For years I wiped sand from my eyes, kicked there by more muscular peers. For decades, I suffered discrimination on television, where my skinny compadres Mr Muscle and Rodney Trotter were routinely mocked for physiques which, frankly, put my upper body to shame.
Lower down, things were no better. "Do dogs piss up those?" enquired a colleague in the plastic bag factory where I worked one summer. I had ill-advisedly showcased my lamppost-like legs in shorts - an experience I didn't repeat. If I ever tried to get a tan, friends only likened my exposed forearms to twiglets.
All that suffering was suddenly wiped away last summer when it was decided that scrawny men were sex symbols. Lanky became lithe. Skinny became svelte. Girls began to look at you as if you were a piece of meat. Chewed to the bone.
Jarvis Cocker was in the vanguard a decade ago. But even when he wiggled his non-existent bum at Michael Jackson, the Pulp singer was still considered a niche taste. Struggling through my singleton university years, I might strike lucky once a year only to return to a student pit and find a shrine to Jarvis erected there. Me and a million other skinny students could only ever be pale imitations.
It took Kate Moss to unlock the cool in skinny. The woman many men saw as the most beautiful in the world, that icy-cool style icon, dated a succession of thin men. Johnny Depp was pretty chiselled in body as well as cheek. Jefferson Hack put the geek into chic. Then along came pasty Pete Doherty. Between them, the pair (of skinny jeans) made thin completely chic.
In the heyday of Skinnyism, I had to don a fatsuit just so I could go to the shops unmolested by screaming ladies. Clubs became like Entmoots - full of tree-like men, strutting their stuff.
Friends with 34-inch waists collapsed in tears in my living room. "I've been dumped for a 19-year-old who wears 28-inch jeans for girls," one confided. "I feel so unattractive." Gyms emptied. The weights industry collapsed. Bodybuilders lay motionless on beaches for weeks on end in a vain attempt to become weaklings. I kicked sand in their faces.
The glory days stretched on, a bit like my ultra-slim trousers. England decided Wayne Rooney was too porky, so Peter Crouch came in, dollybird on twig of an arm. He proved a physique like a tower crane was no hindrance to sporting endeavour. The nation even danced robotically along with him.
Stick men were no longer figures of fun. The skinnies had their own comic icon, Russell Brand, who wore minuscule black jeans designed for 12-year-old girls. Medium, Large and XXL sectors of our society no longer laughed at him; they laughed along.
But fashion is a cruel season. Now, as suddenly as the end of summer, Skinnyism is over.
Last week I went to the beach. The sand was kicked in my face again and a dog mistook my leg for a lamppost. This week, Donna Armstrong, the editor of teen barometer More magazine, said: "We've been deluged by emails from readers who fear men are pushing it too far. Girls prefer lads with meat on them, the way men prefer curvier women."
I eat like a horse and its very fat foal combined but skinny men are now being dismissed as diet-obsessed "manorexics". Nonsense. But I don't have the strength to fight back.
The posterboys of scrawn will snap under such pressure. Doherty is probably working out in Whitechapel gym as we speak. Brand, meanwhile, is likely to become a Gladiator. Crouch will ditch football to represent England in Discus at the 2012 Olympics.
It leaves me struggling to raise my muscle-less arms in heartfelt prayer: oh come, middle-aged spread.
