriment, Michael Owen’s goal, Michael Owen’s dive, David Beckham’s ‘kick’, Sol Campbell’s disallowed goal, the predictable agony of penalties.  After David Batty’s penalty was saved I stood up in silence and walked out, eventually sitting alone outside on a wall in a show of mock-grief.  You see, I didn’t really care that much.  It was annoying, yes, and I was pissed off that our World Cup was over, but I really didn’t get the whole grown men crying and/or fighting in the street and/or smashing up public property thing.  I felt I should care a bit more, so I pretended.

I put on my melancholy act again (I didn’t speak at all until a couple of hours later when I turned to the two girls me and my mate were with and suggested they come and stay at my house; a beyond-disastrous plan which resulted in a massive bollocking from my parents, who, embarrassingly, were sat up waiting — “worried” — when I strolled in at half past one on a school night with two girls).

The 2002 World Cup was great, mainly because the games were on between 7:30am and lunchtime, and I was in my student placement year.  As soon as the fixtures were announced I booked time off for every England game.  For the 7:30am kick-offs I remember picking my mates up and getting to the Rifleman’s Arms in Belper for 6am, when we immediately set about drinking the place dry.  The day we beat Argentina was a quite epic and very drunken day.

The Denmark (first knockout) game was on a Saturday, and those who’ve been paying attention will know that summer Saturdays = cricket.  We asked the league if we could move our cricket game forward so we could have a two hour break in between innings to watch the game.  The league declined our request.  We watched England romp to a 3-0 lead at half time, then went and bowled Selston out for 35 (Ben Tait took 8 wickets for 9 runs) before knocking them off and having beer with tea at about 4 o’clock.  A great day.

Then there was the limp defeat to Brazil, and the number-of-years-of-hurt-people-like-to-refer-to went up by four.

I don’t remember a great deal about the 2006 World Cup, which makes me think it wasn’t very good.  I remember England’s opening game being on a Saturday afternoon, and this time our cricket league allowing us to start early.  We started our game against Allestree at about 10:30.  I got 7 wickets, we watched a fairly poor England victory during an extended tea break and then went out and won the game.  I remember watching the Ecuador game in a pub in Headingley before going on to get hideously drunk watching The Who.  I remember the Portugal game being on a Saturday but for some reason we didn’t move our cricket game forward.  Still we managed to coincide a drinks break with the disappointment of another penalty shoot-out defeat. 

I remember coming over all Gallic when Zinedine Zidane went completely batshit fucking mental and headbutted Marco Materazzi.  I remember whatshername saying at the time, “Well that’s just ruined it for me.  I wanted France to win, but not anymore.  Not after that.”  (I was quite the opposite.)  I had France in the office sweepstake, and the next day I wrote a strongly worded e-mail to Zizou’s official website saying that his recklessness had cost me fifteen pounds of winnings and I’d be grateful if he could send me the equivalent amount in sterling or Euros.  Inexplicably I heard nothing back.

Quite literally the best thing I've ever seen a Frenchman do

Which brings us to 2010.  And, I hate to admit it, but I really hope England don’t lift The World Cup in three week’s time.  That’s the first time I’ve ever thought that, but my reasons are fairly sound.  I went to Edinburgh last week for a wedding, and in a vain attempt to ingratiate myself with the locals, I made a couple of gags about them hating the English and wanting anyone to win but us.  Almost without exception they corrected me: “We don’t hate the English,” they said, “we hate the English media.”  And you know, I think I do too.  I was bored of this World Cup before it even started, what with every newspaper ramming it down my throat since February, and the constant news coverage, and the predictable, “We’ll never get a better chance…” bullshit the idiot pundits spew out every four years.

A prime example: we’re constantly told that the English Premier League is “the best league in the world.”  Cesc Febregas and Fernando Torres are two of the very best players in “the best league in the world” (just try and tell me they wouldn’t be in your Premier League XI) and yet they were both sat on the bench for Spain last night.  You see, there’s saying you’re the best in the world and then there’s actually doing something to prove that you’re the best in the world.  The best don’t need to tell you they’re the best.  They just fucking are.

