End of Week 2: Three pounds to the good, still obese (BMI = 30.1).

Well, as predicted I didn't lose as much weight this week as last - three pounds, to be exact. That's still a lot better than my target of a pound a week, so no cause for too much worry.

I think I established last week that breaking my routine at the weekends doesn't work - I didn't actually put anything on, but the momentum of weight loss was completely broken. This weekend I've tried to keep exercise as part of the mix - yesterday I put in about a half hour at  a friend's gym, cycled too and from zantic 's birthday bash last night, and today I'll give Merlin a proper walk of a couple of miles at least.

I'm going to be a wee bit out of my routine this week. unblinkered  doesn't get back until Wednesday, so I need to walk Merlin in the morning and be back to walk him not too long after five. That means no gym in the morning, or straight from work. I'll try to get round that by walking him for half an hour in the morning, and maybe going back out to the gym in the evening, and maybe fitting in a lunch time gym session. That does mean I probably should go to the gym this afternoon. In fact, I'll do just that - I can pick up my shopping at the same time.

OK, enough talking, time to do.

Robert Burns Week: Day One

I'm going to have quite a bit to say about our national bard (or "this ghost of a national poet, in this ghost of a nation", as Andrew O'Hagan puts it) this week, in the days leading up to the night when we celebrate him, but mostly I'll be posting a quote a day, since it's the poetry which matters.

This first one is the closing stanza of  "Love and Liberty, A Cantata".

"A fig for those by laws protected,
LIBERTY's a glorious feast!
Courts for Cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the PRIEST"

Peace, bread, work and freedom.

Just read this piece of brilliance by Andrew O'Hagan in the Guardian. It's an edited version of his Orwell Memorial Lecture, and it has a great deal to say about the death of the Working Class in England, and the causes of death. It made interesting reading for me not just because it brings together a good many of my own interests - Orwell, the radical tradition in England, and the society we're living in, but because O'Hagan's voice is very close to my own - his upbringing was the same, and many of his views were shaped at the same time. It's also a Scottish voice, talking about England, and that's something I rarely do.

I don't talk about England because there's nothing I can do about it. I've said here before that I think of England like the partner in a dead marriage  - I wish Scotland could arrange a quiet separation from it, but I also see it through a mist of better times, and feel a perverse loyalty when it's criticised by anyone but me (I had something of the same feelings about Bush's America - hopefully I'll be able to start feeling proud of it again, soon).

O'Hagan's piece is powerful for me because he does make those criticisms, he does talk about what England was and what it is.

I have a lot of English friends on this list, and a lot of friends from outside the UK: what do you think?

Blizzard

The snow has come.
I'm off to walk Merlin in it :)

Photo Meme

(Pinched from chickenfeet2003 )

Go to your pictures folder
Open the sixth folder
Open the sixth photo
Tell us about it:



Anna, doing her "over here, I'm adorable" pose.
Taken in my previous flat. It wasn't as nice as this flat, but it had wonderful light, and it was the first place I lived in that was uniquely mine, um, ever, come to think about it.

Woody Allen's Manhattan

Damn it, I go around thinking I'm a grown up, and that my relationships with women have been more or less what they should have been, and then I watch this again, find myself nodding, and know that I'm never really going to be normal. Whatever that is.