Philip Hensher has narrated this article for you to listen to.
It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so it can only have been half past ten in the morning. A familiar neighbourhood figure zigzagged recklessly across the road towards us. He had something like a sense of purpose about him.
Telling a stranger that his avoirdupois could give G.K. Chesterton a run for his money counts as a hate crime
‘Have you got –’ he paused and reckoned – ‘£5? To get something to eat?’ Five pounds seemed an ambitious amount. I thought I’d answer the implied request and not the question he’d actually asked. ‘I’m not going to give you £5,’ I said briskly. He looked about as ghastly as usual – that yellow-grey, oily quality of the long-term heroin aficionado. Once he had knocked on our front door, claiming to be a neighbour from number 31 in need of cash for the electricity meter or something.
‘Ah go on,’ he said. ‘I just want £5.’ ‘I’m not giving you any money,’ I said. ‘It’s only £5,’ he said. ‘What you going to do with £5?’ ‘No,’ I said, walking on. A diabolical expression took hold of his face. ‘Ah off you pop, you fat sod,’ he said. ‘Go on, then. Wobble, wobble, wobble.’
Greta and I went off, wobbling in a dignified way. I got home, gave her her dinner and went to take a look in the mirror. It was true that I had had breakfast at home and an hour later yielded to the thought of a bacon sandwich in the park café. These days, telling a stranger that his avoirdupois could give G.K. Chesterton a run for his money counts as a hate crime – you fatphobic chump, I’m calling the police. On the other hand, it had to be said that the neighbourhood smackhead did have a point. There was a definite quality of wobble to be accounted for.
Being fat, I must say, is pretty awful. There is the 3 a.m. choking fit. There are the humiliations of being shown the door, in the politest possible way, in shops where you might actually want to buy clothes. And these are just the beginning – a bit further along, there is going to be the specialist ‘outsize’ shop and having to request a seatbelt extension on a plane. Or buying a second seat. There are the medical issues that start to crop up. And one day it occurs to you that the medical profession is merrily prescribing you one medication after another to deal with the consequences, but is never going to say to you: ‘Get out of my office, you fat sod.’ Something had to be done.
Actually, losing weight is a doddle, if you can be bothered. The other day, I came across an acquaintance in the park who said ‘My God – I didn’t recognise you,’ and then, bluntly: ‘How much weight have you lost?’ ‘Five stone,’ I said. She goggled and said: ‘How?’ You have to tell the truth. ‘I ate less,’ I said.
Literature, for once, is not a great deal of help here. Fat characters only crop up occasionally – the Fat Boy in Pickwick and Flora Finching in Little Dorrit, or the Cleopatra Lucy Snowe gawps at in Villette, ‘from 14 to 16st… extremely well-fed: very much butcher’s meat’. In fact, fat people weren’t written about, because they weren’t that common. There was one fat girl at my primary school and she was famous for it, like Hattie Jacques. The only literary account of someone growing fat I can think of is the hero of Brigid Brophy’s Flesh – ‘You’re disgustingly fat,’ his wife tells him on the last page.
But there was one lesson from literature I took, the moral of Hilaire Belloc’s Henry King: ‘“Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,/ That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch and Tea/ Are all the Human Frame requires…”/ With that the Wretched Child expires.’ It turns out that if you eat breakfast at eight, lunch at one and supper at eight, all with moderation, and nothing else, you lose 5st. Who knew?
Do thin people understand the tension and grief of buying clothes in a shop’s largest size?
The incidental pleasures are quite unexpected. A lot of it is about clothes – packing up the discards for the charity shops, for instance. I wanted to hang around to watch the volunteers picking up the tentlike donations, ideally with incredulity. Or unearthing a 30-year-old jacket that now fits you again. Do thin people understand the tension and grief of buying clothes in a shop’s largest size? And conversely, the pleasure of one day smugly asking for the size below, then the size below that? A shirt that does up, a jacket that buttons? Bliss.
‘I hope you’re not going to start exercising,’ my husband said one day. ‘Oh God no,’ I said, snobbishly. ‘Or start recommending anything…’ ‘God no,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you the height of my ambition. I want to wear a waistcoat. A nice tweed one. And when the south London heroin addicts call me names in the street, I want them to call me an old poof, not a fat old poof. That’ll do me.’ ‘Don’t say addict,’ my husband said. He’s quite proper about that sort of thing. ‘You should say heroin user.’ ‘I’ll try to remember,’ I said, not for the first time.
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