A RIGHT old jumble of thoughts ...

... mixing up along chaotically with the fat free strawberry yoghurt I had for breakfast. So big I think the Amercians would call it a cart. Or a quart. Whatever, it was massive.

Here’s what’s rumbling (sadly, it’s never my belly).

I’ve put on weight. I knew I had. I can just sense these things, like a half baked psychic, heavy on the sick.

The grand total of my dietary shortcomings is 8.5lbs. That’s in two months, which is how long it’s been since I last went to Fat Club.

I know it’s just over half a stone because I went back to Han Reunited FC last Monday, new (fat and thin) faces filled with hope lining up for a go on the scales.

FC teach, the biggest loser of them all in the best possible way, called me up to say welcome back. I said I’d put on 8.5lbs as my hello. She said not to worry. I said it was OK for her to say that, she’s lost 76876 of the buggers.

But to make her point, she said she’d been on holidays and put on 9.5lbs. That’s more than me, in case you’re rubbish at maths.

Since I last saw you, I asked. No, she said. Since holidays. Had you been away for two months, then? Two weeks, she said again. “I put on 9.5lbs in two weeks. It’s the b****** chocolate and lager. So you haven’t done so bad. God, I’m depressed.”

Chocolate and lager, not my weaknesses but I know that if I drank (I don’t) or was a chocoholic (I like a sneaky bar of Dairy Milk with the best of them, but it’s not a hankering) I’d be on her team.

I felt better, for a moment. Thinking that even if the biggest loser can put on - and she knows all the rules of the game, down to even having a special container with only her milk allowance in the fridge - I’m not as bad/crap/useless/human as I felt.

So I had two packets of crisps - low fat, in case you were wondering - to celebrate being so, well, human.

Anyway, two months ago I said to myself, as I tend to do in moments of clarity, that I’d try really, really hard to lose some more weight before my book launch, this coming Saturday in Cardiff (Waterstone‘s noon-2pm; WH Smith, 3pm-4pm if you‘re interested in having a copy and a free donut). So that I could go shopping in that magical land called ANYWHERE and pick up something nice.

My book’s out officially on Monday, based on these columns of mine. To give it its full title it’s Diary of a Diet: A Little Book of Big.

And guess what? I’m 8.5lbs heavier that I was two months ago. I’m so good at being bad I feel like a national treasure, so much so my face should be on tea towels so the Japanese tourists can take me home as a memento of What Not to Stuff when they come to Wales and fancy over-indulging on the Welsh fudge.

So what to wear to the launch? Something dramatic, Significant (thin) Other suggested. I reminded him that you can’t get Juicy couture in sour sized. Or the Fat ‘n’ Fabulous range in Principles.

A trip to Cardiff, then, to visit the Big Five of My Big Life - Chesca, Elvi, Anne Harvey, Box 2 and Evans, the total sum of my plus sized shopping experience.

Evans - sale stuff along one side of the shop, an abundance of leisure wear and stuff fat clubbers could make silly in. So, as you can imagine with one down and four shops left to go, disappointment started to jab.

Chesca - fine if you like glitzy cropped tops or were going to a wedding and didn’t mind going see-through.

Elvi and Anne Harvey - I’m 35, not 205.

Box 2 - £250 later I have two tops. Sufficiently dramatic, S(t)O panders. Hmpf, I tell myself, I think I look like Jo Brand dressed by Trinnie and Susannah I slam at him. Yes but Jo Brand liked your book so much she wrote its foreword, he tries again. (But my feet are hurting, thwarting anything getting through to my ears.) So, I goad, knowing how much he hates shopping for himself, what are you going to wear?

S(t)O, whose look is more crumpled Englishman abroad when he gives a damn, said we’d go to M&S.

To find a suit which looked like it belonged to an Englishman abroad, I ventured?

If they have it, he scowled.

S(t)O has the very same problem as me - he can’t find clothes to fit him as he’s the opposite end of the normality scale.

I’m fat, big bellied, tall and big boobed; he’s thin, flat bellied, tall with shoulders which Duncan Goodhew would covet, ones which he hates and I love.

I watch as he gets frustrated with himself, rally at the designers, wonder why he can’t get quirky in the long legged and lovely and big shouldered bloke’s section of M&S.

It’s like watching myself after a lifetime of being forced fed testosterone on rye.

Just try something on, I gently coax. Then came the clincher.

His “You don’t know what it’s like to be thin.”

No, I thought to myself, if you let yourself go and had three tidy meals a day, you’d slide into the normal zone.

And if I let myself go (even further), I’d need a vat of Vaseline to get my big fat arse through the swinging doors of the Last Fat Chance Saloon.