I have woken up fat.
Technically, I woke up fat Tuesday.
The realisation came when I needed to let my belt out a notch.
To be honest, the belt felt a little tight Monday evening on the way home from work.
I ignored the warning signs and ate enough for two Monday evening.
This is not the first time I have woken up fat, and it will not be the last time. The ban from the scales was lifted and the damage was confirmed in hard, honest numbers. 105.4kg.
“When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
Chuck Palahniuk
I am banned from the scales for my own wellbeing. Shell imposes the ban because I become so obsessed with my weight on the scales I count calories and start to walk places I don’t need to go to end up in a calorie deficit. I wake up each morning and if the number is higher than the previous day I go to extreme lengths to ensure the next day this does not happen.
Never mind. I will turn it around in a few weeks.
We spend a lazy day in the House of Wisdom, as usual. Shell has some work to do, I finish Coming Up For Air by Orwell and continue reading Seneca’s letters.
If Coming Up For Air was not written by Orwell, no one would have heard of it. Which leads me to wonder, outside of Orwell fans, has anyone heard of Coming Up for Air?
I have read his four fictional works written before he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy over the last month. They are inferior to his masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984.
We can draw two conclusions from this realisation. Firstly, he matured as a writer, secondly, he was influenced by Eileen. I lean toward the second conclusion purely based on the fact the Coming Up for Air was inferior to his previous three books. Further, Orwell’s first book, Burmese Days, was his best before he married Eileen.
Given that Eileen wrote and presented a poem about a dystopian future in 1984, and she named the animals on the farm after she married George, I am willing to go one step further and suggest that not only did she influence Orwell work, she probably was the inspiration.
“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”
Simone Weil
I have started reading Animal Farm as the sun sets in Dubai. I raise my glass to Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the genius behind two literary masterpieces; buried in a mountain of Orwell fandom, male biographers and the general tendency of society to push great women down at the expense of men who are not as great as we think they are.
A night of Chianti and a Gewürztraminer. The irony of three bottles of wine on a post about being fat is not lost on me.
“And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.”
Honoré de Balzac
2021 Maison Castel Gewürtztraminer (Languedoc-Roussillon, France)
Cheap and cheerful but hardly exceptional.
2020 Sensi Dalcampo Fiasc Chianti (Chianti, Italy)
See previous
2018 Riecine Chainti Classico (Chinati, Italy)
Shell picked this. Typical Chianti nose but some black tea and mint to make it interesting. It felt there was some oak, but the sweet spice is all from the fruit. Very good drinking. More elegant and polished than a typical Chianti.
