I could have eaten a farmer’s arse coming through a ditch. A baby’s arm through a wicker chair. I was that hungry.

Today is Day Eight of my seven-day fast. Mostly, I felt dreadful, while others glowed like Christmas lights. The advertised seven days was a marketing lie told to lure in clueless softies like me. The day before, I was only allowed fruit and salads, which don’t really count as food. Today, though I’m supposed to be finished, I’m still only allowed fruit and salad, and had a special bonus colema in the morning. So that counts as nine days of suffering by my reckoning. There’s a German lunatic here on Day Twenty.

And the regimen! So much for sitting on a beach contemplating a changed life.

07.00:     Cleanse drink (disgusting: pineapple-flavored frogspawn)
07.30:    1 hour meditation
08.30:    6 herbal pills (disgusting)
08.45:     1.5 hour yoga
10.15:    (Late for) cleanse drink (still disgusting)
10:15:    1 hour colema (unspeakable)
11.30:    6 herbal pills
13.00:     Cleanse drink and clear vegetable broth
14.30:    6 herbal pills
16:00:    Cleanse drink
16.30:    1 hour colema (unspeakable)
17.30:    6 herbal pills
17.30:    1 hour chi gung
19:00:    Cleanse drink and coconut juice
20.30:    6 herbal pills
21:00:    Last pills
22:00:    Bed

As for the colemas, which are eliciting reader interest, Spa Samui is the Disneyworld of dysentry. Experience the thrill of cholera in a controlled, safe environment. Buzz, the manager/instructor, is worldweary as only someone who has trained 4,000 strangers to administer a tube up the butt connected to 16 gallons of weak coffee solution can be. He struts about, the (Aussie) Jeff Goldblum of this movie.
    ‘Here’s yer cappucino,’ he says, pointing at the bucket, ‘I’m off to have a beer and a pizza. Heh, heh. Just kidding.’

It’s very low-tech. We got a plastic catering bucket, a tube, a bulldog clip, and our ‘own personal colema tip’, which connects to the tube. There’s a white plastic board that you balance between the toilet seat and a plastic stool. Lie down. Grease up. Away you go.

I had a pet gecko that stared at me throughout each operation, while I swore at him for not eating the mosquitos. One particularly bleak morning he ran up the wall, all cocky-like, and fell off and landed on his back on the floor. He lay still for a while, then slowly crawled back up and stared balefully for the rest of the time. I think he blamed me.

A large coconut had caused my bathroom ceiling to cave in slightly, so that when the rains started in the afternoons I was pelted with wet leaves. I began to contemplate what an ignominious end it would be to be brained by a coconut, indoors, while pinned to a colema board on Koh Samui. A fitting end for a reluctant New Ager.

Day three of my seven-day fast. This morning I fainted at morning meditation, keeling over dramatically into the circle drawn on the sand. First I felt nauseous, then goosepimpled despite the heat. My vision went dark, I couldn’t hear, and I toppled over. Woke up almost immediately and crawled out of the circle into the shade of a palm tree, where the teacher revived me with coconut juice.

It was very satisfying, I must say. Irish Catholic girls have a self-dramatizing streak, as my friends know well. We are brought up on stories of various fasting and masochistic female saints, who lick pus from beggars wounds and flagellate themselves horribly for the love of Jesus. (When I found a major religion, it will have entirely different devotional requirements.)

After just two and a bit days without food, I had the joy of fainting in the quest for an enlightened state, and then being terribly brave about it while fawned over by people who murmured soothingly ‘It’s the toxins releasing.’ rather than ‘Get a grip.’ And all on a tropical beach.

This place is a trip. And worth it for the cast of characters alone.

The night-train from Bangkok to Surat was tremendous fun. (There wasn’t much call for night-trains where I come from. Ireland is 160 miles top to bottom.) Train staff came by at 10 p.m. to put sheets and pillows on the beds. As I climbed into my top bunk and drew the curtain, I felt like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot though likely I looked more like Jack Lemmon. At six we were awakened for Nescafe before making the boat transfer to Koh Samui.

I shouldn’t have had the coffee, of course. I’m here to do the famous Spa Samui 7-day clean-me-out. If anyone had asked, I would have had to ‘fess up to a diet of cappucinos, noodles, spicy pork sausages, and left-over Kit-Kats in Bangkok, instead of the prescribed week long preparatory program of lightly-cooked vegetables and liver-flush drink. But they didn’t ask, they simply presented me with a bucket, a colema board, a battery of supplements, and some icky drinks. No food for seven days. Yikes.

On day one, I was hungry—what a rare sensation. And headachey, nauseous, and cranky, too, though reluctant to admit it here since I didn’t bother with the pre-cleanse. I’m suspicious of the fake science here, and feel like a Regency-era lady taking the waters in Bath. I have qualms about paying not to eat in a part of the world where people do it for nothing without a choice. But more than half of the people here are return visitors, and they don’t appear to be nuts, so I shall wait and see.

Makes a nice light snack
My Canadian friend Glen is a close reader of dervala.net. A little Bond villain case of joy arrived by courier today (his birthday!). I’ve already eaten four. Make that five.

Burp, eh?

The Enema Within
By late Sunday, after two weekends at the office, intensive colonic irrigation was more appealing than reality.

