145 pounds at last!

In February this year I had a meeting with Roma, one of the impressively slender instructors at the gym in Highbury, to review my exercise programme. She said she thought I was doing stuff rather aimlessly at the gym and I needed A Goal. My impulse was to shrug this aside: I've stopped doing Goals since I left the BFI and feel much better for it. But she insisted, so I said rather off-handedly that what I'd really like to do some time when I felt up to it would be to lose a stone (14 pounds). I'd always thought this rather vaguely - I knew I was a bit overweight and it was annoying how tight some of my clothes were, but I just figured you get fatter when you're older and that's that. But Roma seized on this and said "Yes that's a great Goal to have: what date shall we set for you to reach it?" Thinking fast, I looked well ahead and suggested my birthday, 29th May. So then Roma weighed me in at 81kg (178 pounds or 12 stone 7) and I was locked into the process.

No diets for me: I'd done several and I know they're all rubbish as far as serious long-term weight loss is concerned. If I was to lose weight permanently I'd have to get used to eating what I would be eating for the rest of my life, so there'd be no point in trying something outlandish. I also knew - or thought I did - that with a bit of self-awareness about alcohol, nibbles before dinner, snacks in the morning and afternoon, smaller helpings and no second helpings, I'd lose weight and all I needed to do was keep going. So I lost maybe four or five pounds in the first month, but then it all slowed down and got boring.

This was, of course, Roma's big moment. She ordered me to write down everything I ate for a week, count the calories, and report back to her. Tsk! So boring and old-fashioned, calorie counting. But I only had to count a few items before I realised I was simply eating as much or more calories as I burned. With my regular diet in front of me, I was able to decide which bits to cut: half my Birchermuesli in the mornings, and as much fat as possible ie no marge on bread and no cheese - so, effectively, hardly any bread either - and, very sadly, no more little morning treat of a gloop of cream in my coffee.

Keeping up the gym, swimming, twin care and allotment work took care of the energy expenditure, and having resigned as the Chair of the MEA my time in front of the computer diminished considerably. Crucially, TAS joined in and we began to lose weight together. I lost a stone by the agreed date, but then thought, why stop now? Why not another stone? This was not an eating disorder: I felt thinner than I looked, rather than looking thinner than I felt. Now and then I'd pick up a six-kilo weight and think: I'm not carrying that around any more! I didn't actually look that much thinner: it was only by September when I had lost another half stone that people started to comment on how much better I looked (or put it another way, remind me what a fat pig I'd looked a few months earlier, I guess). And it was later still that I started to notice it: I could feel bones I'd forgotten I had, and some of my clothes suddenly became unbearably huge. I've had to buy new bras and alter all my trousers, and I can put on socks and tie my shoelaces without groaning.

Now when I try to pick up a 15-kilo weight at the gym - I don't actually USE a 15-kilo weight because I can barely get it off the ground - I think: was I actually carrying all that around, and wondering why I got sore feet and problems with my knees and felt puffed out running upstairs? What was I thinking of? How did I manage to go on considering myself "a bit overweight"? Why didn't anybody - not even the doctor - tell me I was fat? The reason of course is that I wasn't THAT fat: a size 16 is not much to worry about compared to the really vast people you see every day - so my mere 32 pounds of extra flab didn't put me on anybody's Urgent list.

TAS has lost about the same amount, and we're more or less grinding to a halt on the serious weight loss idea. Our current weights seem about right: they're about the same as they were when we first met, 40 years ago. We have to keep an eye on it though: we weigh ourselves every morning (that being the most comfortingly lightweight moment of the day) and notice when too many of those little indulgences have made their presence felt. Two days in the Netherlands notched up four pounds on the scales and last night's little binge at the IoE graduate reception accounted for a pound and a half.

