App-orexic

After supper on Wednesday night I asked Ro to get down the box of Lindt milk chocolate eggs from a high anti Fran and Lexie shelf. We then updated our app, 'My Fitness Pal'. I frowned, 'but how many calories is one egg?' She replied, not looking up from her app, 'Well, three are 180 calories and that's how many i've eaten.' 'Oh.' Glum. 'What about 15?'

Disaster. My app then informed me that if I go on eating like that I was going to put on two full pounds! This can't happen. I cannot get out of control again. I require a strict Lexie leash.

Cut (not literally, I'm not that upset), to Thursday and we're having lunch with Mum at home. My unemployment is clearly catching. We finish our noodles, beans and cheese and I ask Ro to fetch me an egg. She smugly isn't having one. I rebelliously crack one open with my teeth but the smile fades when the two halves fly under my tongue from the impact of my force. I choke a bit and they fall out down my white crochet style top.
Hmm. That was I think what they call a Jennifer Anniston pudding. Just a taste was quite nice. I put the two halves spittily on the table and announce that i'm finished. I don't feel like having anymore.

There is quite a furor about this. Mum and Ro are such feeders. Or maybe they're just totally shocked at my app-orexic behaviour. As they recount how the chocolate egg must be feeling at such rejection and termination of its life's journey I sulkily throw the two halves down in my beany cheesy lunch bowl. No, why should I finish my Lindt chocolate egg if I don't want to? I'm being assertive.

Unforch I obs haven't finished my assertiveness training, or maybe just how weird I am being soaks in finally, but after they've finished telling me how excited the egg was being made in the factory at the thought of being eaten by me, I grumpily chew back up one spitty beany half. Fine!
To make the egg feel better, when they clearly don't care about my feelings, Mum and Ro share the last half.

I think readers may feel as traumatised as the poor Lindt egg after finishing this story. Soz. 

Woffling on

I always get excited when I see rarebit on the menu because I think i'm about to get a nice meaty piece of bunny. Then ever so sorry when I remember that it's just cheese. What first world shock.

I remembered this because I was making a list of dishes that my Grampa will eat. Rabbit was on it and I thought, hmm you only usually see that on Welsh teashop menus. Ohh, tears tears, that's just stupid cheese on toast. So you can imagine how my heart soared when I was in the butcher's shop with Granny recently.
"Frances, come and look at this meat." Ok, Granny, which one would you like out of all those enormous dead animal caracasses?'

And then I spotted it! A fridge full of rabbit! Oh look Granny.. "Are you sure?", said Mr Jones the Butcher. We made nervous faces at each other. We don't like change. Granny resolved herself, "Yes" she nodded, looking anything but sure.

We bought it and stewed it and ate it with mash potato. It was completely delicious. With bated breath we asked Grampa if he'd liked it? He thought it was chicken. Small adventures.

If anyone wants to invite me out the house I promise I won't retell this "story". I'll be as cute company as a real life bunny.

Kitchen cut

I just tried to trim the back of my hair myself. Blind. With a pair of kitchen scissors. Whilst talking to Granny who was making gravy in the kitchen and couldn't see what I was doing behind her back or she would have immediately stopped me.
I literally want to stab myself now with the same hair stained kitchen scissors. Hannah from Girls has it backwards. You get ill because you cut your hair yourself, not the other way round.
I did it because the ends of my new 'do were becoming ever so slightly plaitable. Just like two times plaited, "cross hair, cross hair", not a full plait.
And now all I can think of is how Alex jokily pronounces plait. Like fat. Plllllllllaaaat. Yuk. That makes me feel more sick.

Luckily our meat loaf lunch will hopefully distract me by clogging up all my tear ducts with butter. If my hands are full of forked up mash potato I can't repetitively and obsessively touch the mauled uneven ends on my poor neck. It's like looking at a dead swan now. An elegant neck gone to waste.

Dave welcomed me and Spring through the door today for brunch. I skipped in like the newly shorn lamb I am  with an arm of cherry blossom stolen from the tree in the church yard next door. I'd subtly lingered by it for ten minutes whilst on the phone to my Grampa until the two elderly church garden attendants got distracted by their aching bent backs. What? I was already doing one good old person deed.  I'm not Diana!

Dave had luckily planned to make a breakfast with just as much bounce as me. We were having Nigel Slater's banana and berry muffins. But as we didn't have a  muffin tin as Lottie and Will had sold it to buy drugs we had to settle for a loaf tin. Voluminous.

After about two hours it rose like the April sun itself . We basked in it just as happily,  but slightly too sated as we'd already filled up on porridge during the baking dawn.

p.s the picture is not in the slightest bit what it actually looked like as we ate it with our hands

Grating

I decided to cut my hair off. I had half a mind to do it myself a la Hannah from Girls but then I realised that as much as I emo about i'm not actually that disturbed and as such should not pretend to be.
So I plumped for Toni and Guy like a normal unemployed 20 something. More Marni. More me.

I felt worried that the hairdresser would talk me out of it but he didn't and before long I was completely shorn. I don't feel like posing for photos right now as I haven't quite figured out how to style it  but just think Anne Hathaway or Claire Balding on a good day.

