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After years in imminent danger of being found dead in a hotel room from heart failure, I got back from Australia 16 months ago with a switch flicked and a new connection with my physical self.

Since then – I’ve managed to shed 26 kilos (4 stone) without having to resort to reckless, unscientific fads like exercise and managed to cheat just often enough on my diet to still feel like a rebel unchained.

Here are the before and after shots – I’m particularly pleased with the third one – taken just today which really highlights the transformation.

To my wife Madeline Williams Bozorgmehr – we tried you and I – but I’m thin now (ish) so I have to follow my destiny. Have left a pie in the oven as a final farewell as I elope with my new love.

Javier understands me. We tango, meditate and do capoeira together. He calls me ‘Gran toro con los pezones duros’ and I call him Susan.

It’s been emotional – but as I jog into the sunset without instantly collapsing, I bid you Adios and hope you too can find happiness.

 

Covered myself in glory yet again. After a complex morning negotiating the Kafkaesque architecture of the state and its automated phone minions, I headed out to a disconcertingly civilised lunch.

Washing the cares away with several bottles of a questionable local vintage, things got flamenco really fucking quickly. By the time my daughter had arrived from school, I was wearing an improvised belly dancing outfit held together by gaffer tape and denial, introducing the neighbours to Rick Astley and generally smashing the shit out of the afternoon.

Having clocked that Zara (my daughter) seemed a touch underwhelmed by her father’s magnetic charisma, I downed three sambucca shots and set out for the building’s swimming pool, strapping a small, tinsel dressed Christmas tree to my head and belting out ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’.

Despite my conviction that she’d beam with pride as her friends queued up for autographs, it turned out that I’d misjudged the tone of the swimming pool. Met with a wall of confused stares and a daughter mouthing ‘Fuck Off’ from behind her hands, there was only one thing for it….. Double down hard with a frisky Irish jig.

Now I don’t know if Guinness has some sort of stabilising enzyme in it, but sambucca and dodgy plonk definitely do not. About 7 seconds into the jig, I went for a bit of cultural fusion with some freeform ballet leaps, and while they were undeniably graceful as fuck, the timing may have been a fraction off.

Long story short, I ended up in the swimming pool, fronted it out with a half drowned rendition of ‘The Boys are Back in Town’, pretended it had all been part of the plan and then exited stage left by taking multiple bows to a group of deeply sceptical children.

It wasn’t until about ten minutes later that I realised the Christmas tree was AWOL, and while heading out sheepishly to retrieve it, I discovered that it had been adopted by a 3 year old called Taha – who had – no word of a lie – named the Christmas tree ‘Silly Fat Santa’

I think my work here is done.

Quick thought – is irony eating itself? We hear so much about the ironic nature of hipsterism – a kind of post modernist ennui that deflects genuine feeling into wry skepticism.

There’s an argument to be made that this reliance on irony reflects hopelessness – a sense that there’s no point being passionately earnest about anything because it can only disappoint, so fuck it, let’s just try and find the humour in it or be contrarian in a different way.

But looking at Trumpism and the movement building around the ludicrous Jacob Rees Mogg, you can’t help wondering how much of their support is driven by irony. Rees Mogg in particular consciously trades in caricature and his supporters seem to love the idea of electing an anachronistic joke to high office.

The same with Trump – how many people who were abjectly disillusioned by the political process thought it would be hilarious to send the Donald clodhopping across the manicured lawns of Washington?

Perhaps most extraordinary is that as irony starts to inform things like political choices, it’s losing its bite, normalizing and setting up car crash after car crash on issues that really matter.

It’s almost as if life has been so comfortable in so many ways in the West over recent decades that we’ve forgotten what real catastrophe looks like, so why not treat politics as a good laugh – what’s the worst that can happen?

The thing about irony is that it’s supposed to highlight the absurd as a tool of critical analysis. Now it seems to either be a weird manifestation of apathy or a key current in recasting Western public consciousness as a massive reality TV show.