Fatman

Nobody ever says, “I really need to lose a little weight,” unless they really need to lose a lot of it.  I know this because I need to lose a little weight myself, but I am at an age that means I will remain tubby or I will become gaunt: I will look fat and healthy or thin and ill.  When you pass sixty you are doomed to look either overweight or unwell, there are no other options: leotard or tub-of-lard.  I have grown accustomed to being on the plumper side of overstuffed.  If I was a cushion, I would be the one that you gave to the dog.

You know how it goes, one of those days when you eat until you start to feel like some kind of extruded sausage.  When, having eaten far more than you know you should, you turn to drink and, having drunk, you turn to peanuts.  Perhaps you don’t.  Maybe you don’t like peanuts; maybe you don’t like whisky, maybe you’ve never felt like too much suet in a single duff.  Somehow, it always comes as a surprise when someone tells you that you’re supposed to have an apple instead of cake, not as well as; when they tell you that carrot cake is not one of your five-a-day; that orange squash is not an orange; that a banana split does not count as two bananas…

As you become older everything makes you fatter and nothing, other than ill-health, makes you thinner.  Thus, in the minds of most people, an elderly thin person is an unwell one.  I definitely carry a little too much timber.  I would quite like to shift some of it and I’m quite certain that doing so would not make me ill.  The problem, should I actually lose the weight, is that nobody bothers to tell my skin that it has less flesh to cover.  It does not shrink to fit.  It hangs in folds and gives me the kind of jowls that are otherwise associated with Deputy Dawg.  I don’t want to look like somebody else – for a start I’d never be able to get onto my phone – but I would quite like to look like a thinner me.  Not because I have a great face – my mum used to show me milk whenever she fancied a yoghurt – just that it is the face that I have grown used to.  It is the face that scares me in the mirror every morning.  It might not be much to look at, but it comes attached to my body and as long as I see it in the mirror, I know that I am still around.  In the movies, when fugitives ‘change their appearance’ with the kind of radical cosmetic procedures that, in the real world, leave relatively normal-looking people resembling one of our less-attractive simian ancestors, who do they see when they look in the mirror?  Do they still see themselves, or do they see somebody else?  Do they become somebody else?  Maybe someone a little slimmer, with less saggy skin…

Don’t want to be a fat man
Have not the patience to ignore all that
Hate to admit to myself
I thought my problems came from being fat… Fatman – Jethro Tull (Anderson)