Falling apart

I went for a walk today down to the Tai Tam reservoir. I was already sluggish from staying up too late last night; I didn't wake up until just before midday, and then I spent a few hours being disappointed by Chuck Klosterman's Eating The Dinosaur. I really enjoyed his previous work, but perhaps there's just too much in this volume about American football and basketball for me to be able to engage with it. If there was more hair metal anecdotes from the 1980s I'd be much happier. Ah well.

Eventually we dragged ourselves down to a taxi and headed up to the reservoir, where we spent half an hour floating around on a pedal-powered boat, trying to feed bread to fish. I'm not sure if koi carp should really eat stale white bread, but the attendants at the reservoir were selling it, and they're bound to be experts in marine biology. Nobody had told the fish though, so as we pedalled around the lake there were hardly any creatures to take our bread. In the summer, there had been hordes of fish, jumping out of the water to snatch bread from us. Saddened and disappointed, we pedalled back to the edge of the lake. Where we saw a tumult of fish being fed by people throwing bread from the side of the reservoir. Damn those perfidious fish and their refusal to swim out to our boat for fish, when they had easy picking available at the shore!

We walked round the edge of the reservoir. As we prepared to start hiking, we walked past four vaguely disaffected Hong Kong youths sitting on the stone parapet - they had a packet of cigarettes, two or three bottles of beer and a portable stereo playing Chemical Brothers tunes from the mid 1990s. Rebellion doesn't get much fiercer than that for the hard-partying teenagers of the Special Administrative Region. I thought of telling them this, but wasn't sure if they'd get cross and start sulking, or whatever other threatening behaviour they could imagine.

The hike itself - well, a walk, really, as it didn't involve being lost up a mountain / attacked by bears / losing a toe to frostbite - was fairly painful. Something is wrong with my body and I stumbled, devoid of energy, for two hours on a route that only a few weeks ago I would have run in 45 minutes. Perhaps that holiday in Taiwan has done for me. Perhaps I should knock the idea of exercise on the head and spend the rest of my days in bed, eating chocolates. Well, being fed chocolates, as soon my arms will be too weak to even lift them to my mouth. What is becoming of me?

Weight: still 170 lbs. I weighed myself last night and I was 168 lbs. Then I took off my underpants and gained 2 pounds. Life is unfair.