The Rot Sets In

Day 18


Then: 15 stone 5 pounds (215 lbs)
Now: 14 stone 8 pounds (204 lbs)



On Saturday morning Keith said he wanted to try my porridge. I explained that it wasn’t really porridge, but oat bran cooked with water and salt. He insisted on having his own portion, which I tried to cheer up with milk and honey. He tasted it and winced. So this is what gruel tastes like, he said. Jo says it’s like eating moist cardboard. Later in the day I found a single chocolate croissant sitting in a packet. Keith sheepishly confessed that hunger had driven him to eat all the other five while I wasn’t looking.

To make up for it, I made him an alfresco lunchtime spread of Spanish cold meats, cheeses, pickles and Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. I had cold cooked chicken a slice of smoked salmon, two olives with a Coke Zero. The sun and the birdsong didn’t make it any better. But two days without a fat-free yoghurt can’t be all bad. Keith keeps asking me why I’m treating myself so badly. I explain (again) about the family portrait, and how I want to look slim for Izzy. Then he says something so extraordinarily insightful and profound, I could have killed him.

“Why don’t you have the photograph taken immediately and then just airbrush away the fat? That’s what supermodels do all the time”. How dare he be so right.

Last night we went to The Cherry Tree, one of Newcastle’s few half-decent restaurants. The service is terrible: you have to ask for menus, the girl serving drinks is the slowest and least able on record and the food takes an age to arrive, but at least the chef can cook a bit, which is more than can be said for most of the city’s establishments.

At the start of the meal Jo, Keith and our friend Caroline put their collective feet down. I had become, they said, utterly boring. Apparently the previous night I had become almost human after the marguerita, so they weren’t going to let me have any dinner unless I had a glass of decent wine in front of me. I had three glasses of Gavi and, as a direct result, threw caution and the entire diet to the winds and ate half of Jo’s bitter chocolate tart.

Woke up at 9am feeling guilty as hell.