Just imagine, try hard to imagine, the God-awful hysteria this once-great country would descend into if England won the World Cup.  It would be unbearable.  It was bad enough when we won the Ashes, and hardly anyone really cared about that.  Just imagine the arrogance.  Imagine the St George’s flags on cars and hanging out of bedroom windows for another four years.  Imagine shirtless chavs showing off their ‘World Cup Winners 2010 England Til I Die’ tattoos.  But more than anything, imagine — just fucking imagine how fucking terrible this would be — go on and imagine Glen Johnson getting a fucking Knighthood.  Imagine that.  Do you want that?  DO YOU?  No you fucking don’t.

So I’ll cheer on England for however long it is before we crash out of the World Cup.  I want England to do well; I really, really do.  But the older I get the more I think that the England squad is the epitome of everything wrong with football, the “working man’s game” played by men trousering £150,000 a week.

The advice I was given was to get plenty of RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation).  Perhaps unwisely I’ve been online a few times to try and get a better understanding of what I should and shouldn’t be doing.  I should apparently only follow the RICE theory for a couple of days after the injury, and I should only apply ice for twenty minutes at a time (with a rest in between ‘icings’—although the suggested periods of rest differ from website to website, from twenty minutes to four hours).  Wednesday night, immediately after feeling the pop in my knee, I should have done the RICE thing immediately.  Instead, I walked nearly 3 miles to get home (stupid male pride prevented me from asking for a lift home), and, thinking I’d walked it off, slumped on the sofa watching Flight Of The Conchords on BBC4.

Thursday night I should have done the RICE thing again.  Instead I went to the pub for my mate’s birthday (sausage, egg and chips, a few shandies and a couple of hands of poker — it was worth it).  I also forgot about my fucked knee whilst running across the pub car park in the rain.  All told I’ve done nothing much to help the situation, and when I have tried to help the situation I’ve got it completely wrong.  Friday night I sat with ice on my knee for two hours solid.  TWO HOURS.  That’s a bit more than the recommended twenty minutes.  (Apparently this can lead to nerve damage.  That may explain the aforementioned anaesthetised sensation.)

Not my knee

Despite considering myself to be fairly unfit and not especially active, being unable to do the little bits of exercise I previously took for granted is getting me down.  Wednesday night 5-a-side football was fast becoming the highlight of my week and I was really starting to enjoy running (ME!  ENJOYING RUNNING!).  At lunchtime I went for a short walk to the shops just to get out of the office, and found it really tough.  I’m wishing I hadn’t bothered now, as my knee is throbbing.  It’s not painful but it’s uncomfortable.  I feel so pathetic.  I feel old.

On the plus side, there isn’t much swelling around my knee.  I read that swelling is a tell-tale sign of damage.  Plenty of rest is the order of the day (or the order of the rest of the year, to be specific).  It’s demoralising that I’m still hobbling around though, and I’m annoyed I can’t walk a couple of hundred yards without feeling like my leg is going to drop off.  This does however give me an excuse to be a lazy fucker for the foreseeable future.  Every cloud…

It was ten minutes from the end of the football and, foolishly, I attempt what can only be described as a Crap Turn (kind of like a Cruyff turn but, well, crap).  And then I felt a ‘pop’ in my left knee.  A bit like Michael Owen in the 2006 World Cup but nowhere near as bad or as crippling (literally) for our national football team.

This gave me an excuse not to attempt jogging home (I wasn’t going to anyway, but being injured is a better excuse than being fucked).  My knee still hurts, so much that Friday’s planned 5mile run is now probably in jeopardy.

My knees hate me, and I can’t really blame them, given all the Me there is pushing down on them.  The irony is that all this exercise is to help me lose weight so there’ll be less Me pushing down on my knees.  All this exercise is for the benefit of my knees.  Stupid knees.  I’M TRYING TO HELP YOU, KNEES.

Anyway, here’s a picture of Britney Spears.  Well why the hell not?

That I can describe myself as “reasonably fit” without too much sarcasm is something of a triumph and a surprise.  I don’t do exercise, generally.  The only mildly energetic pursuit I normally indulge in is a spot of cricket in the summer.  Now, as sports go, cricket can be a fairly sedentary game at the best of times.  This year I took over as 2^nd team captain, meaning that I had an excuse to exert myself even less than usual.  Saturdays this summer typically went something like:

• 10:45 — give girlfriend some bullshit excuse about having to leave early for cricket.
• 11am — meet Miserable Musical Macca, Mr Tickle and Ugly Smug Cunt at Cob Corner.  Full English with toast and fried bread plus black pudding and tea (one sugar).  Chat intelligently about the issues of the day.

