My eldest daughter is quite sporty, so we've been pressed into watching the World Swimming Championships from Shanghai, one of the few remaining sports, along with children's fencing and egg-throwing, that are still on terrestrial TV and which haven't been auctioned off to Adelaide's bastard son.
During our long night of repeated (chemical) climaxes last week, Kim had warned me that the convex bulbous look which lumpily threatens most men of my age and drinking habits, will almost certainly not appeal to the kind of grammar-obssessed, Proust-reading, secondhand clothes-wearing, bilingual, glasses would be an advantage, dirty fucker whore slut woman I am hoping to meet. Her advice made me resolve to wear looser shirts when next on a three-day drug binge with a younger woman.
Partly inspired by the enviable physiques of the world's fastest men in water and having read somewhere that a forty-minute sesh in your local pool has almost Photoshoppish transformative effects on the male torso, we set off to the University's swimming pool, where, due to my status derived from having acquired two degrees there, I receive a discount of fuck all.
We swam in a pool populated only by a few Chinese girls trying to obliterate their intense longing for home with a bit of back crawl, performed in swimming costumes with little skirts on them. Afterwards I walked back into the changing room and ripped off my trunks quickly. They gave an agonisingly painful snap as they yanked my arthritic left big toe out of its normal ten to two slot. There was no-one to hear my girly gasp of un-six-pack pain.
My body possibly fell one small notch back towards the "Before" photo when I dealt with the raging appetite swimming produces by ordering pizza and chips all round, plus, for me, a pint or two of Black Sheep, an ale which doesn't figure prominently in the diet section of Glamour. But it's full of healthy B vitamins and provides for twenty quid roughly the same sort of State of Nothingness that people in London pay thousands of pounds for in course fees and airfares.
Apart from the usual narcissicism, I'm writing this because I can feel that familiar onset of delerium that happens in the days before a gig. And this will be a big one. Only my third gig overseas, after two in Glasgow.
Off to see Potiche in a bit, Catherine Deneuve's new-ish film, then tomorrow I'm going to splash out on Denise, so to wishfully speak. I'm paying at Imran's Punjabi Buffet: seven quid for limitless food, which I suspect is sold cheaply from stuff that hasn't sold over the weekend in the family's network of "Indian" (like saying "European", surely?) restuarants.
Followed by Brussels, for what I hope will turn into a reckless, or at least Silly, few days with my co-stars and any stragglers we might pick up.
