from the archives

found this from back in the day. i made myself laugh. imagine!


Some people have combination skin. A greasy bit, a flaky bit, a spotty bit. I have a combination body. I have the arms of a Barbie doll, OK, they’re a bit longer but not much fatter. My legs could belong to a long-distance runner. A 14-year-old long-distance runner. A 14-year-old girl that is. You wouldn’t notice the difference if I stuck my chest and shoulders on to Mr Bean (though you might think he’d got hairier) while my belly does a very passable Giant Haystacks impression. It could be worse, I know, but I dread to think what that would look like.
It hasn’t always been like this. Oh no. In fact I suspect that if, somehow, I could fit myself in one of those clever machines used for crushing empty drink cans I would return to the me of 20 years ago. In those heavy (I mean heady) teenage years, I weighed about 4 stone more than I do now and rather than pear-shaped, I resembled a pineapple atop a couple of marrows, with asparagus tips for arms.
Don’t ask me what happened. Who knows? If we were in Ancient Greece I could proudly boast that I was a toy of the gods. Oh mock ye not, for I am a plaything of the divine. I am Stretch Armstrong, see how Zeus and Venus pull at my limbs. As it is, I can only guess that as I got taller, the puppy fat heard that there was a party going on round my midriff and decided to gatecrash. It’s obviously one of those great parties that no one ever wants to leave.
I’d love to be one of those people who just doesn’t think about their physical appearance, but I think if I did I really would turn into a vegetable. So much of my waking life is spent worrying, measuring, catching sight of, feeling unhappy with and obsessing about what is under my clothes that the fact that I hold down a decent job and have a healthy social life is a minor miracle.
Actually the healthy social life is partly responsible for much of the fretting. You see, I am at that stage in my life where my diary is beginning to read like a restaurant guide. Dinner at such and such with so and so. Lunch here with her. Dinner again with them again. And on and on and on.
And I know I’m my own worse enemy. If it were true that you are what you eat, I would be a bucket of cheap red wine with a mouldy old salad floating in in.
Invariably an evening out will start in some bar or pub. Now, I stopped drinking beer years ago, after the instructor in the gym I used to (until that day) go to, saw me in the changing room and declared, for all the world to hear – what is it with you English guys and beer? (I was abroad at the time) How do you say, beer belly? Ha ha. Beer and I have not been seen together since.
I will usually start the evening with a Bloody Mary, particularly if I am out with a certain friend of mine, who, after her first BM is literally struck dumb. We affectionately refer to this phenomenon as her turning into ‘Marcel Marceau’. She usually recovers her capacity for speech at some point during the evening, but it does allow me to say everything I want to uninterrupted.
While I am on the subject of Bloody Marys (if you follow the rules of grammar you end up with Bloody Maries which sounds like an Osmond after an axe attack), never order one in Australia or you will be served a tomato juice rendered undrinkable by the addition of several bottles of Worcester sauce and little more. But I digress.
Anyway, I shall then move onto wine, or, if I am feeling particularly restrained, a spritzer. Now I can speak a foreign language, I can drive a car, I can touch type and I can swim, but if there is one thing I have never ever managed to get the hang of, that is pacing myself when drinking alcohol. Actually it’s not just alcohol. Whatever I am drinking, no matter how hot, cold or intoxicating, it is almost as if someone has shouted ‘go’ and I have to empty my cup or glass or whatever as quickly as possible. Obviously, this is by the by for other beverages but with alcohol it does seem to mean that I get pissed in no time at all. So the spritzers soon dump the soda water and the glasses of wine soon add up to the odd bottle or two. And off we go to dinner.
For me, reading a menu is never an easy task. I go through each dish thinking, ‘cheese, no, fattening’, ‘avocado and mozzarella, couldn’t possibly, straight to my belly’, ‘duck, more like run and hide, all that fat’, ‘creamy…’ I don’t even bother to find out what. And on I go, eliminating anything that vaguely smacks of grease, calories and body. In the process I usually manage to eliminate anything vaguely appetising but I can’t help myself. By this time I will have reduced the menu to its two or three blandest, least tastiest dishes and it’s just a matter of deciding which of them I want least. Invariably when the waiter or waitress comes this will be the dish I order. I don’t know why, after my habitual 20 minute elimination run through I will be convinced of what I’m going to ask for, only to be totally bewildered at what comes out of my mouth. ‘I’ll have the garden salad, no dressing thanks, and could I have a bread roll with that please, no butter.’ Why I bother to torment myself with the menu I shall never know.
I wish I were one of these people who wasn’t particularly interested in food. I’d have so much more time to think about other things. Who knows, maybe I’d write a novel or discover a cure for cancer or something. As it is I am far too busy reading recipes for dishes I’d never let myself eat and wondering how fattening that sandwhich I had for lunch was and whether to have tuna with my jacket potato this evening (I’m having an evening in) or to go for cottage cheese.