• 12ish— trip to Co-op en route to cricket ground.  Buy Nuts or Zoo or both (depending on attractiveness and/or chest size of cover model and/or likelihood of toplessness), some sugary sweets and a bottle of Orange Lucozade (if I’m feeling hungover).

• 1:30onwards — if we’re fielding I stand at first slip shouting encouragement to the lads I get to do all the bowling and running around.  If we’re batting I sit on the balcony occasionally looking up from my copy of Nuts or Zoo or both to cheer on the lads doing all the batting.
• Around 4:30 — tea.  I love playing cricket because it’s one of the few sports which stop halfway through for a meal.  I usually gorge myself, knowing full well I’m going to get my team-mates to do all the batting and bowling.
• 8ish — game finishes.  If we’ve lost I’ll have a few pints of Guinness and maybe console myself with a kebab.  If we’ve won I’ll have a few pints of Guinness and maybe celebrate with a kebab.
• My only real exercise of the day is staggering home about midnight.

Apart from four games I missed due to weddings/stag weekends, I did the above every Saturday from mid-April to mid-September.  This is no doubt the primary reason for me putting on weight, not that I’m trying to blame anything other than me and my generally slothful existence and penchant for unhealthy food.

This all makes me especially surprised at how quickly I’ve got into this running malarkey.  I actually feel really motivated to get out there and run further and quicker every time, knowing that I won’t feel completely and utterly fucked at the end of the run.

Tonight, arguably, I’m going to attempt something very, very stupid indeed.  Wednesday nights — as you loyal readers will know — is my 5-a-side night.  A normal Wednesday night involves driving to football, playing football, driving to the pub for a couple of diet cokes or beers (depending on mood), before going home.  Tonight I’m going to jog 2.7miles to play football then jog the 2.7miles home afterwards.  That’s 5.4miles, plus the two or three hundred yards I will probably run during an hour of 5-a-side.

*collective sharp intake of breath*

There’s no need to worry.  I’ll be fine, honest.  Well, probably.  Possibly. 

I’ve created an iPod playlist of songs which for some reason I think will help me.  Crucially the playlist lasts 29-and-a-half minutes, the target I’ve set myself for each 2.7mile leg.  I know you’re all dying to know what songs make up said playlist so here you go (in order):

• So Alive — Ryan Adams
• Bend And Break — Keane.  Yeah, that’s right.  Keane.
• Yesterday’s News [live] — Whiskeytown
• Under The Gun — The Killers
• Fans — Kings Of Leon
• It’s Getting Better (Man) — Oasis
• Goodnight — Easyworld

It’s by no means perfect but I’ll see how I get on.

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The moment: the thirty-yard screamer, the three-pointer, the diving catch, the hole-in-one, the double on the black to win.  We play because we all know we have it in ourselves to have a moment of glory.  Every dog has his day, and all that.  This is the only explanation I can think of for people who spend hundreds and thousands of pounds on golf equipment and green fees when they can’t even hit the ball straight.  They hope for the moment.  The applause, the cheers, the high-fives, the celebratory beer afterwards.  It’s why shit people play sport, I’m convinced.

An old person playing golf

And this brings me on to the subject of me playing football.  A friend says he’s organising a game of football, so I let him know I’m interested in playing.  I can do a half-decent job at centre-back, I said.  (This is not entirely true, but playing at centre half probably involves doing the least running—except goalkeeper, obviously, but more on that later—and, as every knows, you generally put your big ugly donkey at centre half and tell him to kick anything that moves.)  My mate says he’s already sorted for centre backs, so I tell him I played every position in the team for South Normanton Athletic juniors.  I can play anywhere.  Then I start thinking…

I didn’t play in every position because I was good.  I played everywhere because I was so shit I didn’t warrant being chosen in any particular position.  This is not to say my career (span: 1990-94) was a disaster.  Far from it.  My U12s Top Scorer trophy sits proudly between my U11s and U13s Sportsman of the Year trophies (Sportsman of the Year award definition: a consolatory trophy for the shittest player who turns up every week without fail and never moans when he doesn’t play).

I started reminiscing on my own personal highlights package in my head, and decided upon some of my more notable performances in the various positions I played.

Centre half.  I started off as a centre half, but my inherent laziness was a problem.  I recall our manager once pointing out, after the opposition had scored, that I was out of position.  Specifically, I was stood on the halfway line with my hands on my hips.

