True Force... All The Kings Men Cannot Put It Back Together Again

A couple of Fridays ago, I went to the gym after work. I do that regularly, except I don't usually get utterly breathless after running 800m at the sedate pace of 11kph. I had to stop three times in the mile-and-a-half I usually do on Fridays. My legs weren't there, and my breathing was tight and shallow. I went swimming about twenty minutes later and didn't have any problems, so it wasn't about having a cold or cough or whatever. No. It was about having eaten the wrong stuff at lunchtime: too many carbs cooked in too much fat disguised as a kind of pancake. Plus I hadn't had a decent walk all week: the previous two weeks I've walked from Waterloo to St Paul's and hopped on the Central Line to Liverpool Street there. Not the fastest way, but damn good exercise.

I'd spent the day trying to find data in the wreckage that is The Bank's MI since a project called "Release C", which was supposed to bring the data from the two merged banks together, but actually does nothing of the sort. Our Bank databases are still there and being updated, but Their Bank data is segregated in some ghastly 1990's attempts to produce a suite of normalised data tables, which has actually produced a set of tables called "I don't mind if it goes into ****** as long as it goes somewhere useful as well." In my circles, that line is a consistent laugh-getter. I am not making progress with the project I'm working on, and I'm spending more time repairing the damage done to our neat, easy-to-use, data environment by those vandals who ran Release C. I am waking up and wondering how much longer I have to keep going into work. I know the answer to that: I have to work until I die, because my pension isn't worth a damn. This is frustrating.

So gasping for breath on the treadmill kinda did it for me. That's enough. I'm letting this new location and office get to me, and it has got to stop. I need my morning walks. I need to eat right, and after Xmas, have a month on the 1,500-calorie diet. I need to find a way of being able to think straight again. I need to stop being self-pitying, and get a life and a whole load of other things. 

Or as Travis Bickle says: "I gotta get in shape now, from now on it will be 50 press-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups, from now on it'll be total organisation, every muscle must be tight."

This year my challenge was getting into some kind of physically-fit shape, and actually taking holidays. I did both of those things. I was pretty clear about what the challenge was for 2011 at the end of 2010, but I'm not so sure about what it is for 2012.