The Ryder Cup

So, anyhoo... I did in fact watch some of the Ryder Cup last night.  You know, after the kids were in bed.  And after I'd been for my ballroom dancing lesson with STonk.  And before I drank my bedtime matula tea for the eradication of gastric helicobacter pylori (motto: "Stress doesn't cause ulcers, I do!").  Yep, my evening was pretty much identical to that of every other red-blooded male who was tuning in, I imagine.

I didn't watch much of it, sadly.  It became clear, shortly after I turned it on, that I wasn't helping proceedings - within minutes Europe had missed several key putts to put their victory almost beyond reach - so I took one for the team, shut my computer down and went to (our 100% organic, 100% natural, natch) bed to read my book.  During the evening, though, one thing became very clear to me:

Our foxtrot needs work.

No, it really does.  I can barely remember the first three steps and even that's three steps more than STonk knows.  That's not why you're reading this blog, though, and I'm nothing if not demand-driven, so I'll (finally) get back to the thread: why my Ryder Cup experience this time is so different to my boozetastic, sausagemungous Ryder Cup experiences of years gone by.

In short, it all comes down to my wife.  She's become a health nut.  Oh, she's always had tendencies in that direction, even when she was filling her face with takeaway pizza and chocolate, but in the past it was all mercifully vague and fleeting, and if I ignored it for long enough, it eventually went away.  I think I was aware, even back then, though, that it was important to her, even if she didn't always actually behave as though it were.  She was always trying new sports or diets in an effort to get fit and healthy and I could see that, despite the immediate gratification that junk food brought her, it was almost immediately replaced by remorse and unhappiness on such a scale that it simply couldn't be ignored any more.  Something had to give.

As it happened, back at the end of 2010, our IT jobs (we worked together) were heading down the pan due to the frighteningly common combination of poor executive decisions and senior management idiocy.  When STonk was offered redundancy it gave her the opportunity to get those executives and senior managers to actually pay her to start up her own business.  So, having weighed up the pros and pros (I'm still stuck in the same company, and can tell you, there are no cons) we decided that she should take the chance to found a life coaching business.

So far, so good, right?  Still a long, long way away from heavy metal detoxification and colonic irrigation, right?  Well, no.  Not really.  Not very far away at all - indeed, around eighteen months away, as you shall see in my next post: "ARRIVAL OF THE HOLISTIC MONSTER."