catch the school coach from Stanmore station, where there was a kiosk. Each day on my way to school and on my way home, I’d stop there and buy something sugary.
At school there was a tuck shop. While the other kids spent their lunch break playing football, I would queue up, wolf down a jam doughnut or a Marathon (as they were back then) and then head to the back of the queue and start all over again.
My parents’ divorce, my father’s imprisonment, my discomfort at being bald, my increasing unease at my growing attraction for other boys, my anxiety at my persistently low grades and the ever-increasing workload – I struggled to talk about any of this. Instead I just ate and ate and ate.
Back home after school, I would dissolve some chicken stock cubes in boiling water and add huge amounts of pasta, devouring the lot during Neighbours. A couple of hours later I’d be raiding the freezer and whacking some Birds Eye Steakhouse Grills and Alphabites in the oven.
Things came to an inevitable head. While I was out one day, my suspicious brother pulled my bed away from the wall to reveal hundreds of discarded chocolate-bar wrappers beneath.
It was decided that something really had to be done about it and so I enrolled in a weekly Weight Watchers class. My mum wasn’t overweight but joined me in an act of solidarity. I was put on a strict diet and was thrilled to lose nearly half a stone in the first couple of weeks.
Each Wednesday evening we’d line up for the weigh-in – ‘we’ being about twenty-five women, one man and Matthew, the fat little boy with no hair.
The course leader was a bright, chirpy lady called Barbara, who would begin each meeting by asking if we had any ‘noooooo members’ – sound familiar? The longer you spent in the programme, and (hopefully) the greater the weight loss, the more the eating plan opened out to include previously forbidden foods. At the beginning I came to regard a slice of brown bread or a digestive biscuit as the height of naughtiness. Eventually I was permitted the occasional Hula Hoop or maybe even a Birds Eye Supermousse.
Over the next few months I stuck diligently to the diet and went from being a fatty bum-bum to – well, not quite stick-thin but certainly noticeably thinner. Throughout my teens I managed to stay just about the right side of chubby, but then eventually lardiness descended again.
And I’ve been there ever since. I go through phases where I get myself together, lose a couple of stone, but I always seem to return to my solace, my pleasure, my pain – food.
I think it would be easier for me if I wasn’t such a fusspot when it came to food. I’m a bit like one of those freaky eaters you used to see on BBC Three. I’m not quite as extreme, but there are foods that most people love that I don’t enjoy at all. For instance, fish.
Why don’t I like fish?
Because it smells of fish. Also because people sometimes serve it with the face still on. Eeeeeuwwww.
Actually I quite liked fish as a nipper, but I had a traumatic experience with a fish finger when I was about fourteen and I’ve never got over it. I bit into one and it didn’t taste right. I looked inside and there was this big hard green cube of something very icky-looking, about an inch long and an inch wide, and I haven’t been able to touch one since.
There were two occasions in the last few years when I ate very high-quality fish, and I still didn’t take to it. One was when I was on a date with a guy I really liked, and he ordered this very tender black cod with miso. It was the restaurant’s signature dish. So I tried a bit, to make myself look all cultured and open-minded, but it wasn’t for me.
The other time I had some was when I was on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen, and the chef cooked up some curried haddock. I couldn’t very well say no because I was on live TV, so I had a little. What I would say is, if you like curried haddock then you would probably have really really liked this one, because it was the most curryish haddocky thing I’ve ever tasted. Fortunately they then cut to an insert which meant I had a chance to swan around the studio, telling everyone how wonderful it was and insisting that all the crew try some. Not only did I manage to return with an empty plate, but I also looked generous – even selfless – in the process.
I don’t mind egg as an ingredient, but I would never eat just an egg. I realise that makes me sound ridiculous, but then I used to dress up as a baby on TV so I’m already fairly ridiculous anyway.
Condiments are in general a bit too much for me. Mayonnaise is an offender. Brown sauce, HP Sauce – all that stuff. It’s got too much flavour. The worst is vinegar. I can’t get past the smell of it. It makes me sad.
Not a fan of quiche. Ditto pâté.
Chocolate liqueurs are the ultimate act of betrayal. Ask any seven-year-old who picks one out of the box, expecting something lovely and caramelly, and ends up with their throat on fire.
Game is too red and small.
Truffle makes me gag. It’s overly savoury. And pungent.
But the worst offender – and this might shock you, because for many it’s their most favourite food in the world – is cheese.
I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.
Here’s the thing . . .
We were born with taste buds and the power of scent to save us from danger.
Hence . . .
‘Oh, what’s that smell? It’s a burning curtain’ = run from house fire.
‘Oh, I just bit into some chicken and blood gushed out’ = decline undercooked poultry.
But then – even though we consider ourselves no longer primitive beings – unfathomably . . .
‘Oh, lovely, some rancid mouldy yellow hardened fatty congealed liquid from the belly of a cow that smells of week-old socks and tastes of death’ = eat lots of it, as if nice.
Seriously, cheese is the most disgusting thing on earth, bar none. I hate cheese: the taste, the smell, the texture. And don’t try none of that ‘Oh, but this is goat’s cheese’ nonsense on me, either. It’s cheese, okay? It’s CHEESE.
When I sit opposite you in an Italian restaurant and the man comes round with the block of parmesan and the grater, a part of me dies inside.
In fact, cheese upsets me even more than when you read in the Daily Mail about a spinster getting bludgeoned to death by a crack-addled teenager and it turns out she only had 12p in her purse. That’s how bad it is.
I think I can figure out how cheese was invented. It would have been back in the days when almost everyone was poor and starving and no one dared waste anything. Every part of every animal had to be utilised. Even the bull’s testicles were probably used for snooker.
And I can accept that somebody might have come down one morning and it was a hot day and the milk had turned. And they would have thought ‘Right, I’ll chuck that out, then’, but then maybe they got distracted by, I dunno, a man playing a lute or a woman with bubonic plague walking past or something.
And so the next day, when they suddenly remembered about the milk, they would have looked at it and seen that it had now solidified. And they would have had a sniff and gone ‘Pooh, well, that stinks to high heaven. I’m definitely getting rid of that.’
