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.
27 February 2009
The Chocolate-Free Blog, Days 1-3
The best-laid plans of a failed chartered accountant never run smooth. I had expected this to rapidly become one long whinge about all of the chocolate I hadn't eaten, and all of the surprisingly embarassing things that I had actually eaten instead. Yet nearly three days into Lent I've written nothing at all.
This isn't because I've deliberately given up blogging. It isn't because I ate three Mars bars for breakfast on Ash Wednesday and am hiding in shame until I can think of something funny to say about it; I actually had a pear, a yogurt and a handful of sultanas. It isn't even because I've fallen out with the charming BT call centre somewhere in India which always cuts me off after failing to understand anything I've said, which is what usually happens when my broadband connection dies.
No. My body responded to the lack of chocolate by shutting down. Admittedly, I hadn't been feeling 100% for the past week or so - so I even made sure that I kept my sugar intake up by eating some rather odd Skittles Sours in the University of London Library on Wednesday morning (there was someone else sitting there eating something out of a lunchbox with a fork, so I'm thinking the 'no eating and drinking' thing is largely symbolic), and having two Appletizers in the pub on Wednesday evening. However, while still in the pub, my head started to hurt. Taking paracetamol seemed to do nothing for it, and when we left the pub (in theory to go and get some food) my eye-sockets started to hurt with every step I took. So I skipped dinner, and went home, figuring that an early night would undoubtedly 'fix' whatever it was that seemed to be holding my head in a vice and doing strange things to my eyeballs.
After a night during which I didn't sleep because it hurt too much - even though I couldn't even open my eyes without it hurting more - and during which I kept trying to move my head into a position which hurt less, only to find myself shaking uncontrollably every time I moved, I was a bit less sanguine about the whole thing. In fact, I was about 50% convinced I was dying, and panicking because my husband and I hadn't sorted out our wills. I even got the husband to Google symptoms of meningitis before I sent him out on a drug hunt yesterday morning (I was mostly reassured by the conclusion, and have since resisted the temptation to Google it myself to see if he actually got the right answer).
I managed about two hours out of bed yesterday, with the assistance of the type of neurofen which has codeine in it (it took about an hour and half to kick in, and only worked for about an hour or so - but at least it did sort of take the edge off things). By the end of the day I was no better than I had been at the beginning of it, and I was becoming even more convinced that I was dying - to the extent that I was even contemplating an interaction with the medical profession.
Thankfully, I fell asleep sometime around midnight, and when I woke up at about half past five this morning my temperature had gone back to normal. I still had to keep my eyes shut when it got light - although that has gradually got better in the course of the day, and I even made it as far as Waitrose in Fulham this afternoon (and got some Malted Milk biscuits, which tasted weird and sugary - but that might just be because they are). So chocolate hasn't really been a big issue yet. Hopefully I have that battle still to come.
This isn't because I've deliberately given up blogging. It isn't because I ate three Mars bars for breakfast on Ash Wednesday and am hiding in shame until I can think of something funny to say about it; I actually had a pear, a yogurt and a handful of sultanas. It isn't even because I've fallen out with the charming BT call centre somewhere in India which always cuts me off after failing to understand anything I've said, which is what usually happens when my broadband connection dies.
No. My body responded to the lack of chocolate by shutting down. Admittedly, I hadn't been feeling 100% for the past week or so - so I even made sure that I kept my sugar intake up by eating some rather odd Skittles Sours in the University of London Library on Wednesday morning (there was someone else sitting there eating something out of a lunchbox with a fork, so I'm thinking the 'no eating and drinking' thing is largely symbolic), and having two Appletizers in the pub on Wednesday evening. However, while still in the pub, my head started to hurt. Taking paracetamol seemed to do nothing for it, and when we left the pub (in theory to go and get some food) my eye-sockets started to hurt with every step I took. So I skipped dinner, and went home, figuring that an early night would undoubtedly 'fix' whatever it was that seemed to be holding my head in a vice and doing strange things to my eyeballs.
After a night during which I didn't sleep because it hurt too much - even though I couldn't even open my eyes without it hurting more - and during which I kept trying to move my head into a position which hurt less, only to find myself shaking uncontrollably every time I moved, I was a bit less sanguine about the whole thing. In fact, I was about 50% convinced I was dying, and panicking because my husband and I hadn't sorted out our wills. I even got the husband to Google symptoms of meningitis before I sent him out on a drug hunt yesterday morning (I was mostly reassured by the conclusion, and have since resisted the temptation to Google it myself to see if he actually got the right answer).
I managed about two hours out of bed yesterday, with the assistance of the type of neurofen which has codeine in it (it took about an hour and half to kick in, and only worked for about an hour or so - but at least it did sort of take the edge off things). By the end of the day I was no better than I had been at the beginning of it, and I was becoming even more convinced that I was dying - to the extent that I was even contemplating an interaction with the medical profession.