But the interesting thing is how quickly the weight goes again as soon as we get back to eating what we can now truthfully say is "normally". Of course, "my weight" is a flexible concept: everyone seems to gain 3 or 4 pounds during the day, and loses it again by the following morning. Eating early in the evening will make for a lower weight in the morning. So ideally (after Christmas, maybe) it would be good to lose maybe 2 or 3 more pounds so I'd know I'd always be less than ten and a half stone. But it's no big deal: essentially we've pretty much got to the stage where we both know what we can and can't eat if we want to maintain it, and more to the point, know that it's not hard for us to do that. What's probably going to be harder now is to stop ourselves becoming body fascists and casting disdainful glances at everyone who's bigger than us. Is that another things the ads don't tell you: the thinner you get, the nastier you are?

How Arthur and Marilyn changed my life

It may seen superfluous to add to the more than 53 million Google items about Marilyn Monroe but I think (needless to say) that I have a slightly different take. In 1956 I lived with my father, stepmother and brother in a tied cottage on the estate of the Earl of Drogheda (sounds grand, but the press called the House a "country cottage") where my father was head gardener (see my blog about him in October last year) and my stepmother helped out when things were busy (this is what posh history TV dramas always get wrong, because of course it would mess up the casting: country houses always corralled in any amount of help for cooking and cleaning from their dependent local economy whenever there were weekend parties).

When Marilyn and Arthur Miller were in England for their honeymoon and for her to play in The Prince and the Showgirl they stayed in Parkside House - on the edge of Windsor Great Park near Englefield Green - as described, rather fancifully, in Colin Clark's My Week with Marilyn. Laurence Olivier, who co-starred, was the go-between who set up the "country cottage" idyll so it fell to my father to pace the lawns with Olivier and work out (a) who Marilyn was - my father was a bit hazy on that - and (b) plan things for their stay. Secrecy was vital. My brother and I weren't told till much nearer the time, though we knew there would be someone important coming to stay at the House. I think I figured it would be a national leader - Tito I think was one idea I had - and I was a bit disappointed that it turned out to be a vulgar Hollywood star. We were on strict instructions not to tell anyone until after they had actually arrived. The estate was not that secure: we did at least shut the gates but anyone could get through the little wooden ones into our garden and thence to the House via the vegetable garden.

The first thing that impressed me most was the press pack. Exactly like a pack of dogs slavering over a bitch, they hung around the gates incessantly and broke in when they could. Two of them cornered me in the orchard and tried to be smarmy; it was when they called me "little girl" (I was 14) that I told them they were on private property and should leave. We were all amazed by their behaviour (of course it was nothing to what would happen now). It was one of the papers who bought bikes for Marilyn and Arthur following a chance remark that they'd like to go cycling. There is apparently an extant photo of Marilyn cycling but it must have been set up specially - she never left the estate except in a car. My memories of those gentlement of the press has stayed with me during a professional life in media education.

I did see Arthur Miller bowling along the main road on his new bike in Englefield Green once when I was in the ironmonger's. But my closer encounter with him (needless to say I was totally ignorant of his work, thanks to the so-called English teachers in my highly-sought-after girls' grammar school) was when he knocked at the cottage door one afternoon when everyone else was out, and asked to use the phone. What was amazing about this was that it was the first occasion an adult had been polite and respectful to me. He humbly explained that he needed to call his wife at Pinewood and the House phone appeared to be out of order. He hoped it wouldn't be too much trouble to use ours and he was sorry for the inconvenience. I was flabbergasted: what had I done to deserve such decency? I guess this has stayed there in the back of my head all the time I've been developing arguments about the assumptions adults make about what children can understand and deserve.