“At least I could contribute to the increasingly competitive enema discussions. Someone had always passed something harder, brighter, more bizarre. Margaret’s chopsticks had unearthed some gristle, about a foot long, and hard, black pellets. She was so impressed she took a photograph. A few chalets away, Mez had passed “rubbery brown, fat worms” with a strange purple glaze, which she insisted on showing to me in her bathroom. But the clear winner was Anthony’s 22-year-old marble. Perhaps the most bizarre thing, which I didn’t appreciate until days later, is that it all seemed perfectly normal at the time.”

“Colema” treatment sounds like psychotherapy. Distasteful until you do it, at which point you can’t stop blabbing about it. And then you feel sorry for everyone else carrying around a lifetime’s worth of impacted shit.

Oompah, Loompah,
Doopity-do
First day of Lent, 11.56 a.m. Plagued by Willy Wonka fantasies of plunging into a great pool of molten chocolate.

I drank weisse bier with Mark last night. A pedant in an ugly sweater complimented my correct pronunciation of of ‘weisse’, but I was probably just saying ‘Vice, uh, beer?’. When it comes to drinking, I am a big girl’s blouse, a big pink skipping rope, a wuss. After two measly pints, I had feverish dreams about drinking cool water all night long.

Brace yourself, Bridget
Today is Shrove Tuesday.

I have Catholicism in the same way that I have an appendix. It’s vestigial, risks flaring up occasionally, but mostly gives me no trouble. Still, I like to observe some of the old rituals that give shape and rhythm to a year. Tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, I’ll make eyes at firemen with crosses on their foreheads and I’ll give up both the demon dhrink and chocolate for Lent.

I never accept that I drink very much, but then I grouse through six weeks of deprivation. Forsaking chocolate is even worse. By Friday, my loved ones will roll their eyes and yawn at my pitiful mewling. Others will avoid me altogether, sickened by the sight of a grown woman sniffing at the office candy jar.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, though I won’t get shriven, I will drink beer and eat pancakes with chocolate sauce.

The Dervala Diet™
In 1997, I decided to be efficient, wardrobe-wise. I’d wear interesting trousers and skirts, but I’d pair them with identical black hoodies. This would be my look for the season. Machine washable, cotton, still cool. It worked fine until my friend Alex confessed that it had taken him a while to figure out that I didn’t wear the same sweater every day.
‘See, the reason I know is because the food stains are in a different place every day.’
The humiliation drove me back to my bad old fashionista ways.

I thought it was an isolated incident until Joe noted recently that he could make an entire turkey sandwich from the crumbs under my desk. And Jason claimed he could feed a village on the smears on my face after lunch. And then Peter Steinberg bought me the Sippy cup.

Note to self: change friends.

One day at a time, sweet Jesus.
Chocolate problem especially bad today. Ingested many, many Baby Ruths. That Coolidge kid has a lot to answer for.

At lunchtime I went out to buy a toothbrush and toothpaste to brush my cravings away. But the bastards in Dirty Deli on 8th Ave. sold me bubblegum-flavored toothpaste, which is no help.

Munch.

Too many people complained about the lack of journal entries. I shall take a different tack, and instead bore you into submission with more tales of my sugary cultural explorations.

Mark is the only person at Vindigo who a) complains about American candy as much as I do and b) eats as much American candy as I do. Imagine my excitement when he sent around this message this morning, on his return from Toronto:

‘Fine Canadian chocolate bars in the kitchen. Just like American chocolate bars except has French on one side of the package and contains chocolate.’

1. Canadian Crunchies are good, but not quite as good as Irish ones. And the package description, ‘Sponge Toffee’, is just silly, both in French and English. ‘Sponge Toffee’? I never heard such nonsense. It’s obviously a Honeycomb Centre. We squabbled about this for some time.

‘There’s nothing honeycomb about it. That suggests hexagonal chambers. Do you detect any of those?’
‘Yeah? So how can toffee be spongy?’
‘I bet “honeycomb centre” wouldn’t get past EU regulations. Section 2 Subsection D Paragraph 6 Clause 2e: ‘Centre must be honeycomb-shaped to use term “honeycomb centre”’.

2. Coffee Crisps are really very good. And I loved the genteel Canadian tagline: ‘Makes a nice light snack’. No wild TASTE SENSATION! claims up North.

3.Caramilk Apparently, their long-running ad campaign is ‘How do they get the caramel into the Caramilk?’ Which they’ve obviously ripped off from Ireland’s own ‘How do they get the figs into the Fig Rolls?’
More squabbles and national slurs followed.

‘Any idiot could stuff a fig into a Fig Roll. i don’t think it compares at all.’
‘Well, since so many products incorporate caramel with seeming ease, it’s hardly a great mystery, is it?’
‘The caramel is sealed in with no apparent seams. You’d have noticed this if you hadn’t scarfed it so fast.’
‘It’s just like the Cadbury’s one, though, isn’t it? Chocolate is ductile. You can cover seams easily.’
‘Still orders of magnitude more complex than inserting a fig into a Fig Roll, though. Only complete peasants would be mystified by that process.’

4. Smarties More or less the same, except with Junior Mint-style boxes instead of Rowntree’s* cool tubes.

5. Aero is also the same, I think. Never a favorite.

Now I feel sick. I am the Elvis of Canadian candy.

• (My favorite line from the movie Sexy Beast: the snarling Cockney gangster played by Ben Kingsley goes: ‘ ‘is name is Rowntree, like Smaww-ties, or Shawwwwwftt.’)