Food, weight and greed

The gaps between my posts here are quite long - more than a year since my last. I suppose that's a sign that life does move on in new directions. But it doesn't mean that I have forgotten anything (I was once quite scared that I would) or that a day passes without me thinking about my life with Wendy. There is still quite a lot more I want to add to this blog.

I notice that the content has broadened, so that it seems to have become more than simply a catalogue of her wit and wisdom. More a memoir of her life, maybe. One aspect I've been thinking about is Wendy's relationship with food. All her friends and family will have memories to do with food or meals, because eating together was important for her. Meals at Christmas or family occasions (this photo was taken at Tim's 18th birthday meal), and social meals in each others' houses or restaurants were all important to Wendy.

But this post will focus mainly on her self-confessed greed and ongoing weight problems. Wendy struggled with her weight off and on throughout the years we were together. In good times she was size 12 or even 10. When she reached size 14 she knew there was a problem and she switched to her personal version of the weightwatcher plan. One year, she kept a photo of herself (taken on holiday, in France, as usual, this time standing above the Gorges d’Ardeche) on the fridge door as a constant and powerful motivational tool in her fight to lose weight. In my memory, and usually in reality (e.g. here on a Cornish beach, or here in Venice with Sam) Wendy was slender. But in that fridge-door photo (I can't find it right now, but when it turns up I'll add a link) she was decidedly stout. The difficulty was that she loved her food to the point of greed. Bread was a great weakness, but she especially liked “food you can get your hands in” – so lobster, crab and seafood like shrimps and mussels were also favourites. Once, in a restaurant by Collioure harbour flanked by Moorish hillforts at either end of the little bay, as she tucked into a starter of baby octopus in garlic, she said: “Pinch me so I know I haven’t died and gone to heaven!” Sometimes after a heavy meal she’d promise never to eat again. Certainly greed was in play in a restaurant in St Malo when she overate the night before our ferry home from a holiday in Brittany. When we went back to our hotel she lay on the bed and cried: “Don’t touch me, I’ll explode! I’m like a snake that’s swallowed a buffalo!”