Full back.  I played right-back for a while until I got sent off twice in the same game.  (It was a friendly, and the opposition manager ordered his team to walk off from “these animals” mid-way through the second half.)  I was tried at left back for a while too.   The highlight was a game against ADASC at Ripley, where I found myself as substitute.  We were all aware of the ability of ADASC’s tricky right winger, but at half-time it was 0-0 and our left back, Gary Forbes, had played a blinder and had their winger in his pocket.  Unfortunately Gary had to come off injured, and I went on to replace him.  Fast forward to the end of the game and their right winger has a hattrick and we’ve lost 3-0.  The moment that sticks in my mind was the build-up to his third goal, where I ran alongside him from the halfway line as he dribbled towards goal, too frightened to tackle him because I knew I’d foul him as he was too quick and I was too shit.  I kept running alongside him until he rounded our goalkeeper and scored.

Goalkeeper.  Towards the end of my career I played one game in goal for South Normanton as both our ‘proper’ keepers were injured.  We lost 3-0 against the team who were top of the league, and I was named our Man of the Match due to a string of outstanding saves.  We were ripped to shreds and should have been absolutely hammered, but I had the game of my life.  I was goalkeeper for our school team a few times, too, until it became apparent that I would make at least one massive fuck-up every game, which would ultimately overshadow my otherwise decent performance.  A bit like David ‘Calamity’ James (below).

Midfield.  I have never and never will be good enough or fit enough to play in midfield.  I think I found myself playing left midfield for a while, which seems frankly ridiculous.  My trademark move was to charge down the wing with the ball and ‘cut inside’ onto my right foot, as my left foot was and still is only for standing on and under no circumstances should I attempt to kick a ball with it.

Centre forward.  And now we come to that one season — 91/92 I think — when I could arguably have claimed to not have been completely shit.  The season started badly with a 3-1 away defeat in which I didn’t play.  The next game we were playing at home, and again I found myself as substitute.  With fifteen minutes to go we were drawing 1-1 with Ripley (who we should have been beating) and the manager gambled, throwing me on as a striker.  Fifteen minutes later it’s 6-1 and I’ve scored a hattrick, the third goal of which was a coolly-taken penalty.  I went on what at the time seemed a remarkable scoring streak, scoring in each of the next four or five games.  And we’re not talking about tap-ins against shit teams in 6-1 drubbings, either.  I scored the one and only goal in a game against top of the league Woodhouse Imps (a tap-in, admittedly, but an important one), the last-minute winner away at Ravenshead (picked the ball up on the half-way line, charged down the left wing, cut inside onto my right foot and — aiming for the top right hand corner —slotted the ball in the bottom left corner), and a late equaliser in a 2-2 draw at RJN. 

Then — and I’m not entirely sure what happened — I got dropped.  Now, my memory gets a little hazy here (funny how I remember every goal, but can’t remember being dropped, eh?), but I’m pretty sure I was dropped to the bench for a couple of games.  Despite being top goal scorer at the time, I was still pretty shit so I couldn’t really feel too hard done by.  I think I managed to come off the bench and poach a goal in a 5-1 victory, then found myself back in the starting line-up for the final two games of the season.  Riddings were put to the sword as I scored a hattrick in a 9-1 drubbing, and then I bagged another hattrick (three tap-ins, I seem to recall) against Ripley, the side against which my one and only season of glory started.

The hallowed turf of South Normanton Athletic

By the start of the following season we’d recruited some better players and I was back to being substitute again.  Not that I minded, really, because I’d always have my SNAFC under 12s top scorer trophy and I could always say I scored sixteen goals that season, including (in case you lost count) three hattricks.

So next time I’m asked to play football I should grimace slightly, grumble something about knackering my knees “in my playing days”, and politely decline because I know I’ve had ‘my moment’.  But I won’t.  I’ll say, “I can play anywhere you know,” because I’ll always always always fancy my chances of another glory moment or three.

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Seeking to relive their ‘glory days,’ four former Accountancy students go back to the university town in which they so frequently disgraced and embarrassed themselves on many, many nights out.

