The Great Body Overhaul: Day 1

I am hijacking this blog for the next 52 days to deal with a pressing issue: my weight.

Since returning to northwest London in August and rediscovering my party spirit, I have gained almost 30lb. I am not happy about it! My clothes don’t fit.

So, until May 31st, this blog is going to chart my efforts to shift some of the excess before actually going to a Weight Watchers meeting and subjecting myself to the weigh-in.

• Long-term goal: Shift 5st
• Medium-term goal: Shift 30lb
• Short-term goal: Be slightly lighter in 14 days' time

Progress so far
Well, technically, Day 1 was Monday, but it was rather stressful – my first day in the new job and then an argument with my housemate. I ended up getting takeaway and drinking a martini. Whoops!

Tuesday, I arranged to meet some friends for a drink – but a meeting at work overran by ninety minutes, so drinks became dim sum and some cake Emilie had brought for me.

Wednesday, once again, I ended up going for dinner with a friend, followed by total surrender in the form of coffee and cake. And I announced over a lime and stem ginger brownie that I am giving up on going out for the next fortnight to try and concentrate on healthy eating. I’ll give it about that I’m skint, or something.

Today has been pretty good. I didn't manage to get out for a run this morning as I got home later than planned last night and was somewhat tired, but I used my extra minutes wisely by cleaning the kitchen. Tonight I'll try and do the same for my room!

Foodwise, I have been quite well-behaved:

• Breakfast = Chocolate Weetabix and skimmed milk (5 WW points)
• Lunch = homemade sushi and salad (7 WW points)

One huge difficulty I have is drinking enough water. A fitness professional advised me to aim for 3l a day and most days I have trouble even managing 1.5l. It's not even that I don't like water, I just don't often feel thirsty and find remembering to drink really difficult. I have had some success this week making sure I drink half a litre before leaving for work, but remembering to drink after that is still a battle.

This evening's big challenge will be going out for a drink with my housemate. She has brought a bit of drama into the flat recently and wants to talk about it. My plan: stick to two light drinks and go home after about an hour.

Explanation of absence

O, I am such a terrible blogger!

Where have I been?

Well, at the beginning of March I gave up my job, which you would think would give me loads of time for blogging, but it didn’t. I was out partying with friends and enjoying life! 

I went to the theatre; I met up with people I haven’t seen in ages; I discovered iPlayer and 4oD and caught up with all the TV shows my friends have been on about; I knitted; I went to the cinema; I sat in pubs and parks in the afternoon and watched the world go by; I read large, long books.

And then, I got a fantastic new job. Well-paid, intellectually stimulating and a ten-minute walk from my flat. I couldn’t ask for much more, really. Oh, except for nice colleagues. And they are: lovely. 

Curiously, any ability I’d had to sit through a TV show evaporated the day I started the job, and so did all the time I’d had for reading and knitting: I now walk to work so there is no ‘built-in’ culture time in my schedule!! On the plus side, I don’t have to leave home until 8:30 in the morning, so I can probably reinstate my ‘sacred hour’ for reading or writing, although so far I’ve been using it to listen to Radio 4. 

So, that’s just a quick update about where this blogger has been…

RIP La Liz

Photo I saw posted on Twitter...

Today, I was sad to hear that a true icon of Hollywood glamour has passed away: Elizabeth Taylor, surely one of the most beautiful women ever to be captured on celluloid.
 
 Though I loved watching her in films from National Velvet to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and as a child ws fascinated by stories of her many husbands,  the biggest impression she made on me was through her support of AMFAR. As a small child in the 1980s, AIDS was a hige, scary headline. Like most people my age I was fed myths by ignorant adults, it was a subject discussed in hushed tones and on news reports sprinkled with words like 'plague' and 'stigma'.

When glamorous Elizabeth Taylor came out publicly in support of AIDS sufferers, that, too made the news. It also revlolutionised my views and made me aware of AIDS as a humanitarian issue, as a topic to be approached with compassion and dignified with funding and research.

Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first few major celebrities to back AIDS charities, raising over $50 million during a crucial period. That - as much as her movies, diamonds and scandalous love life - is what I would like to remember her for.

No Soup for the Homeless

I'm really appalled by Westminster Council's decision to pass a bye-law which would not only make sleeping rough in the Westminster area illegal, but would also criminalise any charity or individual offering support to the homeless in the area.

