I’m back with the latest from your favourite 14th century peabrains, as you can see. As usual, the first three strips keep you up to date and the fourth is the latest one, featuring the toilet-mouthed Mother Chattox, wicked witch that she is.
Going south for the winter
It’s been a while since my last post and all I can say in my defence is that an amalgam of Christmas, an excess of socialising, the New Year and then a long drive down thorough southern France and most of Spain has been rather time-consuming.
We’re now wintering in Portugal, on the Algarve, which is the southern end of the country. Until the end of February, the small but lively town of Lagos (not to be confused with its Nigerian namesake) will be our base. It’s generally quite a bit warmer here than France. Must be to do with the curvature of the earth putting us that much nearer to the equator.
We’re using this period as a kind of “boot camp”, not least because it has taken us far from our lovely friends in France at whose hands we indulge in wine, food and an excess of both on a semi-nightly basis, all of which ends up creating a large overhang around the trouser belt region. I daren’t tell anyone how much I really weigh for fear of them immediately tying me to a fence-post and forcing me to subsist on a carrot a day.
However, freed from the generous and convivial clutches of our friends back home and snuggled as we are in a tiny apartment high above the bustling metropolis of Lagos, we can exercise great control on our consumption of everything. And control is the name of the game, I can assure you.
We’ve been getting into a new and spartan regime of bodily exertion over the last ten days or so. Gone are the long, sedentary days of idleness, doing little other than increasing the depth of the large dent in the couch cushion. Gone, the feasting on rich foods and intoxicating drinks, the evenings of debauchery and red-faced carrolling among the discarded bottles strewn around us. Now is the time to mend the sinews, renew the tautness of long-neglected muscle, stretch the thews and generally set a course for Arnie-style physical perfection.
Is this all sounding a bit like a New Year’s resolution to you? It does sound like it to me but that’s nothing more than a coincidence. Honestly. A convenient coincidence brought about by deciding to take this extended break and then, having arrived here and seen the lie of the land, if you see what I mean, realising what might be possible.
Consider the situation.
It’s just the two of us here. Socially, we are more or less on sabbatical. It’s true that we do know one or two people here and we could be out smothering ourselves in Portuguese wine and cuisine but to tell the truth, we had both become a little dissatisfied with what we have become since moving to France. Well, since retirement, really.
So we have resolved - though this resolution is by no means an actual New Year’s resolution - that we will take great care over what we consume and on top of that, we’ll get out into the fresh air and burn off some calories.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to start boring the pants off you by telling you how many calories there are in this or that foodstuff; that would put such a cloud of zeds above your head that you’d be smothered by it. And then you’d never get to the end..
It’s really about lots of walking. And you know, seaside towns like this always seem to have one dominating feature that can’t be avoided, and that feature is terrain at a keen angle to the horizontal.
Hills. Everywhere and in every direction.
It seems to me that wherever I go in Lagos I have to labour for several days up a mountainside and then virtually abseil back down again. You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? Need a drop of milk? See you in a few hours! Fancy going out for a meal? It’s be calorie-neutral by the time you’ve traversed the various inclines and ravines between here and the nearest nosherie. At least there’s little need for oxygen: there’s never a shortage of fresh breezes to blow your hat off at the seaside!
I have also taken advice from the great Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. He’s no slouch when it comes to taking care of the body, as you’ll readily agree. I recently saw him interviewed and the chap asked him how he stayed in shape at the age of 76. Turns out that Arnie has never, since adolescence, passed a day without doing at least 200 abdominal crunches. Well, thinks I, I don’t need to look like him and let’s face it, there would be rather a lot of catching-up to do if I were to try, but surely I can take this little hint.
After all, I have a wardrobe full of fairly expensive trousers that I haven’t worn in twenty years but kept in the long-forgotten hope that I might one day fit into them again. Well, if this plan works, with all the walking and the abdominal exercises every day, I shall have at my disposal some fifteen pairs of nearly-new strides with no outlay apart from my own sweat and swearing.
Wish me luck!
Here’s a link for you, as always..