Sainsbury’s cash point, one member of the group needs cash.  He reaches into his pocket and produces a bank card, quite literally folded in half, to much hilarity.  Witty banter flies around, mainly centring on the fact that his folded card won’t work in the machine and he’ll have to beg his friends for beer tokens.  Trying to hide his embarrassment he straightens his card and slides it hopefully into the machine.  To the disappointment of the other former Accountancy students present, his transaction looks to be going to plan.  He enters his pin, and lo and behold, the machine accepts his card!  He punches the air in celebration, throws an expletive or two at his no-longer-mocking friends, and wheels off down the street, arms aloft.  One of the group, noting that the card is still in the machine and the transaction is at the ‘choose amount you would like to withdraw’ stage, opts to do that hilarious thing we’ve all done at some point.  He reaches over and withdraws the maximum amount he can from the machine — £200.

The straightening of the card

Now, at university this would have been hilarious (for all except for the owner of the bank account who would have to carry two hundred of the queen’s pounds around all night and somehow not spend it).  Once at university a friend was withdrawing some cash when I reached over his shoulder and hit the £100 button.  Needless to say the following morning his wallet was empty after he frittered the lot away in Loughborough’s most glamorous of student haunts.

Back to 2008, the hilarity of the situation was quashed somewhat when the owner of the bank account returned to the cash point after a few seconds of running around celebrating like he’d scored a goal for his beloved Scunthorpe United to find his friends giggling like schoolgirls. 

“How much did you withdraw?” he asked. 

“Two hundred quid,” we guffawed. 

“Two hundred quid?” he scoffed.  “I shit two hundred quid these days.”  That was the end of our fun.

Forward to now, yesterday in fact.  You may recall I specifically asked for reasons NOT to run the kilomathon.  What I actually received were comments telling me I could do it, and I should do it.  I was banking on my girlfriend talking me out of it, but all she said was, “I think that’s a really good idea.”

The one comment that nailed it though was a facebook message from the gentleman referred to above: “I will pay to the charity of your choice the amount of money that “I shit these days” if you complete this kilomarathon successfully.”

So tonight, believe it or not, I am going on a three mile run with my girlfriend.  I’ve mapped it out already on this great website.  That’s right, next March I’m going to do this bloody stupid great kilomathon.  Sweet Jesus.

On a less-energetic note, I’ve had The Killers back catalogue on repeat on my iPod the last few weeks, and present my top five Killers tracks, only one of which could possibly be up for debate.  In no order: 

• Mr Brightside
• All These Things That I’ve Done
• Bling (Confession Of A King)
• Why Do I Keep Counting?
• Under The Gun

Anyway, having done nothing other than an hour of five-a-side football in the way of exercise and in a desperate attempt to lose weight I got my girlfriend to shave all my hair off last night.  And it worked—I’m down to 18st 5lbs.  I’m not sure how much hair weighs to be honest, but hopefully after a couple of runs I’ll have better news next week.

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If your hand is in the air you are a) wrong, and b) a bit simple for putting your hand up.  Saturday night the missus and I found ourselves in a lovely restaurant overlooking Trevaunance Cove in St Agnes, Cornwall.  After a very nice starter — squid and chorizo salad — my main course arrived; moules marinière with a side bowl of chips.  There’s a rule (I don’t know if it’s true or not and frankly I don’t care, but it makes sense) that if a mussel hasn’t opened during cooking, you shouldn’t eat it.  I found an unopened mussel and lifted it up.  I shouldn’t eat that, I thought to myself.  It might give me the shits.  Hang on, that might help me lose weight…

Trevaunance Cove, St Agnes (C) http://www.consolsoils.co.uk/

So I ate it.  I prised open a mussel and ate it, full in the knowledge — hoping, in fact — that it would give me a stomach bug which in turn might help me lose weight.  That’s right, people — after all my bluster last week about doing some ruddy exercise I (unsuccessfully) tried to give myself food poisoning as an alternative to doing any exercise.  That aside I lived up to my greedy tag, polishing off my moules, the accompanying baguette and bowl of chips, despite the fact that finishing the chips was a real struggle.  I sat there, stuffed full, neither needing nor really wanting any more food, but there it was in front of me — food that hadn’t been eaten.  So I had to eat it.  It’s a compulsion I have.  A disease.  I blame my parents for all those times as a child they wouldn’t let me leave the table until I’d eaten my brussel sprouts, bribing me that I’d “grow up big and strong like He-Man.”  Sorry ma and pa but I went too far.