Thankfully, I fell asleep sometime around midnight, and when I woke up at about half past five this morning my temperature had gone back to normal. I still had to keep my eyes shut when it got light - although that has gradually got better in the course of the day, and I even made it as far as Waitrose in Fulham this afternoon (and got some Malted Milk biscuits, which tasted weird and sugary - but that might just be because they are). So chocolate hasn't really been a big issue yet. Hopefully I have that battle still to come.
24 February 2009
The Rules
It has occurred to me, rather belatedly, that I ought to work out what giving up chocolate means, given that I'm guessing that I've already done it. The husband made pancakes with chocolate sauce for pudding this evening: the sauce was a bit odd, so I actually passed and just had lemon and ice cream with the second pancake. There is (to my knowledge) no more chocolate in the flat, and I've known him long enough to know that the husband won't have thought to buy something for me to eat just before midnight, so I've given up chocolate several hours before I meant to.
Giving up chocolate has to mean not actually eating chocolate, or anything with chocolate in it. In order to avoid silly distinctions, I'm guessing that it has to mean nothing chocolate-flavoured either.
My husband's family tend to regard 'giving up chocolate' as shorthand for giving up all sweets, biscuits, cakes and desserts, and also not eating between meals. This is clearly silly, and would almost certainly result in multiple fatalities one way or another - which I think the husband accepts, as he was trying to persuade me not to give up anything at all a couple of nights ago. So I think I'm just going to give up anything containing or tasting of chocolate, and review the position in a week or two to see whether I've actually managed to improve my eating habits or just swapped a chocolate habit for wine gums or soft mints.
The husband actually believes that you get Sundays off during Lent - but then he does church stuff, and I don't. So this is it, until Easter.
I guess the problem is that chocolate isn't really the problem. I want giving the stuff up suddenly to make me into the kind of person who has a shiny, tidy, fabulous life. I'm not sure if accepting that it won't before I have even started is realism or defeatist.
Giving up chocolate has to mean not actually eating chocolate, or anything with chocolate in it. In order to avoid silly distinctions, I'm guessing that it has to mean nothing chocolate-flavoured either.
My husband's family tend to regard 'giving up chocolate' as shorthand for giving up all sweets, biscuits, cakes and desserts, and also not eating between meals. This is clearly silly, and would almost certainly result in multiple fatalities one way or another - which I think the husband accepts, as he was trying to persuade me not to give up anything at all a couple of nights ago. So I think I'm just going to give up anything containing or tasting of chocolate, and review the position in a week or two to see whether I've actually managed to improve my eating habits or just swapped a chocolate habit for wine gums or soft mints.
The husband actually believes that you get Sundays off during Lent - but then he does church stuff, and I don't. So this is it, until Easter.
I guess the problem is that chocolate isn't really the problem. I want giving the stuff up suddenly to make me into the kind of person who has a shiny, tidy, fabulous life. I'm not sure if accepting that it won't before I have even started is realism or defeatist.
21 February 2009
Upping the Calorie Count
I've just eaten my last batch of pre-Lenten cookies: every time I eat something involving chocolate at the moment it's as if I'm self-administering the last rites by instalments. Has to be said that it neither makes it taste any better, nor makes me feel any better about it - and it doesn't seem to make me less inclined to eat it either.
Cookies have been one of my great comforts of the past year or so. It's partly Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fault, as it's one of his recipes that I have been using. I have to say that he's not generally my kind of cook - if you find yourself being subjected to the consequences of weird butchery in the wilds of Chiswick, he's almost always to blame - but his cookie recipe is spot on. It makes the kind of cookies which are chewy without being more than a little bit crisp or ever so slightly spongey. I've tried it enough times to know that it works better with 'proper' dark chocolate than it does with anything more anaemic. I've even tried it enough times to know that I prefer it with Green & Black 70% to most other brands (although the Tesco finest 72ish% works OK if I'm feeling poor), and that it chops into about the right size chunks if you chop the little squares into 4, and that it chops most easily in winter weather if it has been in the cupboard near (but not next to) the hot water pipe for a day or two. If I'm using a medium rather than a large egg, I reduce the rest of the ingredients by about 10%. And it doesn't seem to matter much what kind of sugar you use.
I didn't grow up with cookies, although there was plenty of home baking around. Cookies have the attraction of being exotic. I remember very clearly the first time I ate proper home-made chocolate chip cookies: the fact that they remind me of a particular boy at a particular time certainly does nothing to put me off them.
But they also have the advantage of making up into relatively small batches. I have the same problem with cakes and biscuits as I have with chocolate: if they are there, I eat them. The cookie recipe makes about a dozen. Eating a dozen cookies is bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as eating an entire tray of brownies or a whole, large carrot cake. I just concentrate on not thinking about the fact that making a bar of chocolate into cookies miraculously converts about 550 calories into something more like 4,000.
If I actually manage to do this (the giving up), I intend to spend Easter Sunday morning making cookies.