The Council's justification for this act is that there is 'no need' for people to sleep rough and that the presence of the homeless makes life less pleasant for people living and working in the area. Why? My guess would be because it makes them feel guilty about their relatively privileged lives.

The Council also seems to think that food handouts to the homeless have no place in 21st-Century London and that giving  destitute people with no roof over their heads souo and sandwiches somehow 'encourages' people to live on the streets. I wonder if the individuals thinking up these ideas have ever wandered the streets of central London. A lot of the homeless people in the area are Big Issue sellers - they are already on their way to improving their situation - but they still need help. Being guaranteed a filling meal means people don't have to beg for food.

I feel that 21st-Century London - the affluent capital city of a country which wastes more food than any of its neighbours - is exactly the place where people who have nothing should be able to receive support, compassion and yes, free soup. Should the fragile, superficial sensibilities of those rushing off to spend money in Covent Garden boutiques be given more weight than the basic human needs of people who have nothing but worn clothes and a sleeping bag to their name? I don't think so.

Below is a video of a protest held against this measure a few days ago:

I fully agree that Londoners should be doing everything in their power to oppose this law and ensure that homeless people continue to receive vital support on London's streets. It is simply unacceptable to deny something as basicas food to people who have no means and nowhere to go.

In 2008, many journalists laughed at the Beijing authorities efforts to make their city palatable to an international Olympic audience. Westminster Council seems determined to present a similarlyartificial sanitised view of London by baniushing 'problems' like homelessness to the suburbs. The question is, will we let them?

Film Review: Black Swan

Rating: 3/5

It may have won a clutch of awards, and may be on track to scoop a few more, but Black Swan is decidedly more camp classic than cinematic art, a film hyped way beyond its stature.

Where the film lets itself down is in the details. From my very brief flirtation with ballet at the age of five, I know that dancers are not permitted to wear jewellery or have their hair down while rehearsing and that huge tattoos are highly unlikely to be seen gracing the shoulders of principal ballerinas. They might also have enlisted a foot-double for Portman – I’ve seen ballet dancer’s feet and they look as though they have been mauled by dogs!

That the film’s central performance has been showered with awards baffles me entirely. Apart from the fact that she is very good at portraying ‘cold’ and ‘unresponsive’ Natalie Portman’s acting leaves the audience with no sense of character whatsoever. This works to her advantage in a film like Closer, but seems to be a disadvantage in Black Swan. If the whole film rests on Nina, then her characterlessness makes the entire film insubstantial. She also seems to have trouble speaking, as if she doesn’t know what to do with her tongue, and this can be very distracting.

Aronofsky's strategy for avoiding film cliche's related to madness, is to avoid subtlety altogether. This is jarring for the viewer, accustomed to more regular representations, but not necessarily a bad thing. The film is best where it is most ludicrous, which is also where it is violent. The scenes that stick in the brain involve blood, smashed fingers, broken bones and mutilation - the gruesome, gory side always reined in enough not to disgust. The sexual content seems set up to have the same effect, but fails.

Mila Kunis, while very good, is almost annoyingly stereotypical in her role as the ‘bad Californian girl’ who likes sex and cheeseburgers, takes drugs, and wears a lot of black. I feel sorry for her: one feels she could have done so much more with the role if the director weren’t so hell-bent on abandoning subtlety in favour of caricature.

Much has been made of Winona’s Ryder’s ‘supporting role’ and while the moment when she plunges a nail file into her face is one of the film’s most startling moments, she really has little more than a cameo. Far more substantial, and chilling, is Barbara Hershey as the chilling, obsessive stage mother who keeps her adult daughter in a little girl’s room, confined to an apartment where there is no privacy.

The ending, I felt, was lazy. In fact, the final scene is such a mirror of the ending of The Wrestler that I was almost annoyed.

And yet…and yet…for all its cartoonish excess, the film is enjoyable. I laughed out loud (something I rarely do) in several places, and jumped in others. I feel the hype around the film may have drawn in the wrong audience – I derived much the same pleasure from Black Swan (aged 30) that I did from Scream (aged 16) and I somehow feel the two should be watched in the same spirit, by fun-loving people looking for a few laughs and a few thrills.

