Hear no, see no, eat no evil

Sometimes a bury-my-head-in-the-sand mentality means it’s easier to get through the day.

It’s easier to start wearing leggings than resolve to eat less chocolate. It’s easier to blame other people for the fact the atmosphere at work is stultifying. It’s easier to assume the world is to blame for your  problems. It’s easier to have a fling with someone new than sort out your relationship with your husband.

It’s an attitude that’s served my purposes rather well over the past few years. Especially in winter, when hibernation takes hold.

Since Christmas, I’ve mostly been eating, watching telly and writing blogs with mixed responses. I punctuate the day at work with multiple cups of caffeinated beverages: coffee, tea, green tea, peppermint tea, builders tea, Earl Grey. It helps it break up. When I get home, Tom will have cooked (I’m not at my best with a saucepan and an open flame) and then, after the usual wrangling, we get the kids (Jonah and Ava – if you’ve just arrived) to bed before slumping on the sofa, barely speaking, watching telly, or writing. But it’s an amicable silence. One borne of ten years in each other’s company. We’ve not had sex for weeks, partly because I’ve been exceptionally slack about personal , er hem, grooming since at least before Christmas. Partly because I’ve been ill, and partly because, well, you know, it goes that way a bit. But we cuddle up all the same.

The winter has made me fatter, and disinterested in anything but my own comfort. I’ve given up any pretense of sartorial elegance. I’ve taken to wearing leggings in public, something that’s only just made my OK list. But my jeans were cutting in, and I cycle to work, so elastic has become my friend.

A general air of can’t-be-botheredness has crept in. But there is the odd green shoot appearing from the depths of my slovenliness. Weeks ago I blogged that I wasn’t that bothered that I’d put on a few pounds, and I wasn’t then, but now I am. Writing about Jonah’s diet last week has renewed my focus on cutting back on sugar, not just for him, but for me too, so I’ve started the 5:2 diet this week, where you fast for two days and eat ‘what you like’ for five, which seems simple enough but I felt like hell on toast (which I’m no longer eating) for two days as my body kicked out whatever nasties in my guts have been feasting on my Christmas excess.

I already look slimmer, but the diet itself is fairly brutal on the fast days – by mid afternoon I was headachy and couldn’t concentrate. By home time I was faint, and come 9.00pm, I was gnawing on my fist. I’ve done longer fasts in the past and the first day or two are always the worst, before the hunger pangs dissipate and your body starts feeling renewed. So I’m not sure this diet is for me, as I definitely ate two dinners on my non-fasting days. But a general shift away from eating like I just don’t care (because at the time I didn’t), and cutting back on the white stuff, in all its forms, is on the agenda, so hopefully come spring, I’ll be back in my jeans, and on top of my game, in more ways than what I choose to wear.

I can be fatalistic, optimistic and best case scenario about a lot of things until the moment I’m proven otherwise. I don’t believe in free will, as I’ve said many times: we’re too locked into a grid of genetics and circumstances for our neural pathways to run in more than one direction, or offer up a choice of options. But nonetheless I’ve started to wake up from my winter sloth and pay a bit more attention to the things that for one reason or another, I’ve been letting slide.

Poor Ava got diagnosed this week with glue ear, which explains why she’s been turning the volume up on the telly to max, and I feel a little guilty that my default assumption was that her sometimes selective hearing was attention seeking. So I’ve resolved to listen to the kids when they complain about this and that, to follow up with Jonah’s teacher who mentioned in passing, rather brutally, I felt, that he’s been having a hard time at school rather than hoping he’ll just tough it out, to ignore their protests that I’ve replaced their pudding with fruit, and take some responsibility for things it’s easier to blame on the way things are, or simply ignoring and hope they get better on their own, go away or never happen.

Like this article I wrote some months ago, that took me by surprise by being published today. I’d been pretending to myself would never be read by anyone but myself. It’s the reason many of you are here, but I’m afraid I will disappoint you with my current lack of joie de vivre. If you’re here for smut, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place, although if you find me on Twitter, I’ll occasionally point you in the direction of something more salacious – this blog, however is strictly safe for work. But if you like peeking behind the curtain of other people’s lives, and getting under someone’s skin, stay awhile – you might be surprised what you find.

In any case, it seemed like a good idea when I wrote it, but things have moved on since then, and change is the only inevitability of life, except death and taxes. Things are better with Tom than they have been, and Sam, well, I’m meeting Sam later, but dinner’s as far as it will go.

I’m not advocating a complicated lifestyle for the sake of it; only that making yourself happy in life is as important as trying to please everyone else.

But sometimes, doing the difficult thing and pulling your head out of the sand is the only way to see the right way to move on.