OMG!

Day 41 and 104 kilos
Day 42 and 106 kilos
Day 43 and 109 kilos

GOD'S HOLY TROUSERS! From Friday morning to Monday morning a rise of six kilos - that's almost a stone for the Brits -  in three days!!! How, you are probably asking, could that happen? Well, very simply, I've been immoderate - three or four bottles of red wine and the addition of bread, potatoes, deep fried chicken, dutch "bitteballen" and pizza. Now I told you that I wouldn't post a daily rota of the things that I have consumed - so I won't but suffice it to say that the chief and I have had a "social" weekend involving dinner together at home on Friday, a visit to the comedy club on Saturday and dinner at a pizza joint on Sunday evening with friends and obviously no exercise whatsoever. Things were so bad last night that I was awoken by heartburn - a very simple warning signal that my stomach is being squeezed by too much food.

I do not feel good this morning and nor am I proud of myself. I'll be on fruit, vegetable juice and consomme for the rest of the week along with a daily bike ride. I cannot believe how my body has reacted to a single weekend of gluttony - I'm horrified by both the weight gain and the heartburn.

Having said all of that - the weekend was very pleasant. I kept myself surprisingly busy - visiting the market down in Geylang to buy the fruit and veg - it's a third of the price of shopping at Cold Storage (our local chain of supermarkets) and better quality but unfortunately the downside is that the market (as is true of most markets in Asia) smells very bad indeed. A mixture of stale fish, stale meat and rotting bits of vegetable and fruit. The chief has banned me from going to these places on my own because I get ripped off so heavily - "ah white man coming - double the prices". The chief of course goes in chatting in Malay with an idiot grin on her face and charms them into giving discounts - although it has to be said that her charm rarely works its magic on the chinese vendors.

We spent Saturday evening at the Dutch club which was hosting the comedy club night and we watched and laughed at / with three excellent comics. Drinking, eating and laughing - it's a difficult combination to beat.

Sunday was spent cooking - thai chicken and coconut soup (it rocks) and a new batch of chicken liver pate which my body is craving for some reason. I was sort of forced to go to the pizza restaurant last night. Obviously it would have been better to go to a healthier type of place but "C" had decided that he wanted one of their fat bastard 21" pizzas. We ended up with two of them between seven of us and despite some heroic efforts on the part of your narrator and Avinash we failed to finish them.

For those of you that are not aware of the fact, my six your old son lives in Spain with his mother. Apart from the annual (sometimes twice annual) visit, I keep in contact with him on Skype every week - a truly fantastic piece of software that usually but not always allows a real time video conversation. Sunday is the designated day and for the first time ever we had a conversation yesterday that included him listening to my questions and then giving answers and also asking me questions. Now his conversational skills have not been that strong on skype (because he is only six and would rather be playing with his cars or picking his nose) but yesterday I felt that we have had a breakthrough and this makes me exceedingly happy. The downside is that he has a newfound subject on which he wishes to converse and learn - football! If there is one topic of conversation in which I have no interest, it is football. But nonetheless in view of his prolonged verbosity I played along and the conversation went back and forth for about 45 minutes - the longest ever by far - it's a good start.  It was a slightly less impressive end however because he decided to finish the call by first standing on the chair, dropping his shorts and mooning his father before turning round and exposing himself at me. The problem of course is that whilst I am obviously a firm disciplinarian, I couldn't help but laugh instead of scolding him. I have laughed quite a lot over the weekend.

I mention all of this because I have started to wonder about the importance of one's state of mind in relation to fitness. The expression "mentally fit" seems to ring a bell and I am wondering if someone would be considered fit if they were unhappy or mentally unfit. Is fitness a holistic concept of both body and mind or is it just the body? This is not really a rhetorical question - I welcome your thoughts.

Oh dear god - one weeend only!