When You Try Your Best But You Don't Succeed

Today I took out my frustration with my weight – with my life – on the manager of a posh drycleaner/shoe repair.

It’s something I do from time to time, and I’m not proud of it. All the anger and frustration with things I feel not in control of gets directed at somebody who doesn’t deserve it – at least not quite to the degree that I give it.

I’ve wrestled much of the weekend with the instinct to starve, because I had a sticky toffee pudding (which wasn’t even particularly good) at the Duke of Cambridge on Friday night, and then a fish pie in a suspiciously creamy sauce on Saturday night. Between the rich food and the return to normal eating post-flu, I feel like it’ll be impossible for me not to show a gain this week. Which will do nothing to bring me closer to clothing actually being looser, a lift I could desperately use as I prepare to head off to Italy for 3½ weeks to cover the Olympics. The hours are going to be long, the job is going to be frustrating (working for a weekly means what is a story early on in the week rarely is by the end of the week, so 95 percent of your work ends up on the cutting room floor), the conditions are going to be rough (I’m covering alpine events, and today there was a minimum of 18 inches of snow in the lowest lying mountain areas), and the food is going to be difficult to resist. Sigh.

Then there is the lingering frustration with The Married Guy, and worse: the totally depressing sense that every time I have been faced with a crucial decision in the past several years, I have made the wrong choice.

So, er, my life is my excuse for nearly yelling at Ali at the drycleaner/shoe repair. I mean, I paid nearly $45 to have my favorite pink satin toe shoes mended – only to have the place thoughtlessly punch the claim check through the side of the shoe, creating an irreparable hole. Hello, the shoes are satin! And you would expect better of a place in Chelsea, that deals with some of the poshest clothes (and accents) in London.

Of course, customer service in Britain is like dating in Britain – a concept Brits themselves don’t understand. (When my British friends visit the U.S., they come back marvelling: “They bring you the trousers in Banana Republic!”) So you can imagine how much luck I had explaining the concept to someone for whom English is not a native language...

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A friend and I went for lunch Sunday at one of those trendy east London restaurants that is virtually impossible to find among all the warehouses and council estates and shops offering jellied eels – I imagine you’re supposed to feel smug and cool just for being in on the secret of finding it (it’s unlabelled, and you have to go through what looks like the bathroom to get there.) It’s the kind of place where you order fruit salad three times and it finally arrives as your dining companion is finishing the second of her two courses. Yes, that kind of place. I didn’t even want the fruit by the time it showed up.

I also had to ask four times what a Black Velvet cocktail was (feeling like an Uglier and Uglier American every time I did so). For the record, it’s Guinness and champagne, surely a combination that was never meant to be drunk together, no matter how late it is and what dregs are left on the liquor table (aka makeshift bar). It sounds about one step up from one of the drinks my sister and I used to make when the babysitter wasn’t looking, where we’d dump every spice and condiment in the kitchen into a glass and dare each other to drink it.