The Price We Pay

At some point during the summer I accidentally mislaid some body mass. To be slightly more accurate I lost a stone and a half very quickly and whilst it’s evened off, my weight still seems to be dropping.

Which would be fine – I think pretty much everyone who knows me would agree that I’m not exactly slender – were it not for two reasons.

Firstly, this isn’t actually deliberate. It just kind of happened without me noticing. I put it down to working in the pub: my beer quota dropped and I would eat my dinner at about four-thirty before spending seven hours either standing up or, pretty often, running my arse off. This was far healthier than my previous regime of eating between eight and nine, if not later, and then remaining fairly physically inert one way or another before going to bed.

However, I’ve been back in the doldrums of office life for two and a half months (Jesus, there goes the next decade) and whilst I’ve been trying consciously eat healthily I’m not doing significant amounts of exercise. So, shouldn’t I be sort of stabilising by now? If not actually going back up, at least remaining constant?

Anyway, the second problem (and in many ways a more significant one) is that now
none of my trousers fit me. Running for a bus is a no-no; carrying too much change a disaster waiting to happen. Take these jeans I’m wearing now. Okay, so you can’t see them, but they’re fairly standard jeans – a grey-blue, with white stitching down the outsides of the legs and a zipper on the left hand pocket. Got it? Good. Now,
I’ve had these since last Christmas and so they’re practically new. I don’t want to replace them, but they’re going to get me in trouble. As I walked along the road I could feel them snaking their way over my hips, dragged down by the rainwater clinging to the cuffs. To my left a gaggle of teenage girls at the bus stop. To my right two coppers in a patrol car, sitting outside the Chinese takeaway.

It was a close call.

So, I clearly need some new clothes (or at the very least a new belt), but cash flow makes this a challenge – plus I loathe going clothes shopping, but in December? Jesus. Perhaps a prison uniform would be simpler.

This is the thing that no-one ever mentions. We’re told that we’ve an obesity problem, that we’re a nation of fat fucks and that we need to sort ourselves out.
Floppy tongued Jamie Oliver and stool sniffing Gillian McKieth swoop down on unsuspecting Dominos Pizza mopeds, forcing the salivating customers into submission by being more irritating than having to wait for a replacement pizza.

But no-one in these credit-crunching days suggests how we are to re-clothe ourselves.

Presumably we could use the money we’re saving on excess food to buy new clothes, except we do still have to eat something and healthy food is so irritatingly more expensive than shit.

I guess the only solution must be that there will be lots of people with saggy skin never able to leave the house.

I am, of course, presupposing that everyone dislikes going shopping as much as I do. There’s plenty of evidence, however, to the contrary. People love shopping. They love the heat of the buildings, the ching of the cash registers, putting their cards in the little boxes and tapping out their unique numbers and spending money that was never theirs. My God, some love it so much that they’re prepared to kill for it.

Seriously.

In the early hours of last Friday out on Long Island, New York State, crowds were gathering outside a Wal-Mart where a sale was due to commence – the annual Black Friday Sales. Never heard it? No, me neither. The jostling punters were so impatient that they pressed ever closer to the doors, applied greater and greater pressure until the point – not of the door being forced open – but of the glass shattering.

Presumably this made quite a lot of noise, but rather than jump back in shock, or even pause to wonder exactly what was happening the mob surged forward desperate to gather up... Hell, I don’t know. What does a Wal-Mart sell? Cheap burgers? A tasteless festive jumper with fifteen percent off? Half-price Adam Sandler DVDs or Pussycat Dolls CDs? Whatever it was they wanted it badly enough to trample a store worker to death. Even after paramedics tried to clear the scene most shoppers simply refused and responded with a whinge about how long they’d had to wait in line.

So watch yourselves out there in this annoyingly advertising in advance season of so-called goodwill.

Me? I think I’ll simply break out the swiss army knife again and puncture another hole in this here belt.