Suffice to say, Valentines day isn’t exactly my favourite day of the year, and not for anything to do with recent events. There’s just some pretty nasty baggage from many years ago that unfortunately coincided with exactly the wrong day on the calendar, thus ensuring it jumps up to bite me on the arse every year. Ho hum.

So yeah, moving on. Obviously there was the danger of today spiralling into some kind of headfuck given recent events but I did my best to distract myself from all that by embarking on a fairly major rearranging of my office. Soon got bored of that though and headed up to Gloucester for a mooch, a coffee and some social interaction with actual real-life people. Bumped into a couple I often see in Waterstones, Les and Sian, with their rather lovely Doberman Herla. The poor old girl’s got a degenerative nervous system disorder rather like MS and she’s slowly losing motor function in her legs which is terribly sad to see in such a lovely animal but thankfully she doesn’t seem to be in any major pain and she does end up getting spoiled rotten by all the regulars in costa (not to mention the staff)

I’ve got to admit that seeing all the fluffy stuff online today did spin me out a bit as it was naturally difficult not to think about relationships given how the subject was rammed down our throats from all directions today.

I am still finding it surreal the way Kel seems to be able to just carry on as if nothing’s happened. It’s like she’s managed to to just wipe away all that time from her head or something and is just treating me like I’m just any random bloke she knows and not in fact the guy she was planning to spend the rest of her life with. She seems to have miraculously gained the ability to show absolutely no sign of emotion about ‘us’ whatsoever, it’s just like none of it ever happened and that’s weirding me out big time because now I’m starting to question everything and wondering if she ever did actually mean anything she said to me. it certainly doesn’t feel like it and that’s a very odd feeling.

Still, sitting around moping isn’t going to help anything is it and so I’m just doing the only thing I can, just getting on with it. I’m not quite sure what ‘it’ is yet, but whatever it is I’m getting on with that.

I did very nearly made a prick of myself by buying Kel a big soppy valentines card & ordering flowers etc. but I thought better of it and cancelled them. As far as I can tell the only possible outcome of that course of action would have been more pain for me and I figured what’s the point in belittling myself even further after being made a fool of for the last 12 months? I’ve got a long way to go to get the old me back but I’m at least sentient enough to know I’m worth more than that.

I am lucky to have an excellent group of friends who’ve been keeping me (nearly) sane and putting up with me over the past few weeks. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a few trips down to Bristol to hook up with some friends who are also into photography & creative stuff. hopefully we’ll be sorting out some photographic opportunities with them very soon which is cool. It’s also been good for my sanity to talk to some friends who’ve at least managed to (almost!) convince me that I’m not in fact insane and that Kel does in fact ‘want her head read’. That bit did at least make me feel a wee bit better about myself!

Anyway, onwards and upwards as they say..

I think this weeks primary goal needs to be to get my arse down the gym, renew my membership and see if I can’t sort out some kind of sensible training plan to shift some blubber without totally destroying my old knackered knees. I’m setting myself a goal to lose about 1½ stone by June. I’m currently about 16st and want to get back down to under 14½ again. That’s totally do-able as I did more than that a couple of years ago, at one point I was over 17st and got down to under 14½ then, it’s just crept back up again over the last 18 moths or so. No excuses, sure it was a combination of dealing with mum being Ill, shit with Kel and a couple of injuries that took months to get over but those aren’t real justifications. The truth is I just took my eye off the ball.

I’m going to ressurect an old pic from a couple of years ago as motivation for myself. This was the progress I made when i set my mind to it, did a detox and just got on with it.

The pic on the left is pretty much spot on for how much I weigh and how I look now. The scary bit is that when that was taken I’d already lost about a stone so I’m bloody glad I didn’t have any pics from when I was at my heaviest.

If I did that before then I know I can do it again. It’s not going to be easy and I know that realistically i’m going to have to dramatically improve my nutrition and get my lazy arse into gear big time to do so but I’m bloody fed up with feeling like a fat old knacker and so there’s only one thing to do really isn’t there.

Just get the fuck on with it.