I also suffer dreadfully from menu envy. Basically if it’s on someone else’s plate and not on mine (which it never is, obviously) I wish I’d had that. Even if I hate one of the ingredients. Even if I hate all the ingredients!. And I have to try it, to confirm how much nicer it is than mine. It takes a Herculian effort to stop myself from eating off other people’s plates. People are usually only safe the first time they meet me, or, if they’re lucky, if they are sitting at another table and I don’t know them from Adam.
And so my dinner will come and go and all the while I shall be glugging away on wine, drinking it like there is no tomorrow so that when tomorrow does actually arrive, not only will I have a shocking hangover, I won’t be able to remember much about the evening. Oh, I’ll remember who was there and where we went, but don’t ask me to recall conversations or times.
One of my best examples of ‘self-inflicted amnesia’ was the party I went to wearing a white T-shirt, nothing remarkable about that I know, except that I returned home wearing a blue T-shirt with Cuba emblazened across it. To this day, no one knows where I got it from or why I had to change. I have managed to piece together the fact that after the party we all went on to a club, though no one remembers if I had changed by then or not – Luckily I am surrounded by people who match me drink for drink and dead brain cell for dead brain cell.
So that’s me, Mr watermelon with matches for limbs. Drinks like a fish (a fish out of water, gasping for dear life, obviously) but restraint itself when it comes to food. Except of course at parties, gatherings and anywhere else where, rather than my own plate in front of me with what I ordered (but didn’t mean to) set down before me, I am faced with a ‘running’ buffet or finger food. Now I suspect that a running buffet may be so named because upon my arrival, my host or hostess will shout at the other guests to ‘run and get it while you can, He’s arrived’ though I have no proof of this. What I do know is that whenever I see a table laid out with food (a spread), something very strange happens and my understanding of the words hunger, want and full goes out of the window. I will start modestly. Celery, no dip. Carrot waved above a bowl of hummous (oil, too fattening). One seventy-fifth of a crisp. Then the alcohol will kick in and before I know it I am trampling over small children and old ladies to get back to the food table (which I will only have left when the need to go to the toilet or replenish my glass becomes unbearable). Back at the table I will begin tearing off hunks of bread, smearing them with butter and stuffing them with as much cheese, salami and whatever else I can think of, before stuffing them down my neck as if they were illicit substances and the police had just kicked the door down. I won’t only do this once or twice, but over and over and over and over again, through fullness (what’s that?) and beyond the pain barrier. I am quite convinced that one of these days I shall wake up in hospital, to be told, much to my horror, the story of my collapsing on top of the buffet table and being stretchered away to have my stomach pumped, much to the amusement of all my friends.
Well, it could be worse. I could take no steps to counteract my excesses.
You see, as well as having Betty Ford’s appetite for alcohol and a Pacman like ability to eat, I am something of a fitness fanatic.
Whether I go to bed at 9pm, sober as the day I was born or at 3am, drunk as a lord, at 6am sharp I shall be out of bed packing my bag for the gym.
I like to start my exercise with a run on the treadmill. Now, work hard play hard, no pain no gain. Or in my case, no pain, no calories burned. So off I trot. 1 mile, 2 miles, 3 miles and suddenly I’ve run the equivalent of London to Brighton. Apparently I look like a praying mantis in a hamster wheel. No matter how far I run though my belly never seems to get any flatter. It never ceases to amaze me how other people can stuff their faces on crisps and chocolate and never gain an inch, while I just have to see an advert for Pringles and an extra spare tyre appears under my T-shirt. I am like Jesus on a running machine. I run so that they might snack. Or maybe I get other people flab by some weird kind of osmosis.
By this time I have usually worked up a bit of a sweat (and gone an alarming shade of yellow) and am ready for some weight training. To say I am a ten-stone weakling would be underestimating my weight by a couple of pounds, but my puniness is something even I cannot deny. You know how sometimes you read in the paper or magazines about mothers who have lifted cars off of their infants or men who dug through tonnes of rubble to free trapped relatives? Well all I can say is that if something terrible like that happens to you when I’m around, don’t expect me to be of any use. I never cease to amaze myself at how little physical strength I possess. Now if it’s stamina you need, I’m your man. I’d be a great friend to have if you lived in a house powered by a dynamo linked to a bicycle. I’d merrily keep those pedals turning for hours, in fact I could probably power half of the national grid for hours on end, but don’t expect me to lift anything heavier than a bag of sugar. I’ll willingly try, but it won’t be a pretty sight. Particularly scary is the way my mouth starts tugging in a Bette Davis kind of way, mid-strain.
Which I suppose in part explains my combination body. Apparently the first place where we accumulate fat is the last place we shift it from. Hence my Ally McBeal extremeties and Humpty Dumpty middle.
So next time you’re feeling a bit down on yourself, like Mr Self-Esteem has tired of your company, just think, it could be worse. You could be me.