He-Man (this is how I perceive myself in my mind)

I say I did no exercise; we walked a few miles each day along the cliffs.  Saturday we walked from Porthtowan (we stayed in a cracking B&B overlooking the bay) to Portreath, about a six mile roundtrip.  On Sunday we walked to Trevaunance Cove (five and three quarter miles according to the sign outside the pub where we stopped to call a taxi to take us back to the car because the walk had taken us twice as long as we thought it would and we wanted to go home).  So I did *some* exercise.  I got my heart rate up on a couple of occasions (the Saturday walk featured a couple of very steep inclines) and got a bit of a ‘dab on’ (anyone who knows me will tell you that it really doesn’t take much to make me sweat though).  I just think walking doesn’t feel like *real* exercise, you know?

Tonight is Wednesday night, and you know what Wednesday night is?  No, it’s not the night “we’re gonna make love” (Flight of the Conchords reference.  Not sure it works to be honest but click on the link anyway) — it’s the night I waddle around a school gymnasium sweating, gasping for breath and trying to kick lumps out of the worst (and preferably weakest) footballer on the opposing team.  I’ll make no promises regarding my calorie intake afterwards, but please keep your fingers crossed (metaphorically of course, just in case you put your hand up at the start of this blog).

I once went on a Management Bullshit Course in which the speaker said that as we get older we find it harder to change our personality traits.  The point that stuck in my mind was the cut-off point he specified: twenty-eight.  Up until the age of twenty-eight, he said, we can still change who we are.  We can change those things about ourselves that annoy us.  After that, we’re screwed.  We’re stuck as we are.

Now, as with most theories, I’m pretty sure it’s not a hard and fast rule.  I’m fairly safe in the knowledge that we can always change who we are and what we’re like, but the point is that it becomes more difficult with age.  And did I mention I’m twenty-eight and ten twelfths?

If this were a lecture or seminar I’d ask you all to write down five things about yourself that you’d like to change.  We’d then probably do an exercise where I’d get you to write down positive steps you can take to achieve those goals.  I’d get you to create SMART objectives, and you’d leave my lecture full of optimism.  But the next day you’d probably have forgotten it all.  Is that a fair assumption or is that just me?  Have I just neatly summed up everything you need to know about me and why I’ll never change?

Why am I thinking all this then?  Well, last night, as planned, I went off to play 5-a-side football.  I actually did quite a bit of running about, which is unusual for me as I have the unenviable combination of being both unfit and lazy.  But after three Wednesday nights of football I definitely feel fitter.  Afterwards, as I said I would, I went to the pub and watched a bit of the England game with a Diet Coke.  All going to plan so far.  Then I had a beer.  A bit naughty but I felt I’d earned it.  Then I went home.

Me (centre) celebrating another brilliant goal

This is where it went a bit tits-up.  My girlfriend had some work friends over for dinner.  She’d made lasagne.  There was some left over, she told me.  “Stick it back in the oven,” I said, and went for a shower.  I returned and ate a rather large portion of lasagne with a bit of salad, plenty of coleslaw and some bread.  And a beer.  Oh, fuck it.

And then it hit me.  I’ll never change.  I love food.  I love beer.  I have very little self-control when it comes to food and beer.  Actually — scrap that — I have NO self control when it comes to food and beer.  I just love it.  I love food, and I like to eat until I’m stuffed.  If something’s nice, why deny yourself?  You might be dead tomorrow, so why not have that last mouthful of lasagne, that last slice of cheesecake, another beer?  This is why I’m overweight (it’s also — unsurprisingly — why I get so ridiculously drunk).

So, if I can’t change — if I’m always going to be a greedy fucker — then what to do?  Do I accept that I’ll be forever overweight and I’ll probably die of a heart attack in my forties?  Nope.  I need to do some ruddy exercise.  Yep, it’s come to that.  ME, doing EXERCISE!  You heard it here first.  Even though I’m lazy and the mere thought of going for a run tires me out, I need to do something on top of my weekly hour of football.  I’m not sure what yet, but I need to do something.  Just you watch me.

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Not my accident

Now in many ways this is irrelevant.  If I were 100% at fault, 50% at fault or a tiny bit at fault, it still goes down as an accident on my record, I kiss goodbye to my no claims bonus and my premium goes up.  The point is that I object to being told I’m the only one in the wrong when a motorbike rides between two lanes of moving traffic.  Yes, it was careless on my part, but it really fucks me off that motorcyclists gets all high and mighty (“THINK BIKE!” FFS) about road safety, while seemingly being a law unto themselves. 

