Danskcolin: Thursday November 21st 2024 "All you dieters out there, do YOU ever 'cheat' ??!!!"

My question-of-the-day is strictly for the dieters among you today, so everybody else, relax and "stand down" for a moment (!). And here comes my question ... are you the kind of dieter who regards the occasional "cheat day" as a help towards losing weight, not a hindrance?

Most of us dieters do, don't we, so no surprise there. But here's the real surprise - the same principle applies in all walks of life! Did you see local woman Karen Garver's story in this morning's Onion News (West Worcestershire) print edition - turn to page 94 if you want all the juicy details !!!!

And Karen's story is certainly one that resonates with me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois today, let me tell YOU!

We find ourselves in bed again this afternoon, feeling a bit naughty but otherwise pretty pleased with ourselves - and under the bedclothes Lois's Huawei is beeping 'like nobody's business' and my Samsung is joining in the fun.

It's only later, after we get up, that we begin to feel 'dirty' and 'used'. When we struggle downstairs at around 4 pm it suddenly dawns on us what we've done. Yes, we've broken our diet, turning today into a totally, and horribly, unplanned 'cheat day'. The horror!!!

The day started innocently enough with a 26 mile drive to Alcester, to pick up our daughter Sarah's post. We call at the house in the town that she and her family vacated at the beginning of September, when they flew off to Perth, Australia, to start a new life 'down under'. We pick up the post from the nice South African woman, Thea, who's now renting the house, and then we saunter through the nearby park where we used to take Sarah and Francis's 11-year-old twin daughters while they were still in England - sob sob!!!

we drive 26 miles to the old Roman town of Alcester, to pick up

our daughter Sarah's post, before sauntering through the park,

today frozen and deserted, where we used to take our twin

granddaughters Lily and Jessica, now all in Australia sob sob !!!!

Unfortunately, on the way back home and feeling in a bit of a naughty mood, we give into temptation and stop for lunch at Malvern's oldest pub, the Bluebell Inn, built in 1512. If only we could turn the clock back, but it's too late now.

Damn!!!!

It was fun while we were doing it, but now Lois and I

just feel "dirty" and "used" - oh dear!

It feels all the more tragic today, because this morning for the first time, I 'broke through' the psychologically important "Ten Stone Barrier". What a fool I've been !!!!!

our 'Australian Wildlife' diet calendar, on which

I wrote my weight, only this morning, of 9st 13lbs 12 oz

- how poignant it seems now, after our joint "cheat day" -

even the weird Australian creature in the picture is looking

accusingly at me - yikes !!!!

And we can't help thinking, also, about Woody Allen's iconic "F"-character. Oh what fools we've been today !!!!!

Poor "F" !!!!!!

A chilling story, wasn't it, and every bit as haunting and threatening as anything in a real life Kafka story. And let's just hope that Lois and I don't meet "F"'s fate - yikes !!!!

[That's enough 'cheat day' so-called "reflections" ! - Ed]

21:00 Feeling somehow fat and horrible this evening, we go to bed on this week's edition of "QI L-to-X", the comedy quiz show, hosted by the UK's most popular Dane, Sandi Toksvig.

Presenter Sandi Toksvig asks a question tonight about who was the first person ever to see sperm cells, the tiniest cells in the human body, thanks to his newly-invented microscope.... yes, it was 17th century Dutch scientist Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek of course, back in 1677.

More details follow from Sandi...

Oh, so that's where he got his "samples" from, was it? What madness!!!!

And the panel members tonight are a bit taken aback, to put it mildly.

To Alan Davies and to comedienne Maisie Adam, however, it's all sounding a bit overly "clinical" now.

What madness!!!

Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek was certainly a very clever guy, who in 1667 developed lenses that were able to magnify tiny objects to 250 times their actual size, compared to the previous best, Robert Hooke's lenses (1665), which could only do it 50 times.

Van Leeuwenhoek would never have been able to discover all that about sperm, however, if he'd been born in Yorkshire, rather than in Delft, as we discover on our just-before-bedtime staple - a re-run of an old episode of "Last of the Summer Wine" , the world's longest-running sitcom.

In this episode, Nora (left) and Ivy (right) are consoling Pearl (centre), who's worried that her husband Howard has been seeing far too much of Marina, the village temptress.