In praise of…

Downton Abbey – After a long, long wait while the Royal Mail got its post-festivity backside into gear, I finally sat down to the first three episodes of this highly lauded ITV show. My expectations were high, having enjoyed Gosford Park repeatedly and taken guilty pleasure in Past Imperfect and Snobs, and I wasn’t disappointed:  it was excellent. JF has hit upon a formula: in each episode, the eldest daughter of the house has a new suitor and her mamma (Elizabeth McGovern) and grandmamma (scene-stealing Maggie Smith) machinate to have the entail on the property removed, but fail. Around this basic weekly routine, Fellowes builds many other plots about the lives and hopes, identities and activities of the house’s inhabitants. As much as it bears something in common with early Star Trek episodes, where Kirk’s weekly love interest imperils the Enterprise and its crew, I think it’s quite a nifty device in this series as it means Fellowes can draw out other plot strands as subtly and lengthily as he likes without making the series seem ‘slow’. Add a few salacious details such as class-straddling gay affairs and young men dying suddenly during sex and it’s a great show. Add Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville and Penelope Wilton on top of that, and it’s gripping TV.

 The only jarring thing for me, really, is that they all sound so very common! In fact the ‘middle class’ cousin sounds a hell of a lot posher than his supposedly upper class girl-cousins who don’t even manage to do 21^st-Century upper class let alone Edwardian!  It is ITV, I suppose. Actually, it did occur to me that when the likes of Wendy Hiller and Peggy Ashcroft were available for hire, an actress sounding the way Maggie Smith does would only ever have got a role as a housekeeper. She’s bloody good as the scary grandmother, though – and her scenes with Penelope Wilton are pure gold.

Topshop nail polish – Sorry to go all girly on you and I’ve never liked Topshop, but this stuff is just fabulous. Great shades and my nails, which were painted on Sunday, have yet to chip, in spite of swimming and cooking and knitting – all activities which knacker weaker polishes.

The BFI – Not only is it London’s only decent rep cinema, but the pre-screening talks are a treat. Little did I know, when I turned up for a screening of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, that I would gain a new perspective on the film.  The showing was preceded by a UCL lecturer giving a talk about the movie and it was interesting to learn that the inception of the film – in which everyone except Cary Grant’s character is clearly bonkers and yet their logic prevails wherever he goes and think he is mad; where perceptions of ‘madness’ are down to individuals not being in complete possession of the facts – took place while the director’s wife was suffering a breakdown from which she never recovered. Somehow, that makes the combination of frustration, love and lunacy more understandable.

Pub Food at the Sir Richard Steele, NW3

Address:  97 Haverstock Hill NW3 4RL

Cost: £9.95 for a full roast

Rating: 4/5

At the point of ordering a pub roast, the diner has usually already resigned him- or herself to something cheap and substandard swimming in watered-down Bisto and is hoping only that the portions won’t be too stingy. And so, it’s always good to discover a pub that bucks against the stereotype and produces a meal generous enough and edible enough to make one wish they served desserts.

I usually take my occasional Sunday roasts at the Crown and Two Chairmen in Soho, but since happily discovering it during a wander up Haverstock Hill I have been installing myself at the Sir Richard Steele for drinks and knitting on Sunday afternoons. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed; young trendies mix with families and Old Men. The music is usually rather good, too.

The pub usually serves Thai food, which is yummy, though the portions are more lunch-sized than dinner-worthy. For post-drinking hunger I’d advise nipping next door to Oliver’s chip shop or two doors down to the local Chinese takeaway.

My previous Sunday jaunt involved many pints and several portions of chunky chips. Yesterday, we decided to do it properly and order a roast.

The menu offers beef, chicken and nut, which disappointed one of my friends who was hoping for pork. I do wish pubs would stop trying to convince their customers that roast chicken is part of the tradition – any real food lover will insist on beef, pork or lamb, surely?

I ordered the nut roast, which was excellent – very moist with a variety of different nuts, plus puy lentils. The portions were generous, too and I definitely appreciated the homemade Yorkshire pudding, and decent gravy. The vegetables sat carefully on the delicate line between too crunchy and overcooked and there were plenty of them: carrots, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and savoy cabbage. Washed down with a pint of Rum Cask Cider, it was a very satisfactory meal, though not quite enough to turn my allegiance from Soho.