Cookies have been one of my great comforts of the past year or so. It's partly Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fault, as it's one of his recipes that I have been using. I have to say that he's not generally my kind of cook - if you find yourself being subjected to the consequences of weird butchery in the wilds of Chiswick, he's almost always to blame - but his cookie recipe is spot on. It makes the kind of cookies which are chewy without being more than a little bit crisp or ever so slightly spongey. I've tried it enough times to know that it works better with 'proper' dark chocolate than it does with anything more anaemic. I've even tried it enough times to know that I prefer it with Green & Black 70% to most other brands (although the Tesco finest 72ish% works OK if I'm feeling poor), and that it chops into about the right size chunks if you chop the little squares into 4, and that it chops most easily in winter weather if it has been in the cupboard near (but not next to) the hot water pipe for a day or two. If I'm using a medium rather than a large egg, I reduce the rest of the ingredients by about 10%. And it doesn't seem to matter much what kind of sugar you use.
I didn't grow up with cookies, although there was plenty of home baking around. Cookies have the attraction of being exotic. I remember very clearly the first time I ate proper home-made chocolate chip cookies: the fact that they remind me of a particular boy at a particular time certainly does nothing to put me off them.
But they also have the advantage of making up into relatively small batches. I have the same problem with cakes and biscuits as I have with chocolate: if they are there, I eat them. The cookie recipe makes about a dozen. Eating a dozen cookies is bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as eating an entire tray of brownies or a whole, large carrot cake. I just concentrate on not thinking about the fact that making a bar of chocolate into cookies miraculously converts about 550 calories into something more like 4,000.
If I actually manage to do this (the giving up), I intend to spend Easter Sunday morning making cookies.
17 February 2009
He loves me?
The thought of Lent is currently a bit of a challenge. There is enough chocolate sloshing around in the flat that it's possible I will be found one morning suffocated by a tidal wave of annoyingly dark chocolate (I prefer milk). But I have absolutely no idea how I would manage to get through a day - deliberately - without it.
Admittedly, not all of the current excess is the result of Valentine's day. I had agreed with the husband that we would only exchange token presents - and that for his side of the deal he would give me a small amount of chocolate. I've learnt that it works best if I make my expectations clear (I once got an academic treatise on Medieval Heresy as a birthday present, apparently because I had enjoyed reading The Name of the Rose); although it turns out that this was actually nowhere near clear enough. I had somewhere between hoped for and expected a box of red Lindor. It turns out that was actually what the husband had intended to get, but he had planned to buy it in the supermarket on the morning of Valentine's day when he went there to get the newspapers. When they didn't have any, he panicked (it seems that he was only aware of a single shop in Fulham. I have no idea what he thought he drove past to get there). In his distressed state he saw a box of After Eight Mints - which he knows I like - but he then realised that they actually don't cost very much. Then he noticed that Green & Blacks were 3 for the price of 2, and I ended up with a box of After Eights and 3 bars of Green & Blacks as a Valentines present.
We have since had the 'small means size, not price, if we are talking about chocolate' discussion. And I've eaten most of it anyway, only for a German friend of mine to present me with four bars of orange chocolate as a very kindly meant semi-joke at lunchtime today.
The best Valentine's present I've ever had was a semi-obscene amount of chocolate. It was a big plush, red box of Godiva praline hearts; and it felt like I had finally arrived in the land of adult romance. I think I even vaguely assumed that every following Valentines day would be equally appropriately marked. The contents didn't last long, but I kept the box for several years and kept sewing thread in it. And I suspect that there is no way on earth to explain to my husband why that was OK, but 600g of Green & Blacks and After Eights really isn't.
Admittedly, not all of the current excess is the result of Valentine's day. I had agreed with the husband that we would only exchange token presents - and that for his side of the deal he would give me a small amount of chocolate. I've learnt that it works best if I make my expectations clear (I once got an academic treatise on Medieval Heresy as a birthday present, apparently because I had enjoyed reading The Name of the Rose); although it turns out that this was actually nowhere near clear enough. I had somewhere between hoped for and expected a box of red Lindor. It turns out that was actually what the husband had intended to get, but he had planned to buy it in the supermarket on the morning of Valentine's day when he went there to get the newspapers. When they didn't have any, he panicked (it seems that he was only aware of a single shop in Fulham. I have no idea what he thought he drove past to get there). In his distressed state he saw a box of After Eight Mints - which he knows I like - but he then realised that they actually don't cost very much. Then he noticed that Green & Blacks were 3 for the price of 2, and I ended up with a box of After Eights and 3 bars of Green & Blacks as a Valentines present.
We have since had the 'small means size, not price, if we are talking about chocolate' discussion. And I've eaten most of it anyway, only for a German friend of mine to present me with four bars of orange chocolate as a very kindly meant semi-joke at lunchtime today.
The best Valentine's present I've ever had was a semi-obscene amount of chocolate. It was a big plush, red box of Godiva praline hearts; and it felt like I had finally arrived in the land of adult romance. I think I even vaguely assumed that every following Valentines day would be equally appropriately marked. The contents didn't last long, but I kept the box for several years and kept sewing thread in it. And I suspect that there is no way on earth to explain to my husband why that was OK, but 600g of Green & Blacks and After Eights really isn't.
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