My stepmother Ruth helped in the kitchen: she remembers Marilyn coming into the kitchen - right through the green baize door! incredible! - on the first evening and asking shyly for candles for the dining table. Ruth also did the laundry and ironing, so of course we peeked in their wardrobes (that's what the help always do). I remember being disappointed by Marilyn's failure to follow the advice I knew by heart: blondes should wear pale blue; redheads green, etc. Everything in there was either black or beige, apart from the amazing red sheath dress she wore at some public event, complete with little lead weights in the ruffles. I thought her colour choices were sad; much later, I realised it was Fashion. I do now wear black a lot, but never beige. Again, it was Arthur Miller's wardrobe that really influenced my later purchases: I finally managed to afford a black cashmere sweater just like his and wore it for years.

I did see Marilyn herself for about 30 seconds. Ruth said I could come to the House when Marilyn and Arthur were leaving, if I stood outside the door and just watched. I remember peeking round the door to see Marilyn in a black "tent" coat, high black heels and her hair pinned up neatly in a bun, kissing the staff goodbye (yes, kissing the staff! - as an extra skivvy, I don't think Ruth got in on that). Then she came out of the front door, saw me standing there in my school uniform, sweaty and muddy from the hockey field, and stopped, confused for a moment and embarrassedly half-smiling, before turning away to get in the car. I felt ashamed: I felt I was behaving just like the press pack.

techno-hell

I always used to be contemptuous of hardware developers' endless quest for a black box that would do absolutely everything. Now I've acquired an iPhone (only to ensure that for PhD purposes I have a voice recorder and video camera always to hand, honestly) I am reluctantly coming round to the view that at least that makes three fewer machines to go wrong.

I thought that starting a PhD would involve long quiet hours in a library leafing through the tomes I'd always meant to read. My first proper talk with John, my main supervisor (we've known each other for years but now he has the unfortunate task of keeping me on the straight and narrow) revealed some of the things I was about to encounter such as EndNote and DropBox (was it The Guardian's makeover as the Guardian or was it EastEnders that started all this?) and propelled me towards getting the iPhone and a Mac laptop.

Still reeling from paying out my first year's fees and what seemed like incredible quantities of other stuff including a far higher incidence of ready meals given our once-again frantic lifestyle, I opted for a second-hand MacBook. Now it seems that every single attempt I make to get anywhere near my PhD work is frustrated by the learning curve I now face. It's not just steep, it's curling over my head like those nightmare enormous waves that loom up just when you thought you'd had a lucky escape from what you temporarily thought was the biggest wave you'd ever seen. Struggling through giant databases with names like ERIC and PsychInfo, each with subtly different interfaces, endlessly forgetting where I last saved what I laughably call "my research", constantly clicking CANCEL when I meant to click GO on the sadistically counter-intuitive university portal login, floundering in deep water with my surfboard out of reach, I stagger home only to discover that my MacBook doesn't recognise my iPhone, iTunes has decided that the only music I will ever need is Carmina Burana, and to top it all the damned DVD player won't work.

I realise that the reason for this last is that some long-vanished Virgin engineer (imagine describing that job to people at parties) has connected it up the wrong way and that we are now condemned to scrabbling through mountains of paper to find what our parents' generation always referred to (but why?) as "the book of words" for the DVD player, and to shuffling about on our knees in the squirming pile of dusty cables behind the ever-temperamental flat screen TV (yeah great, when it agrees to switch on, like about 50% of the time).

Sometimes I like to fantasise about rewriting my favourite SF novels (Ian M. Banks, if you want to know) with some creative touches of life on Earth now: drones fly smack into walls; somebody connects up the wrong power cables down in the bowels of the GSV, etc. Of course Banks' riposte would be that all these machines can mend themselves without disrupting the flow of the story. The only SF parody on the lines I'm thinking is Woody Allen's jibe at "goddam cheap Japanese flying packs" in Sleeper though I daresay there are lots more.

More often though I am liable to break down and cry. I sat stony-faced through War Horse but a software malfunction can have me weeping buckets. I think that today I'll give up on trying to get my invaluable, unrepeatable research videos into my laptop and leaf quietly through Vygotsky instead. He may have been persecuted by Stalin but at least he didn't have to defer to Steve Jobs.