I’m not tarring all motorcyclists with the same brush (in the same way I have to tell myself that some lorry drivers might not be cunts), but…  well, I’ve forgotten my original point.  I’m just pissed off at the moment and need to vent my spleen a bit.  Oh, and did you know that whitelining/lane-splitting/whatever you want to call driving in between lanes of moving traffic is illegal in most US states?

Anyway, this weekend I took on two demons which, as you may have noted, have plagued me somewhat in recent weeks.  I went to a wedding on Saturday where I drank all day, and, remarkably, was neither violently ill nor embarrassingly drunk.  At least not as far as I’m aware.

I’ve not been overly-healthy this week so far, but I haven’t been especially bad.  Until today.  Friday night we had a lovely meal and a few drinks with friends at Archie’s restaurant, then obviously Saturday involved a lot of canapés and beers and that.  Sunday we had a pub lunch with some other friends at the brilliant Navigation Inn in Breaston (I would very much recommend the beef or lamb Sunday lunch option and would advise steering clear of the stuffed mushrooms and risotto.  The former went down a storm with the boys while the vegetarian options were less of a hit with the girls.)  Today I’ve been a bit of a pig.  I made myself an egg sandwich for lunch, then went to Tescos and bought some salt and vinegar crisps.  And some beefy jerky.  And a bag of Marmite-flavoured cashew nuts (really not that nice, perhaps unsurprisingly). 

The reason for this apparent gluttony is that I’m playing football tonight and I don’t want to have any tea beforehand.  Last Wednesday night I was hungry when I got home so rushed a toasted cheese and marmite sandwich (my sandwich of choice at the moment, FYI).  Fifteen minutes later I thought I was going to sick up said sandwich after the first tiny bit of exertion.  So no food tonight either before football or after, when I will go to the pub and drink Diet Coke whilst watching Peter Crouch stumble around looking lost in an England shirt.

And if you’re a motorcyclist, THINK CARS for a change.  You know — those big metal things with four wheels that pay more road tax than you that you weave in and out of.  Yeah, that’s them.  And if you see a black Ford Focus I’d suggest you give it a wide berth because it might be me trying to run you down.

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Why is this important?  Well, it isn’t, really.  Not on the grand scheme of things.  It did however mean that last week I had to walk a bit more than usual every day.  My fifteen-minute drive to walk was substituted with — on a good day — an hour’s walk/bus ride/walk/train journey/walk.  On one particularly bad day it was an hour and three quarter’s walk/bus/walk/sit waiting on cold train station the one day I didn’t wear a jacket/train/walk.  The plus-side of all this was that I got a bit more exercise than usual, and I managed to read the whole of Kevin Sampson’s book ‘Freshers’ (which, to be fair, was OK.  Nothing special — just OK).

I did however miss my Friday weigh-in as I spent my lunchtime collecting my car.  Today when I finally managed to weigh myself I found that the weekend’s excesses had undone all the good of my additional walking.  It may also have been something to do with the 1.5kg tin of chocolate biscuits a work colleague brought in last week (I conservatively estimate I ate about a third of the tin).

And even after an excessive day/night out on Saturday, I still thought I might have lost a bit of weight.  OK, so I drank somewhere in the region of fifteen pints, but on the flipside I only ate two slices of cheese on toast, a bag of nuts and a packet of quavers.  Unsurprisingly — given those combining factors — I vomited pretty much all of it up all over the bathroom floor at about ten o’clock.  So all things considered I thought I’d done OK.  And I’m not admitting to being bulimic either (or advocating bulimia as a weight loss tactic), I’d quite clearly had far too much to drink and not nearly enough to eat.  Yet again I found my Saturday night coming to a premature and embarrassing end; this time however I can’t blame weight loss.  I’ve stayed at 18st 8lbs for three weeks now, and I really need to do something about it.

As much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m going to have to start exercising.  Last week I played 5-a-side football on Wednesday night — something I’m planning to do every week throughout the winter.  That should help.  I might also have to go for a jog.  And I really really fucking hate jogging.  I need to be far healthier than I have been so far.  I just need to do better, basically.

My next weigh-in will be Friday, by which time I guarantee I’ll have lost some weight.

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