Day 1: The task at hand

Evening Captain Blogheart,

I'm definitely not a man who likes to set himself challenges, finding instead that true happiness comes not from climbing mountains, but paying a Sherpa to carry the bags, while I enjoy a cocktail and the sunset. It's not just the disdain for physical and mental labor that dissuades me from self-improvement, but I find that my concentration span lapses before I get....

..oh yeah. Concentration. Indeed. Sometimes my concentration is so poor I regularly struggle to remember to drink a whole cup of tea before the bottom bit gets all tepid and murky, with bits of Hobnob swirling around, so that by the time I come back to it, it looks less like a delicious and refreshing beverage and more like week old sick congealing in a tramps hat.

I am allergic to the concept of gyms, I despise self improvement and feel a retching disdain for 'joiny in' type people telling me how great they feel because they managed to cut the crusts off their Mighty White three days in a row, thus managing to see over the top of their stinking, obese and hairy gut for the first time since the late eighties, and how bloody marvelous they feeeeeel about it. Their cheery, toothy eyed grin wavering only as I remove the tea spoon from their half eaten pot of Activia and jab the thin end into their tear duct, leaving them floundering round the office like a bleeding unicorn on ice.

I'm exaggerating of course (I go for the nostril, not the tear duct. I'm no monster) but I find that nothing saps the energy out of a mighty endeavour more than hearing lots of people around you bark unselfconsciously about their own smug tribulations. A good intention to do something becomes a millstone around your neck. And not even a useful millstone, like the one I tied around that dead hooker's neck before I threw her over the bridge. Oh no.

Say you want to do something straight forward, like giving up drinking for lent. This statement of intent is often met by the noise of at least three other do-gooders all embarking on their own mission of self discovery, each of which is ten times better than the last: "Oh, you're giving up drinking. That's great. I tried that, and achieved my goals, so I'm working towards giving up oxygen. It's really super, I feel so much better now. I feel so free.." If only they would.

The sickening thing is that everyone else's effort sounds so 'worthy' that your own good intention to cut down on the sauce turns that evening into a drinking spree so intense that your brain senses the danger early and gets a taxi home 3 hours before you do so that you stagger home to find your own brain sitting on the sofa, tutting like an elderly relative at the sight of you whirling around the living room with half a kebab in your gut and the remainder in your hair. Or down your trousers.

Simple acts of self improvement are quickly announced among friends and relations - you want to go for a run every day, you want to read a book a week, you want to go big game hunting, you want to practice voodoo, you want to try heroin.... the kind of easy, bettering tasks that humans have been doing and making themselves sound cool with for hundreds of years. Obviously the thinking may be that members of the opposite sex will notice your efforts and declare you irresistible now that you have managed to eat less spicy food. There's an implied vanity in all exercises of self help which is commendable. Unless you are so vain that you disdain every effort of everyone in the world and cynically hurl verbal rocks at anyone who dare improve their lot. God, it would be awful to be like that.

So, I hear you ask, "OK Rich, you're a lazy, evil spirited cock sampler. We know. We can deal with it. What, dear lord, is the point of this diatribe? Will it ever end? And, can you sign this for me?"

Well, to you, my readers I say two things. Firstly, it is my, now stated, intention to write every single day this week, to give you an even greater insight into my world. Think of it a bit like that 'Live' episode of Eastenders, hopefully without the weird pauses at the end of each scene and the rank tedium, but definitely with the overwhelming sense of it being so similar to the regular output, that you might just have been conned.

Secondly, who would you like me to make it out to...? Susan? Great. Ten pounds please.

This is an undertaking of no small measure for a regular person, but for a man who's idea of 'climbing a mountain' is combing his hair, it should be a mighty effort indeed. I am, indeed, so lazy that I'm sitting alone in my room on a laptop and not watching pornography and touching myself. Now that, my friends, is dedication.

See you tomorrow, you poor, poor people.

Loveyoubutjustnotinthatway. xx