Some of you will be wondering why, after wrenching money out of you for a good cause in order to get me losing some weight, I’ve been strangely silent on the issue of my progress. Or perhaps you’re thinking “thank god he’s stopped talking about pumpkin seeds”. Well, to be honest, I thought I was flagging. But a slightly more principled week has seen me hit the “1 stone lost since Christmas” mark. Yeah, I know, I’d already lost 12 lbs about 2 weeks ago – but the IMPORTANT thing is that I’m only 1 week behind my target of 2lbs per week. This target will now be chased down and savagely manhandled in some Tooting alleyway, before being marched back to my flat and taunted with an enormous cream bun. With a cherry on the top.

Annoyingly, this evening I’ll find myself in close proximity to one of the East London branches of Turkish grilled meat emporium 19 Numara Bos Cirrik, so I must be strong.

On Saturday night, my sister’s birthday was celebrated by attending Wimbledon dog track. We haven’t been there for about 2 years, on account of consistently losing money hand over fist. I’ve just tried putting my hand over my fist, and yeah, that’s definitely what it was like. This time, however, we were luckier. They’ve raised the minimum bet on the Tote to £2, which in effect doubled the cost of our night out, but – of course – if you win, you scoop more wonga, don’t you. The Marsden family are not renowned high-rollers, but after noticing the improvement in our fortunes simply by whacking down a bigger stake, you can expect Susannah’s next birthday to be celebrated in Las Vegas, watching my father happily chucking the deeds of the family home on the roulette wheel.

Jenny and I were back at the dog track on Sunday morning, at the market. I’m not saying that we went down there in jacket, tie, sequinned dress, tiara, cummerbund etc, but those stallholders saw us coming a mile off. If you go to this particular market and try and buy some cheese, and you’re reasonably well-spoken, for god’s sake feign some ludicrous East End gangster accent, because you will – like we did – end up paying £4 for a small slab of unexotic fromage. Then £8 for some fish (which I saw come up on the scales as £7.35) and, most hilariously, £10 for a bag of olives and a bag of pickled garlic. Some serious rounding-up going on, there. You may think that anyone who goes buying pickled garlic on a Sunday deserves everything they get, and you may be right. Equally, you might wonder [anyone still reading? thought not] why I handed over the money. I suppose I thought that if they fleeced us, they probably needed to. Is that naive? Certainly that market is in a much more sorry state than it was in 4 or 5 years ago. Anyway, any gains on the dogs were offset by losses on the olives. Net effect of visiting Wimbledon dog track over 2 days: Zero.