Shared Opinion | 15 November 2008

I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat

They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg of Florida. I’m wondering, these Americans, can they really only have a handful of words for ‘fat’?

Forgive the predictable observation, but there are just so many different types. I can see many from the window of my hotel room, down there on the shore watching the startlingly noisy, don’t-book-a-room-next-door, annual Key West World Championship Power Boat race. Arse fat, neck fat, hip fat, thigh fat. There’s also the proper, terrifying Star Wars villain fat: arms unable to descend below an obtuse isosceles triangle sort of thing, but that’s actually fairly rare. I can only see two of them, rippling slightly as the boats roar past. Most common is what you’d have to call skinny fat: slender arms, slender legs, but with a bulge in the front of their polo-shirt, like they’ve been out shoplifting soft furnishings. My doctor tells me I’m a touch overweight, but I could be a whole different species. Side on, my wife is a little closer, but she is six months pregnant.

Ernest Hemingway wrote most of his books here, in a house now overrun with six-toed cats and tour guides who look like chubby versions of Ernest Hemingway. Now I think of it, there was actually a bunch of tautly skinny middle-aged men in the Green Parrot last night, whooping it up to the Janis Joplin covers. Locals, I’d say, all long hair, moustaches and oil-smeared baseball caps.