The software from www.fitday.com says that if I want to lose 20kg by May then I need to eat fewer than 1,700 calories a day until then.

I’ve charted what I’ve eaten today, and despite it being complete rubbish, I seem to be on target. Achieved largely by getting up so late that I only ate two real meals. Worryingly, however, 20% of today’s calories came from Smarties. Damn that Xmas chocolate!

Tomorrow, the plan is an early start to go and check out Nottingham’s weekly car boot sale. We’re planning on trying our hands at making some money out of auld tat in the house by flogging out of the capacious boot of my Skoda Favorit GLXie. Vendors have to get to Nottingham Racecourse by 7.30am; you can start buying stuff by 8.30am. That’s an awful lot earlier than the average Sunday morning rising time for me. This week, just recceing. And not buying more tat. Oh, no.

The wind is blowing so hard direct on the window in my office as I sit here indulging my late-night CSI addiction that the curtains are moving and I can feel a draft. Still, I like windy weather. Makes driving tricky but makes walking — in true Skegness style — bracing.

Has been a while since I wrote anything down, so for the record, I had a lovely festive season. A quiet Christmas day in with Paul, who loved his main present, a chiming Westminster clock that’s kept him awake ever since. New Years Eve, I cooked an 8 course meal for the usual suspects I’ve been spending New Years Eve with since I nearly got us all killed by being moody over the 1999/2000 changeover. Before that I spent less than 24 hours with my parents in Leominster, and on New Year’s Day, and less than 6 with Paul’s in Chinnor.

Man, it starts raining fast in Las Vagas (CSI 1×18). And looks like piranha really can skeletonize a cow in 10 minutes (CSI 1×15).

Oh, dear. It’s definitely time to do something about these blond locks. I’ve not had a haircut this year, and it’s starting to show.

Last night, a friend asked me if I was deliberately trying to look like Margaret Thatcher.

To add insult to injury, last night when watching CSI in my room, my crappy headphones got caught in my hair. A lock got tangled around a screw, and I had to get Paul to cut me out!

I don’t know what I want to do with my hair (although I’m damn sure I’m not putting those headphones on again.) The quiff was good, and I can’t do that when I have this much hair. But are there more interesting things I can do if I let the rate of growth continue at half-an-inch a month. I nearly have enough for a pony tail.

While we’re doing pictures, here’s a few still on the camera from our Christmas/Housewarming party a few weeks ago: the spread, our tree, and a remote control dinosaur that a friend brought along.

I’ve just been watching the last few episodes ever of Frasier: Crock Tales and Goodnight Seattle — and I’ve had another inappropriate emotional response to a TV show.

I have a long history with Frasier, since it’s the show that gave me the internet pseudonym I’ve been using for the last seven years, since my second year in university. I’ve been google groping: a post about the age of consent debate in Parliament dated 1997-10-01 in uk.gay-lesbian-bi has the signature

—
Niles
Why Niles? a) no-one can confuse my gender
b) David Hyde-Pierce (_Frasier_) is a hunk

In uk.media.radio.archers, I was confusing them by calling myself both ‘Niles’ and ‘Alex’ the May before: 1997-05-25:

It’s _Frasier_. The epnoymous radio psychiatrist and sophistocate Frasier has a rather dishy brother with a cute dimple called Niles. This is how I would like to project myself to people who haven’t seen the photograph on my homepage.

[Tsk! I was young and thin back then. And I couldn’t spell ‘sophisticate’]

I’d been on usenet for much of the previous year under various different monikers, but ‘Niles’ kinda stuck by summer 1997 and it’s been with me ever since, in my website, as you’ll know, dear reader; my username on countless websites and cix since 2001, and still, after all this time, on usenet.

I saw a lot of the show in university: for a long while, my Friday night routine, whilst my more boisterous co-tenants were drinking and womanising, involved splitting my time between the laundrette and the TV room in Broadgate Park. In latter years, I’ve hardly seen an episode.

Crock Tales has just skilfully recapped the last 11 years of Frasier, taking us back through the haircuts and the plot lines of the 90s, and it’s reminded me a bit of all those years. The Goodnight Seattle double episodes just rounded the whole show off nicely. I think it’s time to borrow some tapes and watch the, erm, 264 episodes from the previous years. Nothing like a grand projet for starting 2005 with…

I am the epitome of style. I have the most fashionable trousers ever. Chinos from M&S, that trough of trendiness.

But these are not ordinary chinos, oh no!

These chinos have a waistband engineered to expand.

There’s more! They are *stain resistant*.

Nothing says ‘I’m a fat, messy slob’ like M&S, eh?

I’ve spent the last few days writing Christmas cards. In the absence of a lengthier post here, there’s a copy of my round-robin newsletter.

A brass band is playing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in the background of the Archers this evening. I wasn’t listening properly, but I think Ambridge has just switched on its Christmas lights.

Nottingham, however, turned its Christmas lights on weeks ago.

Last week we went and gawped at awful Christmas decorations in front someone’s house in Burton Joyce. There was the full Monty, right down to several different Santas equipped with planes and helicopters as well as the more traditional magic-reindeer drawn sleigh. And, FFS! it was only November.

I will come clean: I don’t particularly like Christmas. I do miss singing Christmas carols, and I find myself singing the bass line to Hark the Herald right now; but the singing aside, I’m not fussed by the festivities. I could do without the whole damn lot.

But — and this is a very big but — we have our Christmas tree up already.

In my defence, we did at least wait til Advent Sunday.

Paul had seen trees in B&Q, and snaffled one (before ran out, like), and so it fell to me to go mad, and spend a fortune on baubles in John Lewis. I plumped for a colour theme, and have lots of lovely purple baubles. I figured (wrongly) that since baubles-only looked super in JL, they would at home too. I’m actually yearning for tinsel.

I should really have checked with P first since purple turns out to be a colour he can’t really see, (he’s red/green colourblind). And he would prefer a tree that’s a riot of colours rather than something that looks like a department store window-dresser came round and did it for you.

Just to show I’m not a complete bah-humbugger, I’ve recorded this for your amusement and delectation. The advantage of having a network on my desk is that I can double track myself using only Sound Recorder and WinAmp. I suspect if I ask Paul nicely, he has a lot more sophisticated equipment for cleaning it up and making it work better.