If I had been doing this more frequently (the blogging, I mean), it wouldn't have been any more interesting. Since recovering from the flu bug/ migraine nightmare, I've been feeling generally under the weather and rather grumpy. I had assumed that this would wear off, but it isn't. I actually seem to be getting rather more grumpy with every day that passes. I'm now at the point where nothing seems to be worth doing, but I then get to the end of the day having done nothing and feel guilty about going to sleep. So often I don't. Then I feel even more crap and grumpy the following day because I've spent half the night either listening to the husband snoring, or wandering around doing sudokus or the ironing.
There are a number of possible explanations for this. Lack of chocolate is admittedly one of them. Depression is another - although I do believe that even that might be tracked back to the lack of chocolate. The fact that it's been winter for a long time, that I no longer have a job, and have no idea what I'm going to do with the next week, let alone the rest of my life, might also have something to do with it.
Yesterday I started thinking about who I wished I was; coming back to the comment from a couple of weeks ago about chocolate possibly not being the real problem. I didn't come to any firm conclusions - it was more that I couldn't come up with anything which seemed even vaguely appealing rather than struggling to choose between competing impossibilities - apart from the fact that I would be thinner, and I would eat chocolate. Not huge, angry quantities of it, but small, elegant amounts, maybe a couple of times a day at the end of meals. Sometimes a truffle, sometimes a mint. Never a frantic scramble to the end of the packet. And absolutely no guilt about it all.
Then I decided to do some sudokus instead, working on the assumption that one would soon go wrong (I've been very slapdash in my sudokuing of late). Except they didn't. I did something in the region of 20 Times fiendish sudokus yesterday afternoon/ evening, and none of them went wrong. Which then became another reason for not having achieved anything.
I'm wondering if I should try eating chocolate again to see if it improves my state of health and mind. Sugar as a substitute just doesn't work. I know this because I have repeatedly tried that experiment - not just the fudge last week, but there was a bag of Percy Pigs yesterday, and a packet of Jammy Dodgers this afternoon, neither of which seem to have helped to lift the fog. But I'm not sure if I'm just making excuses.
8 March 2009
3 March 2009
Day 6 - Godlessness
I finally got around to googling Alcoholics Anonymous last night. I didn't exactly spend long on it, but 'not long' threw up an interesting range of accusations that it was a cult, and statistics which show that it only has about a 5% success rate. I also hit the official website, which sets out the 12 steps, and discovered that step 2 is a requirement to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.
So even if they did do chocolate, I would be one of the 95%.
It was the second time I had come up against God in the course of a single evening - which is kind of unusual. Our paths don't usually cross that often. I had spent an interesting, if slightly odd, couple of hours at a panel discussion at the Royal Society about science and religion. I hasten to add that I didn't do any of the discussing, and hid in the corner at the drinks afterwards as lots of terribly learned looking types kept greeting one another slightly awkwardly (hard to tell whether it was arthritis, autism or problems with bodily hygiene - but quite an interesting dynamic to watch). But it lead me to reflecting on the fact that, despite having done so in the past, I now can't quite summon the energy which I need to believe in a God.
Forster doesn't help. I tend to come back to a quote which I noted down as an undergraduate about 20 years ago. 'He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind'. Conversion isn't religion, but it's close enough for me when I'm free-associating in a room full of professors and priests.
Free association also took me from half-baked minds to cookie dough (it's easily done: I also found myself thinking that the curtains in the lecture room would make an interesting ball gown). My usual cookie recipe is unfortunately specific to chocolate - the dough melts almost flat, and it needs the chocolate to melt with it in order to not produce something with sticky out bits. But I have been thinking that if I upped the flour content a bit and omitted the vanilla essence, it might work with crystallised ginger and dates.
I just haven't tried it today because I bought and ate a large bad of fudge instead. I intended to buy a small bag of kids fudge from Thorntons, but didn't end up anywhere near a Thorntons (which then cost me about 600 calories). So I guess this actually covers day 7 as well.
So even if they did do chocolate, I would be one of the 95%.
It was the second time I had come up against God in the course of a single evening - which is kind of unusual. Our paths don't usually cross that often. I had spent an interesting, if slightly odd, couple of hours at a panel discussion at the Royal Society about science and religion. I hasten to add that I didn't do any of the discussing, and hid in the corner at the drinks afterwards as lots of terribly learned looking types kept greeting one another slightly awkwardly (hard to tell whether it was arthritis, autism or problems with bodily hygiene - but quite an interesting dynamic to watch). But it lead me to reflecting on the fact that, despite having done so in the past, I now can't quite summon the energy which I need to believe in a God.
Forster doesn't help. I tend to come back to a quote which I noted down as an undergraduate about 20 years ago. 'He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind'. Conversion isn't religion, but it's close enough for me when I'm free-associating in a room full of professors and priests.
Free association also took me from half-baked minds to cookie dough (it's easily done: I also found myself thinking that the curtains in the lecture room would make an interesting ball gown). My usual cookie recipe is unfortunately specific to chocolate - the dough melts almost flat, and it needs the chocolate to melt with it in order to not produce something with sticky out bits. But I have been thinking that if I upped the flour content a bit and omitted the vanilla essence, it might work with crystallised ginger and dates.
