I was out shopping for new clothes for the holiday, back in the Hellish post Christmas Westfield shopping centre. All my clothes are old or too small for the corpulent me who has emerged from the chrysalis of the thinner me in the last couple of months - I was actually disgusted with my greedy self when I was trying to find a pair of jeans that I could get into this evening back at home. The not giving a fuck Richard Herring is a different person to the concerned about his health Richard Herring and I (concerned about his health Richard Herring, as I write) hate him for his stupidity. How could I have let this slide away from me so rapidly? Because I am a twat that's why. Or rather he is. The other one.
The shops were so crowded that I actually had to walk out of a couple. Gap looked like a bomb had hit it, with piles of trousers strewn all over the place and a queue that winded back towards the door. Which was lucky as had I been able to find anything or get to the tills I would have just bought another pair of trousers that I couldn't comfortably fit into to. Even after three days of not drinking and keeping count of calories I am still fat. Three days! How can I not be thin?
One of the department stores was a little less crowded, though changing rooms were full, so I just tried on a couple of shirts in the store itself (I had my T-shirt on underneath - no need to scare the other shoppers into thinking a whale had beached itself up in the House of Fraser). I found a shirt that seemed to fit my expansive frame well enough and was asking my girlfriend what she thought of it, when a woman approached.
"Excuse me," she said to me, "No offence, but you're about the same size as my husband...." I wouldn't have been offended, because of course I don't know what her husband looks like. She might be married to David Beckham for all I knew (though if so then I was going to have to give her some bad news about her bigamous spouse - how she had never realised I don't know). But the way she said it, so apologetically, made it clear that her husband was quite fat and probably physically repellent.
"No offence" generally means, "Please excuse me while I offend you", of course, but had she left it out then I might have been able to live under the misapprehension that I wasn't some kind of circus show freak.
"Can I just ask?" she continued, "What shirt size are you wearing there because it should be about the same as it is for him?"
These particular shirts went by neck size, which can vary a lot I imagine regardless of the size of a man's chest and stomach, but she wasn't concerned when I voiced this worry as her obese and deformed husband never does his top button up anyway.
But I enjoyed helping out the woman who had so politely and unnecessarily dissed me with her "no offence".
I actually quite liked the shirt she was looking at and bought one for myself, partly in the hope that one day when I was wearing it around Shepherd's Bush, I would see a grotesque figure approaching me in the exact same shirt, for a second thinking I had caught sight of myself in a reflective surface, before discovering I was about to meet my walrus shaped body twin.
As I packed this evening I started checking up some of the flight info for the holiday. For some reason I had assumed the flight to Mauritius might take five hours, or maybe eight (I don't know where I was getting these figures from, but I suppose I was thinking it's near Africa which is near Europe, so many two to four times the flight time to Italy). I think I had also misread the flight times and thought we were leaving at around 7 and arriving at 12ish and was trying to work out how the time difference affected things. Of course we are actually arriving around midday on Thursday and I found out the flight takes 12 to 14 hours. I hope if anyone is planning to blow up the plane with their pants they will do it at the start of the journey rather than at the end. It would be awful to have to suffer a flight that long and then be blown to pieces.
Anyway I will wish you happy new year for now. I have a feeling that I will continue with the blogs if internet access is readily available, but I haven't quite decided yet. I can't imagine that I will be particularly up for celebrating at midnight after this long (and I suspect sleepless) flight, but let's hope I can stay awake to give at least a cursory toast to the end of the decade.
Hope you have a good one.
