Forty, fat and frightened.

KJB224: Feature Writing

Paul Brand (n0686123): Tute Group Thurs 10am – 12pm

Blog: Junk Food

Bachelorhood teaches you many things; life skills, if you please. How to justify not paying the insurance premiums, how to wring the last drop of blood out of a phone bill deadline and perhaps more pertinently, how to live on junk food. But, what bachelorhood giveth, age taketh away.

New Year’s Eve 2006, in an orgiastic overindulgence of tequila, poker, ill-fitting sarongs and what usually follows, the pizzas were being thrown around like Frisbees, the KFC buckets being emptied with gusto. The inevitability of at least one trigger-happy budding professional photographer came to fateful fruition and the night was intermittently split by blinding, headache-augmenting flashes of white brilliance. All in good fun; all in the spirit of revelry.

For me, the party stopped about a week later when said photographer gleefully shot me an email heavily laden with numerous attachments. Whilst the usual hoard of glossies detailing cigar appreciation, pouting lovelies and at least one of the male congregation gleefully mooning the New Year made an appearance, it was the inclusion of three photographs in particular that came with all the subtlety of a screwdriver to the skull. All of me, all in profile, all chronicling one wretched fact; I was fat, pure and simple.

My near-40-year chronic aversion to physical exertion and over-developed sense of beer appreciation aside, there was one thing that immediately came to mind; junk food. Foul, fattening, oily, fried, battered, super-sized, scrumptious, wonderful, heavenly, divine junk food. Something had to give, about twenty kilos of it in actuality, most of it accumulating around my neck and mid-section. Almost to the point of having to look up the word ‘diet’ in the dictionary, I satisfied myself with renting Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” from Blockbuster and settled in with a Crown and a jumbo packet of Twisties for an afternoon of DVD abandon. An hour and half later, driven almost to the point of being physically ill, I procured another frosty from the Kelvinator and tried to steady my rapidly shredding nerves.

Much like cancer, weight gain is a cumulative beast, albeit with far less of a timeframe. And much like poor PC in the latest volley of pithy rants for Apple, I came to a sad realisation. Cancel or allow? Allow! However begrudgingly.