The wondrous world of sex with non-thin women

I have been spending a lot of time recently perusing the internet for things of interest or funness or note. Though this has unfortunately, meant a lot of time scouring the kind of peer review and recommendation sites apparently mainly peopled by spotty 15-year-old boys in their bedrooms who will promote anything involving girls in bikinis, because they’ve never touched one … and simultaneously things about fat women in the public eye in order to point out that they wouldn’t want to sleep with those.

Of course they’ve only got time to point that out because they have ten minutes before that date they have with Scarlett Johannson or Jessica Alba. Yeah, right. Because these little pricks could actually do soooooo much better.

[And sorry, I should have mentioned that those links will make you want to punch someone. They certainly did me]

Clutter

(If you think this reads differently today, you are quite right. I rewrote this quite a bit this morning because I felt, on re-reading it, that it was a bit ranty and didn’t really give the author credit for the things I felt he got right. - KN)

At Newark Airport - which, I notice, most Americans seem to pronounce “ne-WORK”- I picked up an interesting-looking book by Peter Walsh called “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?”, partly because I remembered Le Singe Non-Travaillant Super-Sexy mentioning it in a comment on one of my other posts. No, I’m not linking to it. Why? Because I can’t be bothered to find it. Go and find it yourself if you’re that bothered. All right then, DON’T. That’s fine. Good! Fine!

The author is a decluttererer, i.e. one of these people who makes a fortune going to people’s houses and telling them to throw things away. I would sneer at this if not for the fact that I am the Clutter Queen of North London. I never throw junk mail away and I usually have hundreds of tiny bottles of toiletries that I will never use or which have an inch in the bottom of them that I’m never going to get out of the bottle. My desk at work was until recently a nightmare and I still never file anything, although - funnily enough - I do keep my PC’s desktop absolutely spotless and everything is very neatly filed. People who send me documents via email are people I treasure forever.

Ad of course I am also fat. So I found this all rather interesting.  BRING ME A READMORE TAG.  STAT.

So I’m in New York, right

which is particularly good because New York City contains this shop called Lane Bryant. Lane Bryant is a chain that sells plus-sized clothes that:

(a) cater for women who are big and curvy, not thin-legged and pot bellied and if any buyers for Evans are reading this can you PLEASE take some notes? and

(b) also appreciate that tall people can be fat and actually do trousers that cover the whole of a tall fat person’s leg, Evans buyers this is another one for you particularly YES YOU, and

(c) vaguely resemble clothes that fashionable people might want to wear, but are made a bit bigger to enable fat people to be fashionable and fat and tall at the same time. WRITE THAT ONE DOWN TOO PLEASE EVANS BUYERS.

I went into Lane Bryant this afternoon, which would be one of your UK evenings, with my usual game plan in mind: place credit card on counter; buy anything I feel like; close eyes; sign bill; continue to make minimum payments on credit card without looking at balance. I justify this on the basis that being tall, fat and small waisted means that I rarely find anything to wear in the UK and therefore a couple of hundred dollars in the US is acceptable, particularly as George Bush is currently cocking up their economy considerably more than Gordon Brown has yet done with ours.

I may be fat but I’m still in pretty good nick. STOP LECTURING ME.

Okay look this is really just a Sunday morning rant. I have noticed that people who are slim sort of assume, without thinking about it, that they are healthier than people who are fat.

I’m not sure that that is strictly true.

Yesterday morning the internet shopping arrived.

(a) Natural yogurt, cured ham, light cheddar, Philadelphia light. Cornichons, olives, onions in brine. Chopped tomatoes, fresh wholewheat pasta, tins of soup and beans.

(b) Fresh salad leaves, cucumber, aubergine, green peppers, skinless chicken breasts, neck fillet of lamb, lean mince, tofu.

(c) Ham and cheese pastry slices, steak pies, Scotch eggs, bacon, full-fat sausages, Meat Feast Pizza, chocolate-cream-filled profiteroles and a fresh cream Victoria Sandwich.

This is shopping for me (Licensed Porketeer), my mother (overweight) and my little brother (5′11 and 9 stone soaking wet).

So who’s going to eat what?

I Am A Cretin

There are a million reasons why people get fat, or can’t lose weight, or don’t want to lose weight, either consciously or sub-consciously. There are also a million different ways to motivate people who are losing weight and whilst Katy, Wendy, Anna and I all broadly have the same reasons for doing it, what motivates us will be very different. (As will the way we cope with for e.g. random scone attacks, sudden curries, The Effect Of Ladyhormones, not losing weight for a week when you are doing all the right things, etc.)

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I am often the first to pipe up with ‘helpful advice’ for my fellow Porketeers, ranging from “shut the fuck up, stop your whining and just get on with it“, to “love yourself, yeah?”, via “It’s really simple! Just eat less and move around more!”, with many other interjections in between.

None of this, however, detracts from the point, which is that I have not:

1. Lost one pound since we started this blog;

2. Managed to combine going to work with doing exercise;

3. Listened to my own advice.

I found this post on my other blog last night.I was much more amusing back then; much more amusing than, in fact, I’ve been for about 530 days. But that is another story all together, and I shall not (for once) digress.

