Okay society you win- Diary of a fat boy

So where were we? Ah yes I was coming to the end of my first two weeks of training. Clive was about to go back to Cornwall and I was taking over my patch for the first time on my own. My fears about being able to do the job or learn the various parts of the call were fading fast. I was a proud wearer of the Guinness tie which was uniform by the way. So much so that we always wore it when in the field, even at England matches, but I think we will cover off football and black beer next week.

No today I want to cover off the Guinness conference. Now the conference was always a major event. We would have a big presentation followed by being split into Northern and Southern region at which point there would be a large sit down dinner. The only problem with the large sit down dinner was that it was free bar and the following day was followed by a regional meeting that had to be attended. Work hard, play hard and all that.

So I go off to my first ever Guinness conference. The job is going well and I am hitting my numbers. The main event is being held in Birmingham and after the regulation brain washing session by senior management showing where we are going, and how we are doing, there follows one of the funniest guest acts that I ever saw at any business function. Guinness brew Kaliber. Kaliber were sponsoring the whose line is it anyway roadshow and they were all there. I laughed………..a lot. I am still madly in love with Josie Lawrence. There is just something about intelligent women that sends me all weak at the knees. By the way quite the worst piece of judgement at a conference happened at a Burton’s conference. The room was full of young men and who come on as the star turn but none other than the Beverley Sisters….what on earth were they thinking of when they booked them. The whole South East region got up and walked out.

The main presentation ends and the north and south need to make their way to their respective hotels. The north head to the Belfry and the south go to Chateau Impney. Now I knew lots of back doubles out of Birmingham and I got to the Hotel early.

I let the concierge take my suitcase, well hold all, and show me my room. “This is the cupboard sir, in here is the bathroom and you have a lovely view out over the grounds”, I tip him thinking I could get used to this as I look out over my twin double bedded bedroom. I unpack which takes all of thirty five seconds, I start running a bath at full steam, I turn on the TV full blast so that I can hear the sports news over the bath. Priorities…..priorities. I get undressed and I do mean fully undressed, and run a sink of water so that I can shave and with white lather all over my face the concierge sticks his head back round the door and says “and this is your bathroom sir”. At which point a colleague of mine Leo comes into the bathroom. Well I am in the altogether’s and the towels are on the far side of the concierge and Leo so I just turn smile at Leo and say “well I wasn’t expecting that”. I might have had some clothes on if I had been warned that we were sharing rooms but nobody had warned me. Poor Leo could never quite look me in the eye again, strangely it didn’t bother me that much.

So shaved, clean and suited Leo and I go to join the rest of the region. There is rather a lot of the black stuff being drunk. In fact the only people drinking lager are women. My first conference and I stayed up all night and drank somewhere in the region of fourteen pints. Bloody hell a paddling pool full of Guinness. Not only that but I am supposed to stay awake all day, contribute fully oh and then drive home tired and drunk. I get through the day without falling asleep but phone Anne Marie and book myself into a Travel Inn overnight.

Now this acquiring of a taste for Guinness does not come naturally for most people. It is after all a very bitter drink. At this time, the Guinness in the UK was brewed at Park Royal. Park Royal was an amazing brewery. It was set up on a slope so that originally the raw materials went in at one end of the brewing process and Guinness came out the other and the whole process was powered by gravity. There were also cows at Park Royal which meant the land was still charged at agricultural rates.

Now even during my rugby playing days I had avoided Guinness. Newcastle Brown was my poison of choice and failing that a strong lager. After leaving school I always found a couple of Newcies before the match would wipe away the possibility of any pain. Now in my first two weeks at Guinness I realised or rather Clive taught me that the best time to do a taste test was first thing in the morning. What you did was line up six bottles of Guinness Original. Check their labels. Make sure they are in date and then dear reader open one of the bottles and taste it. Now this was okay for Guinness Original but let me tell you the first time I did it with Kaliber the fridge had been off for some reason. One of the top ten worst sensations in the world, drinking warm Kaliber at 9 am in the morning. It is similar to that moment when you are about to hit something in your car and you realise just before it is going to happen, but you know there is nothing you can do about it.

Now some time ago I talked about new improved recipe. New improved recipe hit me when I was at Guinness. They changed Guinness Original. Commercially they probably had to as it was a live beer in the bottle but let me tell you in hardcore Guinness land which was where I was working, I took bucket loads of stick. You see live beer lasts about 28 days in the bottle as it continues to ferment. To make it last longer Guinness decided give the product extra longevity by pasteurising it. Well this was the new improved recipe except it wasn’t. It changed the flavour considerably. In fact it was a paradigm shift in downward selling. This classic was only surpassed by Holsten Pils “Good but not that good” campaign. People took the message and decided that if it wasn’t that good then they weren’t going to drink it. Killed the brand faster than filling the bottles full of weed killer

Now temperature had to be tested in all calls. What you did was run off half a pint and stick your thermometer into it. Now beer used to be ambient and then coolers came in because people prefer chilled drinks. Brewers like chilled products because ladies and gentlemen you can drink more. Guinness worked out that lowering the temperature from between 12 to 14^oC to something between 6 and 8 meant that your average hardened session drinker could drink three pints more in a session. Please be under no illusion, drink aware campaigns do not stop the fact that the job of a brewery is to sell beer, end of story.

Back to the old thermometer then. Well first call of the day the temperature would always be high as the beer would have been in the pipe overnight. If the temperature was over 8 to 10 degrees you had to check the cooling. Now a lot of the time the coolers were great big things near the cellar that had multiple beer lines going through them,. If the Guinness pipe was going through this cooler then no problem. If the pipe misses this cooler then we had to get it connected if there was a spare input/output line. If not we had to sell additional under the bar cooling. This was surprisingly easy once you showed the amount of extra profit that cold be earned from lowering the temperature and that there was no cost to the publican. Sold in lots of coolers to pubs. Sold in lots of Kaliber. Lots of Kronenbourg 1664 and even a little Harp.

So next week, we will discover what becomes of Clive, football and Guinness and maybe a few stories from some of the pubs and areas………have to be careful though as I wouldn’t want to upset anybody and nothing does that faster than describing their home area as a turd infestation.

So to fat club. I am hitting the wall my dear friends. We are at twenty miles into this marathon and I am fed up, bored, looking for excuses to cheat. I mean let’s be honest I have come so far. This in itself is a victory. Then the other side of my brain takes over and tells me to take control and see this thing through to the finish. It may take longer but I will not stop this process now or in the future. I may deviate off the straight and narrow but I will always come back quickly to the straight and narrow. I am not going back to twenty two stone. I like the fact that I can move around, use the seatbelt on an airplane and choose clothes rather than just accept that there is a website where I can get a shirt, or my suits have to be made to measure. Was it my fault that I became so big. Only in so much as I did not want to address other issues in my life that were driving me there. The politicians and popular thinists are wrong. Big people are not lazy and people in my office are now aware how sizeist modern society has become.

Hazel O’Connor’s haunting rendition of Will You is cascading into my whole being as I drive to fat club, funny how I always turn to a bit of sax playing when I am troubled. I go up the stairs and in honesty three weeks is too long without the comfort of the group. Onto the scales and ladies and today I weigh 17 stone 7 pounds a total loss of 67 pounds. Honestly I cannot believe how far I have come or how much fortitude I have discovered. Life changing is really hard, really really hard. Even when I reach a weight I will be happy with it is only the beginning or rather moving from the marathon to the triathlon…………but the rewards are great…..believe me.