A Big Loser

We're playing host tonight to Rozita & the girls as Fuad is running some sort of marathon overnight. When I first set out at this Far Place it would have been difficult to imagine writing that just over three years later. My brother-in-law was simply one of those naturally overweight people who were made that way and would stay that way. Except there's nothing natural about it, and he didn't.

With a judicious mix of a sensible diet and lots of exercise he has, with a kind of gradual, determined, inevitability, lost an entire body in weight, now weighing half of what he did then. He's a few, and I mean a very few, kilos heavier than me at this point and about ten times as fit. And all this without the aid of a reality tv programme to explore and exploit his every move. (Actually the 'exploit' thing is a bit unkind, but you've got to be aware of a degree of exploitation even if The Biggest Loser is based on a generally noble premise.)

The possibility that people can remake themselves in the most unlikely ways, rising above the scripts written for them, is one of the few hopeful things our species has got going for it.