Living Tasted Better Than Healthy Felt

I’m pretty sure the people I live with think I’m a bit of a freak. Notwithstanding my forgotten but undoubtedly questionable conduct when drunk, I have shown to have in my possession an amount of kitchen equipment that would seem to rival all but the most thorough of small rural restaurants; and yet I haven’t cooked once.

I’ve been here nine days or so yet I haven’t cooked once. There’s a reason why – a mighty, engorged, sweating mass ten inches above where I would want adjectives like that used. Yep, I’m a fat bastard. A condition I wouldn’t say has exactly crept up on me but nor have I attempted any form of escape. I’m one of those guys where the fat sits hard on the belly and the arse, if I was a dead president’s head in a jar, 1000 years from now, I reckon I’d get on alright with the ladies. Nervous twitch n’all.

News just in Sweary drunks laughing, kicking bottles and hacking up phlegm outside. Might go some way to explaining all these fucking sirens News just in

Where was I? Oh yeah, me being a lard arse. Well you see I used to be a cook, as recently as this spring in Glasgow Film Theatre and prior to that a few places over in Denmark. It wasn’t a particularly well paid job but it afforded me the chance to have cheap after work drinks with pretty waitresses who, in retrospect, probably regarded me as two sly looks and a mix-tape away from the mace in their handbag. Oh the folly of the drunkard.

Anyway, so there I was, money bleeding away on trying to saddle a future ex-wife and a love child with a name its grandmother can’t pronounce; and I was eating my life away. And then I had the accident, the one on the post-bike and after a while and more jobs it gave in and the hospitals got involved. They tried to fix my knee twice and in the meantime I kept drinking, eating, abusing the painkillers when I could get them.

Almost four years after the ops, I couldn’t carry on as a cook so got on an AP Degree course, and that’s where I met my love, a Lithuanian girl named V. We fell in love and we made love, and then we made dinner; big dinners. A year ago, having graduated, we moved to Scotland – a place hardly renowned for its healthy lifestyle – but all these times were good times and Denmark is super and Scotland is wonderful and now (Northern) England is lovely. Just don’t for a minute think I’m one of those people that blames others for their failings – everything that has happened to me is because of a choice I made and I take full responsibility for that choice (although saying that there was the matter of our old landlord in Denmark, I’m in the process of building a robot to give him the Aids virus but my engineer friend over there is coming along nicely with a laser that, if he can scale down, could be used to carve the fucker off the earth and into the sun. But that’s another story.)

So me and V. broke up. A sad, sad time. But let’s be honest, in order for us both to head in the direction we needed we couldn’t be in the same town, hell, the same country. And after living on top of each other for almost three years you can’t go back to postcards and phone sex. Long story short. And the fatness, oh the weight – yes, I’m on a diet, of sorts; a standard of eating that does not involve pots of rice and pasta; devilishly spiced potatoes; dead animals stuffed inside other dead animals; thick soups and heavy bread; spicy delights and savoury treats. No. Fuck all that. I can’t control myself. On completion of this degree I want to head out to the brink of madness; the riots, the wars, the disasters. I’m already an asthmatic with a fucked knee, if I take an extra 20kg outside the green zone the crazies won’t need to shoot me, they’ll just have to jump out and say boo!

So I’m eating my cereal bars and organic oatcakes. I’m drinking my strong coffee and there’s a fridge in my room for the ice pack and the fruit juice. I’m on a new kind of painkiller and it seems alright. You wouldn’t know to look at me but I’m incredibly positive about my future (as long as I ignore conspiracy theories, the economy, the environment, the amount of people living in abject poverty and the chance that the world will face great, violent change come 21.12.2012) – I’m an agnostic, or as I like to call it ‘an atheist with an imagination.’ My problems and yours, dear reader, matter not in terms of your fellow, equal men. It’s all fucking gravy here!

But I’ll just dip an oatcake in to taste. I’m on a motherfucking diet.