Erikka Askeland: On a scale of one to ten, I’m no genius

Tossing and turning, I puzzled over how the mechanism inside the scale translated my increased bulk to a random place on a dial. Would a digital scale would be more accurate? And if so, how? Or would one of those old ones you used to see in the doctor’s surgery be best, with the tiny weights that slide along numbered notches in the beam until it tips over with a clunk? Obviously it is not as if those little square beads on the horizontal bar are actually the same weight as whoever is being humiliated on the scale by a purse-lipped health official, but it still gives a measurement in some way that my anxious and fogged brain could not grasp.

It made me realise that if I were ever to go back in time hundreds of years (don’t we all imagine that?) my knowledge of the wonders of modern, and even quite ancient, technology would be completely useless because I would not be able to explain how anything worked.

So instead of arriving full of genius for amazing things and an awareness of important historical events that would astonish the medieval minds of my interlocutors, I would crumble under just a bit of questioning. I might talk up how we, the people of my era, have flying machines and electricity at the touch of a switch as the jaws those who assembled to hear of such wonders slackened.

But inevitably in this, admittedly rather fanciful, scenario eventually, actually quite soon, I would have to admit I didn’t know how to make adhesive stamps, or how electricity is conducted without burning the house down, or how to weigh things without having an equivalent measure until it balanced. With my faulty memory for historic names and dates, nor would I be able to predict the day of the massive volcanic eruption or if the army would win the battle.

I’d be less considered a Delphic oracle than some crazed hag on the street muttering under her breath, and perhaps treated with even respect.

A quick survey using Google in the morning on “how stuff works” didn’t help my hazy grasp of weight measurement using a spring and rack and pinion, either. It involves something called Hooke’s law and some mathematician and physicist named Philipp von Jolly, whose nature was nothing like his name, I’d wager.

Nevertheless, the real cause of my mental restlessness was probably the glum realisation of my holiday weight gain. I blame it on having enjoyed fully the fruits of a renowned wine region, coupled with a lovely mum who plans meticulously for weeks the meals she will prepare for visiting guests, and who at the last minute then panics and buys double the amount of food she already has. And her peanut butter biscuits were lovely although just clapping eyes on a plate full of them can clog your arteries.

Of course, I am wary of weighing myself. One friend recently admitted to me that although she had been on a diet for a while, she hadn’t been able to face the horror of the scale. She has been following that Dukan diet, which sounds vaguely evil, as if it would stroke a white cat when you weren’t looking. I have taken up a similar regime, although it allows you to eat cheese, which, being of Nordic descent is clearly something I have a genetic tolerance for, if not a particularly slim figure as a result.

I do weigh myself occasionally. When I do, I also ensure that I am nearly naked, because clothes obviously take on the same density of lead when on the bathroom scale. I’m sure that’s what von Jolly must have figured out.

I also hold on to the edge of the wardrobe and ease myself down slowly, slowly until my full weight is on the scale. In case I scare it. Or it scares me.