Sunday 1 April

AFTER THE HUGE fiasco that was the whole of yesterday, today was a fairly quiet day, without any major traumas. You know how Sundays are always a bit rubbish, because the end of the weekend is nigh, and school looms up like a massive monstrous looming thing? Actually, that’s usually a bit of an exaggeration, because normally the worst things that will happen to you on Monday are:

1. Several hours of intense boredom at the hands of geography, maths and French teachers;

2. Getting a break-time dead leg from a prefect;

3. Being forced to eat some kind of pinky-green meat paste stuff with a side order of vegetables that look like they’ve already been eaten and regurgitated at least once before, all served to you by a dinner lady with hatred in her eyes and some sort of brown matter under her fingernails that you hope against hope might just be congealed gravy, but which some deep part of your soul knows is the result of a fingers-bursting-through-the-toilet-paper situation;

4. Having to put up with a snide remark from your enemy, the Floppy-Haired Kid, and possibly also a punch in the kidney from him when you’re not looking.

Well, tomorrow I have none of those things to look forward to. Tomorrow it’s going to be actual starvation combined with intense physical activity, plus having to sleep in a strange bed in a dormitory full of weird fat kids.

So today I hung out with my friend Jim, who doesn’t go to our school. We played our spit-dribbling game, which involves dribbling spit (as you’d probably guessed) from the iron bridge over the canal. The point is to try to get a continuous strand of saliva to go all the way from your mouth to the water without breaking, and it’s basically impossible if you haven’t got a cold.

Unfortunately a duck chose that moment to swim under the bridge, and got some spit on its back. We aren’t the kind of kids who like spitting on ducks, so we decided to stop the game.

Then I told Jim about my food fiasco of the day before, which made him laugh so hard I thought he was going to fall in the canal.

I thought about being annoyed, but then I realized that it was actually quite funny, and I suddenly felt a bit better, laughter being the great healer and all that.

And then Jim slightly ruined things by saying, ‘You do, don’t you?’

And I, like an idiot, said, ‘I do what, don’t I?’

‘Fancy her!’

I didn’t even dignify the question with an answer, but stomped off home.

There was supposed to be a nice last meal with my family before I left for Camp Fatso, not that the word ‘nice’ is normally associated with the Milligans.

It didn’t happen, of course.

Before it even got going, my mum and dad had a big row about the whole sending-me-away thing. My dad said he didn’t approve of ‘fascist health prison camps’, and my mum said that it was his fault that I was overweight, although it really isn’t. It’s my fault. And the fault of donuts for being so delicious.

Because they were arguing, the low-fat vegetable lasagne got so burned it looked like a blackened cowpat, and we had to have cottage cheese on crackers instead.

I kind of expected Ruby and Ella to be nasty to me in their own different ways, with Ruby talking to me in her evil baby voice, going, ‘Ooooh, the poor fat Dodo has to go to a nasty prison for fatties, and he won’t get any of his naughty donuts, will he, poor ickle-wickle baby,’ etc., etc., and Ella giving me one of her scary silent stares, while sticking needles into a fat voodoo doll under the table and maybe draining my blood to be used in some ceremony involving toads.

In fact, they were OK. I don’t mean they were actually pleasant or anything, but they didn’t attack me physically or verbally. Perhaps they are human after all, and not just androids sent back through time to destroy my life.

Actually, Ruby and Ella acting all decent made me even more depressed than a full-frontal assault would have done. It somehow hammered home the grimness of what I faced.

Luckily, before I went upstairs, Ruby said, ‘Listen, Dermot, if you take any of my stuff to fat camp, I’m going to scrape the skin off my verruca into your bed so when you get home you get covered in verrucas all over your body.’

I thought about saying that there was nothing that she owned that I wouldn’t happily have burned in a giant bonfire, even if the resulting pink cloud would block out the sun and bring on a new ice age causing the destruction of civilization as we know it. But I didn’t have the fight in me.

‘Sure,’ I said, and shrugged.

DONUT COUNT:

Last day, so had to fortify myself for what was to come.