As that shearing went so well I decided to shave up some courgettes for dinner. Spaghetti with grated courgette, lemon, cheese, pine nuts. Of course I didn't have most of those ingredients but I'll buy them next time I go to the supermarket to stock up on VO5.

Jamba-crier

I'm really miserable because I just had to listen to an elderly man who I live with doing a laboured poo. For the second time this morning. It took ages. And I was about to go and run myself a bath. To fill the time until it cools down in there I thought I'd cheer myself up with reminiscing about Ro's little birthday party in the countryside last week. 

The night before we went to a Mexican restaurant in Rugby which was fun until a ginormous pack of 18 year olds came in for a double birthday and made Ro feel really old and lined. So then we had to go home. On her birthday morning I felt really ill so lay in bed groaning whilst she gave me a fashion show off her vast selection of body con and crop tops. It shocked the phlegm out of me so feeling better  we dressed the dogs up.

Lexie is unhappy too as he had just eaten a huge cadburys egg and two wispa bars, followed by me trying to get him to vomit it up with salt (I know all the bulimic tricks).

Hot pizza ass

I'm working on my boundaries and being clear and assertive recently. Too much Girls and then an unfortunate hour long episode reading Vice magazines sexual advice columns has scared me into demanding that people leave me a metre squared of personal space at all times.

Knowing that I'm going to El's birthday party at a pizza pub makes me a little worried about testing this. One of my issues with discipline is surrounding food. Not even surrounding. The whole thing is food. I just can't say no. I am fully aware that if I eat big fat wheaty things they make me feel sick, bloated and crampy. And I hate myself even whilst I'm licking strings of melted cheese and crust crumbs off my lips. But I just still do it. The humiliation!

Well no more. No means no. No 12 inch pizza order, no more rimming everyone else's left over crusts, no ten pints and then spitting in Dragana's face when she tries to help me.

I'm going to take myself a little cous cous pack up, settle myself down with a soda water (with lemon) and see who I can alienate. Alienation is easier than assertion fyi. Less confrontational.

On the rise

I accidentally watched an episode of Girls before going circuit training with my Dad. In it Adam is very sexually rude to his classy new girlfriend, after she has explicitly outlined that she does not want him to act like that. But then she gets freaked out and feels like she has to do it because he's kind of scary. "Get on all floors." "Crawl to my room." Aaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhh. Sounds just like push up directions if you ask me.

This made me more determined than ever not to let the circuit trainer touch me. I had a little conversation with myself on the toilet before the class. I would tell him that I was trying to take control over my personal space and that because of that I didn't want any non family or close friends to hug me. No offence.

He bounced into the room and I shuddered. Seriously, get a new gym kit. Ten year old reebok tracksuit bottoms. As stringy as the legs inside them, and probably just as stained as his pants. I put on my biggest smile. Oh Hi. And taking charge, went in for a hand shake. Oh whoops, how did he make that a hug? Men just can't help getting what they want! So manipulative. At least he smelt really clean. That was a nice surprise. Later, for some reason he told me he weighed seven stone. Ro said that was the worse and strangest man lie she had ever heard. Usually they just try to pretend they're not 35 when you're only 19.

In the car home Ro said that I shouldn't have smiled. But I had tried to dampen it down so much. You should see my 100 watt. I barely looked him in the eye during lunges or when he gripped my wrist to move me into position during spotty dogs, and I tried only to smile encouraging whilst looking at the floor. I can't not smile, it's rude.
"Yeah, but your cold and frigid is another person's take me on a date asap smile. You just can't help it. You've got to dampen down. You're too bouncy."

I'll tell you what is bouncy. Dough. I bought these frozen croissants at the farm shop. They come in dough form and you cook them into submission. I defrosted them and left them to "prove" themselves on the side. When we came back from a walk they had puffed so much that they'd all stuck together. Ooh mallowy to the touch. They were just as tactile as me during sit ups. Apparently.  

Feeling blue

In India it was fine eating with my hands. I read an interview with the Indian inventor of the wrist watch phone. He said it was inspired from when he couldn't answer his phone as his hand was dripping with chicken curry. He said in the interview, "You know how it is". Yes, I do, dripping. I felt his pain. My love Suresh, once told me God had clearly intended me to be born Indian as I was such a natural at massaging together my breakfast banana, popadom and rice. Not at the same time as he was trying to massage my feet.

But three days of knife and fork at home has clearly spoilt me. Or maybe I should have known not to paint my nails blue before eating a croissant.

Fish out of water

I accidentally lost 5lbs in India. Quite a coup compared to the 200g of an India travelling friend. Ro says I should then try to keep it off my luxury body with more exercise. So far this week we've gone for a morning hour walk and an afternoon run. The first day was 15 minutes due to falling into a very muddy trench, but yesterday's turned into what seemed like a day and a half. She had me running up and down the field with Lexie, shouting "Come on hurry up, the faster you do this the faster you can get home to that New Girl series 2 which is buffering.."

She's running a half marathon soon so she wants to be fit, whilst all I want to do is to be fit enough to walk up the stairs to my bubble bath.

To cheer us up we made a nice supper of river cobbler fish (whatever that is, sustainable sushmainable, I want cod) cooked in what dregs of white wine we could prise out of Mum's work tired hands. We had it swimming alongside sweet little carrots, and parsnip mash.