Size and Exercise

I've got a speak-your-weight machine. You step on it and an authoritarian, upper-class male voice shouts, ‘Please step off,’ then barks out your weight. Just lately it has been barking out horrific statistics, such as, ‘Your weight is eleven stone four pounds.’

I haven't given the weight shouter a name. I don't approve of naming inanimate objects. I do not find it charming when people give me a lift in a car called Lydia, or refer to their washing machine as Mavis. I find it twee and irritating. In my experience ‘Lydia' and ‘Mavis' are always breaking down. I can imagine the foul language when the service engineers hear on the telephone that Lydia is slow to start, or that Mavis has stopped spinning.

I don't entirely trust the speak-your-weight machine. I think it is lying to me. How can I be eleven stone four pounds in the morning and eleven stone eight pounds before I go to bed? And anyway, how can be eleven stone, never mind the pounds? I've been ten stone something for years.

All my clothes have been bought for a ten-stone-something woman. A size 12 was guaranteed to fit. Yet only the other day I was trying on a size 12 shirtwaister and couldn't get my arm in the sleeve. It was obviously a manufacturing fault, I thought. Some machinist somewhere in Taiwan, daydreaming as she stitched up the armhole.

I got dressed again, left the cubicle and snatched another size 12 shirtwaister from the rack. The same thing happened. I dressed again, went out to the shop floor and rifled through the rack for a size 14. Inside the cubicle I struggled to get it on. It strained across my back, the buttonholes gaped and it clung to my thighs like clingfilm to a microwaved chicken.

I dressed and left the cubicle again. A security guard watched me as I searched for a size 16. Security guards follow me around all the time. I'm used to it now. There's something about me and my behaviour that arouses their suspicions. My partial sight doesn't help. It makes me look slightly gormless and I blunder about a bit, as though slightly drunk.

There was no size 16 shirtwaister. I was secretly relieved, and I vowed on the journey home to stop eating so many fish-paste sandwiches. Yes, I know that other dieting women vow to give up chocolate éclairs, lager and other delights, but I've become addicted to fish paste: crab, salmon and shrimp, sardine and tomato. I guzzle them all. My husband buys them for me in trays of twelve at the garage that now serves as our corner shop. He buys so many jars that the girl behind the counter now gives him a discount.

‘Is your wife pregnant?’ she asked one day. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘she's stopped smoking.’ The girl understood – she's a smoker herself and saw the connection between nicotine and fish paste. A non-smoker would probably have thought the two substances had only a tenuous link. So, consumption of fish-paste sandwiches had caused me to balloon in weight. The only clothes I can get into are the baggy black trousers and loose tunic tops meant to disguise thick waists and fat bums, but which in fact shout: ‘Look at me, everybody, see how fat I am underneath these baggy clothes!’

I will join a gym, I say to my husband. I will get up at six every morning and, after a healthy breakfast of nuts, grain and fruit, I will walk to the gym, exercise for an hour and walk back. He looks at me with pity in his eyes, and doesn't even bother to respond. Though later, when I modify my proposed exercise regime and ask if he'll give me a lift to the gym, he smiles and says that he will.

It is true that, to date, I have yet to visit the gym, or even telephone to request membership details, but I will one day. When I am thinner and fitter, and have more energy and my breath doesn't stink of fish paste.

Since I stopped smoking cigarettes, I have been lighting other things such as candles and fires. This is pathetic compensatory behaviour, I know, but I like the merry crackle of the fire in the grate and candlelight is enormously flattering to a person who has just been told by a bossy speak-your-weight machine that she is eleven stone and four pounds.