Toasting Dr Atkins

The moment I heard on the radio that Dr Atkins was dead, I was in a caravan next to the beach at Polzeath, in north Cornwall, eating tinned spaghetti on toast. Me, my boy, and my boy’s half-brother were there for a fortnight’s surfing – well, body boarding anyway. On three consecutive days in the first week there was a heatwave. I went brown, Mark went pillar-box red and Dan stayed about the same pale-green colour. It was at teatime, during one of these astonishingly hot days, that we heard it on the news. Dr Atkins, author of Dr Atkins’s Age-Defying Diet Revolution (Feel Great, Live Longer), had slipped on an icy pavement in New York and hit his head. He was only 72.

I’ve been a devotee of Dr Atkins since the Sunday Telegraph sent me on one of his Caribbean diet cruises two years ago. On the Atkins cruise I ate about four times what I normally ate, did far less exercise, drank gargantuan cocktails more or less continuously, had an on-board romance with a lady with silicone breast implants –and at the weigh-out on the last day found I’d lost just over two pounds.

There were 300 of us Atkins dieters on board ship. All week we were either eating or attending lectures about eating. Each morning, however, there was an optional activity called Walking with Bob (beginners and up). Nothing strenuous – just a few led circuits of the upper deck before repairing to the dining-room for a five-course breakfast with the full English as the main plank. I remember one morning in particular – yet another glorious cloudless Caribbean morning. I was circuiting alongside Bob because he and I were the only ones present that morning capable of walking and talking at the same time.