I always suspected that I liked bread a bit too much, but ensconced inside a gated villa with only the finest, gluten-free food in the fridge and the dangerous nature of my dependency is writ large.
‘This is how teenage looters must feel about Nike,’ I ponder, as I imagine all kinds of scenarios in which I obtain bread, crisps, potatoes and pasta. (I’m afraid that some of these scenarios do involve me climbing over walls.)
My friend is not only a leading authority on food intolerances and healthy living, he is also a coeliac. So he doesn’t just talk about nutrition, he lives it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but when he opens his cupboards it is clear that he does the rather inconvenient thing for my purposes of practising what he preaches. His body is a temple and he puts only the most suitable ingredients into it.
My body is a ramshackle, low Anglican church where pretty much anything goes. I am ecumenical about food. I don’t mind what it is or where it has come from, so long as it tastes vaguely inoffensive and stops me feeling hungry.
I draw the line at McDonald’s, but only because I have doubts about whether it is actually food. Its so-called hamburgers look to me as if they might be polyester resin-based. But in an emergency I will do a Burger King, which seems to have a higher than average proportion of meat to synthetic material.
A Byron Burger, or one of those other fancy burgers that come with goats cheese or aubergines, I consider haute cuisine. Haute cuisine itself I find meets McDonald’s coming round the other way. It ceases to be food when it has been played with so much it has not only shrunk but has also arranged itself into a pattern and affected to taste of more than 26 different flavours at once, which can’t be natural.
Carb-free food, I am just plain scared of. Having said that, I am only here for a few days so you would think I could manage to enjoy the wondrous bounty of fresh Mediterranean fruit and vegetables, the breakfasts of lightly omeletted eggs and lunches of grilled steak or fish with salad.
After all, I do suddenly look so much better. In what seems like a few hours, I have lost the roll of left-over winter fat around my middle.
But as I tuck into my omelette I notice that I am eyeing an out of date packet of Ryvita and salivating wildly.
When I retire to my room at the end of the first day I feel weird. I try to return a text message and the phone falls out of my hand. I try to pick up the phone and I drop it again. Then I pick up the phone and hurl it across the room. Now the phone won’t work, and I burst into floods of tears. I start jabbering about the futility of life. ‘What’s the point, eh? I mean, here we all are but, really, what is it all about? We all die alone. Dear God, what is happening to me?’ Through the tears, a tiny voice inside me says ‘get bread, get bread’.
The next day I come out to my friend as a carb-oholic and am relieved that he does not judge me but drives me immediately to the nearest supermarket, where I fill a basket with French sticks, industrial quantities of crisps and a huge bar of Swiss chocolate.
He sighs. I am a lost cause. He doesn’t mind about the bread so much, but the way I stuff it into my mouth with a handful of crisps as a chaser makes him pull a face as if he is watching a looter smash a window and try on trainers.
After my fifth helping of bread in an hour he says, ‘I know, why don’t you make a chocolate and crisp sandwich?’
‘That’s genius!’ I cry, running back into the kitchen to get started. As I cram the thing together I realise that he was probably joking. ‘Still,’ I think, ‘out of the mouths of babes and nutritionists…’
There is nothing quite like a crisp sandwich. In terms of carb delivery, it is mainlining. I start to feel myself again. I wander out to my sun lounger, pondering the gentle spring in the well-tended grass and then, as I sprawl on it gazing around me, I marvel at the majestic straightness of the palm trees, and the hedonistic buzz of cicadas. Far out, man.
It is now obvious to me that nobody dies alone and everything in life has a purpose. I think Hovis should consider this as its slogan.
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