January is a bleak month for those of us
residing in Northern Europe. It’s chilly, the days are diminutive, and we crave
the onset of the light and energy delivered by Spring. Following the excited
delights of the pre-Christmas credit card binge that is ‘Black Friday and Cyber
Monday’, January brings us ‘Blue Monday’, rumoured to be the most depressing
day of the year.
January in the North, a bleak etching I created in 2009
It’s not all blue though. January often
gives us an opportunity to make personal changes. We are more likely to ditch
an overly stressful job, rethink our personal goals or make good on our
seasonal gluttony and get healthy. Although I didn’t make a list of New Year
resolutions (I’d inevitably break them), I definitely feel a positive force for
change.
With this in mind, I’m shedding some flab.
I’m not obese, just a bit podgy. An auf
wiedersehen to half a stone would set me free to wear my favourite ‘brilliant
arse’ jeans that lie forlornly at the bottom of my thin clothes drawer. It
wasn’t really Christmas that piled on the pounds, more the proximity of a work
canteen that sells fabulous sausage rolls and the forgiving nature of winter
clothing. It just crept on.
My diet is not strict, I’m simply cutting
down on the usual adversaries; booze, sugar, cheese and the occasional foray
into pies. Vaguely based on Slimming World but without the culinary dreadfulness
that is 1 calorie cooking spray and Quark.
I took a jaunt to the January sales and
purposefully left tight fitting clothes well alone, I’d already dropped a
couple of pounds and was excited at the prospect of delving into my thin
clothes drawer in the near future, no point buying new ones. However, in the
sale I found an ideal motivator. Nestling amongst the Estee Lauder counter’s
sale shelf was a discounted purse spray of Private Collection Tuberose
Gardenia. I bought it, took it home, and promptly decorated the package with a
chastising post-it note. I will not unwrap and spray the perfume until I get
half way through the diet. It will be freed from it’s bondage when the scales
display 10 stone 6. As I write this, I’m 1 pound away. Tomorrow might be the
day.
Motivation
Ironically, Tuberose Gardenia is a fulsome
fatty scent, the fragrance equivalent of one of those delicious custard
pastries that accompany your Espresso in a Parisian café. A Gardenia petal is
firm and waxy to the touch, clustered tightly in a heavy globe, there’s no
frailness here. It’s a voluptuous flower. Tuberose is often likened to the
scent of bacon fat, as rancid and corpulent as it is beautiful. In Tuberose Gardenia, the Lauder labs
have synthesised the concept of gargantuan white flower decadence. If it were a
woman, she would not be thin.
The Gardenia flower
10 stone 6 will mark the occasion of the
first ‘well done you’ spray. From that point it will be consigned to the
fabulous arse/thin clothes drawer. It won’t be properly allowed out until those
jeans fit. By this I mean that I can actually sit down in them without the zip
bursting or instigating the onset of bleeding from my kidneys.
By then it will be spring. And I’ll burst
into fragrant flower as the narcissus in my garden open their faces to greet
the sun.
