I’m back on the ‘public humiliation diet’ – thanks to my kids

I’m on holiday with my family in Turks and Caicos, and maintaining my current weight is proving difficult. Regular readers will recall that I lost about half a stone at the beginning of 2018, after an army of offence archeologists started sifting through everything I’d written, dating back more than 30 years, looking for evidence that I was an unsuitable person to be involved in education.

Since then, this type of inquisition has become much more common — scarcely a day passes without someone being defenestrated from public life on account of having said or done something imprudent in the past — but 18 months ago it was sufficiently distressing to cause rapid weight loss. I called it the ‘public humiliation diet’ and went on to lose another 20lb, bringing my weight down from 13 to 11 stone. This feels like the one redeeming feature of an otherwise unpleasant experience, and for that reason I’m determined not to put the weight back on.

To date, the key to keeping it off has been to cycle through lots of different diets and in that way stave off the boredom of having to stick to the same one. I initially embarked on what I dubbed ‘modified Atkins’, which meant no carbohydrates apart from almonds, dark chocolate and alcohol. I thought of these as ‘good carbs’, but it doesn’t take a genius to spot the flaw in this scheme. It became clear it wasn’t working when I found myself using the Ocado app on my phone to order 30 packets of Blue Diamond smoked almonds, 20 bars of Divine Deliciously Dark smooth hazelnut chocolate and 12 bottles of Louis Latour red burgundy every week. Watching the effect of this ‘diet’ on my waistline, Caroline dubbed it ‘Fatkins’.