I just haven't tried it today because I bought and ate a large bad of fudge instead. I intended to buy a small bag of kids fudge from Thorntons, but didn't end up anywhere near a Thorntons (which then cost me about 600 calories). So I guess this actually covers day 7 as well.
2 March 2009
Days 4 and 5
I am happy to report that although I suspect that my ongoing codeine consumption is taking the edge off some of the withdrawal symptoms (I know that's not a good swap but the left hand side of my neck now keeps trying to go into spasm, and I'm not very good at pain), I have at least started displacing some of my typical chocolate-related behaviours onto the (utterly dismal) substitutes with which I have been experimenting.
Yesterday, for example, I got up and made myself one of the two relatively healthy breakfasts in my repertoire (it was the fruit and yoghurt scenario again - the other one is porridge, although I suspect that ought to be marked down on account of the quantity of golden syrup I usually have with it). I sat and ate it slowly, and tried not to get to irate about the fact that the husband was about to disappear and leave me on my own all day, and even washed up the bowl and wiped down the kitchen work surfaces. I then wandered round the flat, in a circuit starting and ending in front of the kitchen sink, concluding that there was nothing that I wanted to do and that everything was pretty shit. And then I ate all of the rest of the Malted Milk biscuits. And although I started to feel slightly sick before I had finished them, the sense that natural order would be restored if I finished the packet (rather than leaving a couple in the bottom of the biscuit jar, which would also happen to stand as evidence to my general lack of self control...) kept me going until there were just a few largish crumbs left in the wrapper. I then shoved the wrapper in the bin, and hated myself for being fat.
So at one level I clearly don't need chocolate at all. But the chemical composition of Malted Milk biscuits (even slightly dodgy ones from Waitrose - I never quite got over the idea that there was somehow something wrong with them. It was as if the sugar in them was crunchy, which isn't how I remember them...) clearly isn't quite the same, as the sense of disgust wasn't followed by the mild euphoria that a chocolate binge usually brings. Which is possible why I did the same thing with a packet of rice cakes in the evening, to even less effect.
If I think about chocolate, milk Lindor is definitely what I am missing most, though. I don't even eat it that often - although I ate an awful lot of it in the couple of weeks before Christmas, when I tried tying the red truffles to the tree in lieu of 'proper' tree chocolates but then kept eating them all with indecent haste and leaving tell-tale tree needles all over the floor. Eventually I bought some of the humdrum Cadbury's purple tree chocolates instead, at least some of which survived until the tree came down. But I first met Lindor when I was a student in Paris, which is an association which does nothing to diminish its charms. Towards the end of my time there, when I had fallen out with both my boyfriends (the English one and the French one) and decided that I wasn't going to achieve anything anyway, I took to going to Monoprix late most afternoons to buy Lindor and orange juice. I'm guessing it probably counted as supper. Good, rose-tinted, times.
Yesterday, for example, I got up and made myself one of the two relatively healthy breakfasts in my repertoire (it was the fruit and yoghurt scenario again - the other one is porridge, although I suspect that ought to be marked down on account of the quantity of golden syrup I usually have with it). I sat and ate it slowly, and tried not to get to irate about the fact that the husband was about to disappear and leave me on my own all day, and even washed up the bowl and wiped down the kitchen work surfaces. I then wandered round the flat, in a circuit starting and ending in front of the kitchen sink, concluding that there was nothing that I wanted to do and that everything was pretty shit. And then I ate all of the rest of the Malted Milk biscuits. And although I started to feel slightly sick before I had finished them, the sense that natural order would be restored if I finished the packet (rather than leaving a couple in the bottom of the biscuit jar, which would also happen to stand as evidence to my general lack of self control...) kept me going until there were just a few largish crumbs left in the wrapper. I then shoved the wrapper in the bin, and hated myself for being fat.
So at one level I clearly don't need chocolate at all. But the chemical composition of Malted Milk biscuits (even slightly dodgy ones from Waitrose - I never quite got over the idea that there was somehow something wrong with them. It was as if the sugar in them was crunchy, which isn't how I remember them...) clearly isn't quite the same, as the sense of disgust wasn't followed by the mild euphoria that a chocolate binge usually brings. Which is possible why I did the same thing with a packet of rice cakes in the evening, to even less effect.
If I think about chocolate, milk Lindor is definitely what I am missing most, though. I don't even eat it that often - although I ate an awful lot of it in the couple of weeks before Christmas, when I tried tying the red truffles to the tree in lieu of 'proper' tree chocolates but then kept eating them all with indecent haste and leaving tell-tale tree needles all over the floor. Eventually I bought some of the humdrum Cadbury's purple tree chocolates instead, at least some of which survived until the tree came down. But I first met Lindor when I was a student in Paris, which is an association which does nothing to diminish its charms. Towards the end of my time there, when I had fallen out with both my boyfriends (the English one and the French one) and decided that I wasn't going to achieve anything anyway, I took to going to Monoprix late most afternoons to buy Lindor and orange juice. I'm guessing it probably counted as supper. Good, rose-tinted, times.
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