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Can we ever truly change? Or are we a slave to our pre-programming?
It’s obviously a bit of both. As I discuss in my show Oh Frig I’m 50! (t
ouring between February and June 2018 - tickets make a wonderful Christmas gift that you can buy at the last minute), I am a very different man to the one who started writing this blog. And the Oh Fuck I’m 40 Herring was a very different kettle of fish (get it?) to the 50 one, even though his ghost still resides within me, passing comment mainly, no longer able to motivate me in the ways he used to.
So I changed a bit in some ways. But then in other ways I seem beyond redemption. I had bought some Green and Black’s Butterscotch chocolate at the supermarket yesterday (ooooh, someone’s doing well for themselves). I’d actually got two bars for £3. Hooked in by the offer, but yes, that’s the kind of disposable income I have for chocolate, even after a year where I’ve moved house and had a second child. When you’re in as much debt as I currently am you are bound to think, ah screw it, chuck another three quid on the pile. And with luck, the butterscotchy chocolate will kill me and I will have got away without ever having to pay the money back. Take that Ian Santander.
Today, tired as always, but trying to get some tidying done in time for Christmas, I went to the draw and broke off about a third of one bar, thinking, I will just have that today and then have five more days to enjoy some Butterscotchy treats. I mean, do I even know me? Why do I go through this charade? And seem to believe that that would be possible in the face of all previous evidence.
I ate the bit of chocolate that I’d taken as I did some work at the computer. And literally within three minutes was back at the drawer to claim the rest of the bar. At least I didn’t embarrass myself by breaking the rest of the bar in half and pretending I wasn’t going to eat the whole thing. I remembered that I was me and took the lot and it was down my gullet before it had been chewed or had a chance to even melt or even give me a tiny taste.
Because this is who I am. And I can never change.
I mean sure, in the New Year, full of desire to become a better person I will totally give up chocolate for a week or a month, maybe a few months, possibly even a year. But this chocolate monster inside me will be biding his time, knowing that for all my good intentions he will be back. Maybe the ghost of the libidinous 40 year old me is also banking on this (though tough shit to him, I have made myself so physically repellent and unfit and exhausted that he won’t be able to act on his plans, even if he wasn’t a ghost and thus unable to grasp anything with form).
But the all or nothing is who I am. The nothing is just as much part of it. The thing that I can’t change to is to be the kind of person who can have some chocolate in a drawer, have one piece and then come back to it tomorrow, or next week, or forget that it’s there. I will never be that kind of Easter egg still left at Christmas cunt. And thank God for that.
I have achieved so much in my fifty years and changed a little. I wonder if I will ever be able to become a different person in this regard, the person that I think I am when I put two thirds of a bar of chocolate back. The kind of person I despise.
Who is the real chocolate monster? It would be terrible to change and find out that I had actually become evil in the process.
On the plus side, I only ate one of the two bars. And that is some kind of progress.
