WEEK THREE

Monday 25th July – Sunday 31st July

Not much to report. As with Ibsen’s Little Eyolf absolutely nothing happens in the second half of the play except in the spiritual battleground of the characters. They barely move from the drawing room, but the heaven’s fall. It’s like that here. It’s like that with people in general. There is too much ‘action’ presented to us as our reality, Squid and Hunger games, races and cups and outrage. Nothing much happens for most folk – apart from the poor millions of bastards suffering under attack and starvation.

This blog could be called Karen’s First World Problems. But the concept of the Karen is horseshit. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s a slur that is a lazy way to stick it to the man without upsetting the man. It’s good old-fashioned misogyny, even given the amount of asshole ‘cis’ white women who behave badly. (One could brandish any...

Saturday 23rd July

A very large and sorrowful lady with short mumsy hair sat by the lake shore playing Candy Crush with the volume on full. She either wasn’t aware or didn’t care about the crunches and swooshes playing out from her phone. She was over it. I get it. It’s all food. It’s all drugs. Aint none of it rock and roll. I overhear her talking - she is Canadian, but with a group of German women. A Canadian woman living in Germany? This isn’t the kind of facility Americans would come to. Not Americans with money.

I’m still very distressed by the room I’m in. Three men seem to have bunked down in the connecting room - they are handy men on the farm? I’m sure they are perfectly pleasant family guys. But I have awful prejudices I’m trying to excise, so I’m also sure they are women hating hooligans. Why do they all have shaved heads and footy tshirts? National and football pride...

Tuesday 19th July

Arrive at breakfast to find a woman sitting at the little table I’ve been assigned. Background: all guests are assigned a specific eating spot in the restaurant. and they are not to move from it. That’s fine for couples and groups. Singletons however are forced to sit at a tiny table-for-two, intimately facing each other. For a solitary misanthrope this is torture. It’s like being forced on a Tinder date with a middle-aged Swedish mental health worker - as was the case this morning. In a panic I began acting. Acting cheerful and chirpy. Babbling away and encouraging her to think I was that friendly and outgoing. My inner child was screaming.

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All in all, an awful day, in my head. The sun had come out, and it was 27 degrees. I watch women struggling with bikini tops trying to pull the straps down to get a little more sun on their bodies - but not so much that anyone...

Monday 11th July
First day, confused and feel like shit.
Ryan Air lands me in Gdansk in the afternoon. No passport control, and Krystjof the taxi driver is waiting with a sign at the arrivals gate. I was worried the sign would read “Kate Panties” or something. It’s happened before. I had a minuscule film part a hundred years ago where I was credited as ‘Kate Panty’. Don’t bother to google it. It sank without a trace.

A pleasant drive with Krys whose wife calls him three times on the journey. He has her on hands-free and they laugh a lot. I ask him if they have a happy marriage – it seems so. He smiles shyly and says, “Yes, thirty years happy.”

The farm is a mildly gated community. A security controlled entrance and barbed wire fences. Is this to keep predators out or fat people in? (A cheap joke, but too obvious to not.)

I have a panic attack when they give me the wrong exchange rate...

I’m off to a ‘wellness retreat’ in the Pomeranian forests of Poland for one month. That’s the official line but the truth is it’s an old skool fat farm. Back in the seventies, before ‘wellness’ was a thing, and only armies retreated, fat folk went to fat farms. The fat farms did what they said on the can: got rid of fat. I’ve chosen Svbtle because of its no nonsense unbloated approach to blogs. Svbtle: the fat farm of blogging! I’m not a fan of wyrdspeak and using language to make people buy stuff (be it stuff, or ideologies). So, fat farm here I come. Because I am fat. And I don’t like it. Simple as. I think I will blog what happens. Watch this space …