SUMMER…

... don’t you just hate it? Not only do you have to contend with restaurants trying to foist seasonal fruits, fresh avocado and petit salad of Japanese Shiso cress on you when what you really want is a big lump of sirloin steak and buttered mash, you’ve got to endure everyone jabbering on about their holidays.
And if you’re a girl, this is always littered with talk about the B word. No, not beef, baklava or bacon baps – but bikinis.
For someone like me, a size 24 and growing, the whole notion of cutting back on carbs and counting calories all year round in order to squeeze my bits and bobs into what basically amounts to underwear as your outerwear while your flesh is womballing free for a fortnight, makes this the season of unpalatable conversation.
If you’re happy and you know it but you really don’t want to show it off in a bikini, summer can be a wash out for the foodie who’s gone too far in the game of indulgence to bare all in a blaze of washboard bellied glory.
I learned a long time ago that I didn’t have the kind of shape – round is a shape, right? – that was made for indulging in fun in the sun (unless that included an all-you-can-eat deal in a five star hotel in the fabled land of Chunky, a place where you didn’t have to undress for dinner).
While normal-sized friends of mine with an appetite for looking good rather than feeling sated and elated would start exercising portion control at least six months before a holiday, nothing would change for me.
Sure, I’d spend loads of time thinking about what it would be like to finally learn to say no to seconds and thirds and trim down to a reasonable size, one which could fit into a bikini and not run the risk of Greenpeace dragging me back into the water if I went onto the beach. But rational thought sometimes doesn’t taste that nice.
Of course I could have gone on girlie trips abroad, one where photographic evidence shows my pals looking divine sipping Margaritas by the pool (Tenerife) while sucking in their tummies (Magaluf) and making a meal (hello?!) out of sucking bits of fruit (Santa Ponsa). But frankly, I don’t have that much puff or patience with peeling.
Realising that having what food I wanted was far more important to me than trying to look like a Baywatch reject, I struck a novel deal with myself from a very early age.
No longer would I spend months of my dieting life struggling to feel more than I am (but not in the hip/thigh ratio, thank you very much) to try to fit into a bather.
I’d go for pure and unadulterated, guilt-free indulgence instead, to a place where you could stuff yourself silly while fully clothed, in mittens, a balaclava and elasticated trousers if necessary.
And in terms of food – look away now if you’re of a delicate nature or were born in the Windy City – I found it in America, where you can get all-you-can-eat buffets on tap as well as on the cheap, and your nails done while you’re waiting for the beef for your burger to stop mooing.
If we are what we eat, then I’m a steak and curly fries girl, piled high in a bid to satisfy the devilishly Desperate Dan side of Han; I’m melted cheese with burny bits skulking on the edges, pleading with me to pick at them. I’m hot pretzels on a cold day, strawberry cheesecake at any time, all-day breakfasts at midnight and always a stack of pancakes short of full.
I’m not a bikini babe – well, you can’t be, can you, if you’re someone whose idea of a fashionable two-piece is fried eggs followed by chips?
I am what you’d call a comfort eater, someone whose pleasure comes not from exquisite cuisine but in real soul food, only with less beans and gumbo, especially when feeding the Judith Chalmers wanderlust in me.
I’ll never forget my first visit to a diner in the US – they had Heinz tomato sauce on the table.
I don’t mean some sachet of a poor imitation of it which is what I’d always found in restaurants in other countries. But the proper, full-fat, sweet, sticky, gorgeous bloody stuff, the juice which transcends cultural difference and squirts a liberal dollop of Home over posh nosh, wherever you are in the world.
In America, the portions are huge, the taste incredible, the dessert menus straight from the fantasy scene of the cinema banquet in my mind.
And you never have to wipe sand from in between your toes to get at it or walk around in your smalls.
My options on my last trip to neon-coated paradise included dough well done with cow to cover (that’s buttered toast to carb virgins), a bowl of birdseed (cereal), a glass of drag one through Georgia to go (cola with chocolate syrup) with Noah’s boy on bread (ham sandwich) served up with a 100 watt smile by the soup jockey (waitress).
I just love the way size really, really matters, as mountains of finger lickin’ badness which taste so good are dished up in that blasé, almost celebratory way kids (or was it just me?) imagine table-buckling party food in Heaven would look.
I couldn’t live in America – I’d be dead by now, crushed under the weight of a dream sequence of me cavorting with a load of Zeppelins in a fog while trying to make room for a certain Eve with a mouldy lid (That’s sausage and mash, followed by apple pie with a slice of cheese on top if you’re interested).
Some would say, of course, that there’s no need to go to America to eat like an American.
Yankee cuisine can be replicated in any British kitchen by mixing peanut butter with mashed up bananas, ladling it on toast and deep-frying it in lard until golden brown.
Mmm, just like Elvis used to make. And it didn’t do him any harm.
Well, did it?