I wrote it on 18th July 2006. After having a quick lie down and a suck at the gin, I got out my scientific calculator and did some maths. A bit of really clever arithmetic told me that, had I stuck to my very reasonable and effective regime (and assuming I had lost weight the proper rate of approximately 7lbs a month), I could have lost 9 stone since I wrote that post, and that’s about five stone more than I need to lose.

What a fuck-awful waste of time. People being kind or encouraging makes no difference, and sympathy makes me want to vomit. I have never really listened to anyone else’s advice (unless I ask for it), and I hate being told what to do, or being told I “must” or “should” do anything; but the one thing that will get me off my fat arse (in almost any circumstance) is the prospect of looking stupid.

Yes. It is true. I have been stupid. I am a cretin. I am a fool to myself. I am an idiot. I have wasted time, and potential for cartwheels, riding horses at dangerous speeds, and not looking like a mentalist in jeans.

As of this very minute right now, when I am faced with an open biscuit tin, I shall shout ‘YOU ARE A CRETIN!’ and withdraw my hand sharply. If I decide that I cannot be arsed to either go to the gym or ride upon the noble crosstrainer that the best of all men obtained and assembled for me*, I shall remind myself of how miserable I feel if I do not, and shout ‘FOOL!’ in the mirror.  And if hot cheese is in the offing, I shall form its delicious fatty-fatness into the word “I-D-I-O-T”.

Yes. It is time. I must stop being an idiot and get my fat arse in gear.

* It is the least I can do. I have non-stop quiet support, 24 hours a day, in all weathers, hairy crack or not. I have not properly appreciated it until now.

I’d Rather Be Fat Than Have Weird Ears

Imagine it, if you will.

You are having a “night out”. Young people are strewn about the place exchanging views on a number of different topics, some topical (e.g. the US elections and/or Kerry Katona), some whimsical (who would you rather sleep with, Nigel Lawson or Douglas Hurd?), and some puerile (if Finnegan’s Wake is about the Bible, and the Bible is about the law, does that mean that Finnegan’s Wake is about the law?) and drinking alcoholic beverages of various kinds. Everywhere you look, heads are thrown back with gay abandon. Outside, young ladies in short skirts who have forgotten their hosiery are sucking hard on extra-long Consulate cigarettes.

You are looking quite nice, like you might smell of buttercups and taste of caramel; your hair is glossy like that of a show pony; your clothes are well-cut and effectively demonstrating your capacious bosom which - it must be said - is one of the benefits of being a porker. You look like you’re getting it, and you probably are.

At the back of your mind, as it always is, is the awareness that you are bigger than most other people in the room, but you don’t really think about it; there’ s no need; after all, sometimes it’s a benefit and anyway, it’s not actually making any difference to the type of evening you’re having: your friends are still cretins, someone’s trying to chat you up, you’re drinking gin straight out of the bottle with a bendy straw, you’re better looking than the dwarf with extensions, and all is right with the world.

Then you are introduced to a woman you haven’t met before. You dimly register that she’s sort of medium-sized. She’s got slightly weird ears and could do with a good haircut. She’s OK; a bit over-familiar perhaps, but OK to talk to while Katy’s getting off with the Lithuanian in the corner.

And then it happens. She puts a confiding little paw on your arm and leans into you. Her voice drops and she tells you how fat she is. How - no, look, I can pinch AN INCH under my arm - flabby she is, how little exercise she takes, how she just hardly eats a thing but just can’t help being so fat, how she just feels so awful and how she’s not sure she’s ever going to fit into a size 10 again.

You go through the usual rigmarole, which usually involves saying something along the lines of “No no, you are wrong: for it is I who is fat; approximately twice your size, in fact!”, at which point she takes a step back and squeaks, “But you’re not fat! You’re just … big-boned! And you’ve got such a pretty … face. And a lovely personality.”

You look at her, and more half-arsed platitudes are exchanged. For some reason that, later, you can’t quite fathom, you have neither set her hair on fire nor invented a terminal illness that involves serious weight gain. Nor, importantly, have you told her to fuck off.

The rest of the evening is a bit shit, really. You’ve remembered that you’re a porker and have, against your will, said it out loud with your mouth in order to make someone else feel better. And indeed she does feel better, but you feel fat and (far worse), patronised.

Then you get home and you think about it a bit more, and you think: fuck me, when I’m three stone down I’ll be so fucking grateful I won’t worry about sags and kneecaps and flappy underarm skin. I’ll be medium-sized, wearing medium-sized clothes, possibly even able to do cartwheels. Things generally will be a bit faster, easier, less annoying, and I will be happy with that; but her ears will be as weird as they always were.

With this unkind but soothing thought, you fall into a deep slumber, interrupted only by pornographic dreams involving Alex James and cheese on toast. In the morning, you wake up and go straight to the gym realising, as you pack your size 18 gym pantaloons, that never being patronised again is as good a reason as any to stop being fat.