Although many Brits stampeded into the supermarkets in late March, in the fear that we were going to starve due to food shortages, by May some of us have found that the opposite is the case. Pulling, or rather heaving, on my Lycra this week, I noted that, in profile, I resembled a snugly stuffed Cumberland sausage, perhaps because my lockdown stash of “delicious things bought to sit out dystopia” – Choco Leibniz biscuits, Doritos, Super Noodles, tinned macaroni cheese – is now somewhat depleted. I’ve observed the government’s Stay At Home mantra obediently, with a mere 160 steps in 24 hours being my personal best so far. Not one single, non-essential journey did I make that day, other than a mooch to the kitchen to graze subliminally on delicious, non-perishable items that I’d bought to see me through the end of the world. Dystopia, I reckoned, calls for stuff you can eat with one hand while sat on your roof waving to the army to pick you up. That’s why I had, albeit temporarily, an eight-pack of Mini Cheddars.
Dystopia, however, did not come. Or at least not how I’d envisioned it. In its place there’s a relentless drip of disconcerting news: redundancies, recession and, of course, the endless dying. Matt Hancock’s press briefings, I’ve found, go well with small mug of Baileys and perhaps a finger or two of Highland shortbread. And during week five, when I stopped replying to WhatsApp messages because I had run out of words to say, I ate no actual meals at all. Just lots of semi-pacifying things: fistfuls of Kellogg’s Krave straight out of the packet, the last of the marzipan Christmas tree decorations… Subliminal grazing. Life is short, so have a KitKat. The feeling of my thumbnail sliding through the silver paper was ever so comforting.
And now all of this is dispersed lavishly around my hips and bottom. And not for the first time, either – in fact, probably for at least the 30th time, because I have been losing and gaining the same 10 pounds since I was 14, back when I first noted the life-shattering discrepancy between my own arms in a spaghetti-strap cocktail frock and Béatrice Dalle’s. I know the drill, and I know how to lose it: walk more, eat fresh things, go to bed hungry, no day drinking, yadda bloody yadda. And I know, of course, that those pounds I melt off will be back before Christmas. It is my destiny. If God wanted me to be a size eight, would he have made Birds Eye Potato Waffles so waffly versatile? Or toastable in the toaster? Think on that.
It feels churlish to mention weight in the middle of this crisis. We know there are more than 30,000 families right now who would love a problem as petty as tight jeans. Still, all week across social media, I’ve read people’s worries about lockdown weight fluctuation – and about loss as well as gain.
It feels, roughly speaking, as if being hidden away over springtime has permitted many of us to eat without the annual creeping tyranny of how we should look in time for summer. Wedding invites were cancelled, summer parties scrapped, flights were suspended and, therefore, sod being beach-body ready, frankly. All those forthcoming dates on the calendar that, as we peer into the refrigerator before bedtime, keep us deftly in line. That pair of trousers on the back of the bedroom door, the ones with the button that won’t quite reach, might fit for the christening if we quit bread, wine and takeaways for a month, but now they can be stuffed back in the wardrobe. Silver linings have been fairly thin on the ground during Covid-19, but the right to wear elasticated-waist nightwear in daytime – livening it up with a jaunty scarf during Zoom calls to fool colleagues that you’re dressed – well, at least there was that.
But now those days are creeping gently to a close. In the supermarket yesterday – I am brave enough to go there more regularly now – and after finishing my 10,000 steps, I dutifully filled my basket with spinach, carrots, hummus, tofu and buckwheat soba noodles. Health, health, health! I put in some bananas “as a treat”, but just small ones, because they’re ever so carby. I mean, a full-sized banana? Imagine. I bought some of those flavoured rice cakes that seem a good idea at the time, but after approximately three you remember that they taste like small, tortuous, polystyrene Frisbees. I will be abstemious, focused and ready to face the public. I’ll shed the pounds, as usual. But all my old baggage? That I’ll very much regain.
