Sweet sorrow

A burger. He's always got a burger in his hand, or the olive from a drink, or the wrapper from a burger and a drink. Did you notice? Brad Pitt, I mean, playing the part of Rusty in Ocean's Eleven*; he's always eating, or drinking (or both) whenever he's on screen. Jake and Elwood order up fried chickens and white bread when they call at Aretha Franklin's fabulous Soul Food Cafe in the Blues Brothers. Kojak spent the entire1970s sucking on a lollipop; one can only hope that Telly Savalas liked them too.

Well that's been Roo and I for the last three weeks. Not surrounded by glamorous American actors (although Brad, if you're reading, you're always welcome to drop by) but continually eating. Curries, cakes, chocolate, crackers, cheeses, chips, chicken kebabs, cereals, yogurts, grapes, spaghetti Bolognese, cauliflower cheese, bread, butter, boiled eggs mixed with mayonnaise, tortellini, pasta bakes, blood oranges, bananas, mini-pizzas, fish pie, steak pie, braising steak, baked jam roll, ice cream, custard, roast beef, turkey, cheesecake, apple crumble, naan bread, rice, fruity suet pudding...

Well, you get the picture. There's something about being in each other's company that seems to compel us to consume our body weight in food on a daily basis. Almost like one of those demented eating competitions where entrants have to devour sixteen pounds of jellied eels in thirty seconds or something for no reason whatsoever except the prize of a cheap t-shirt and a bottle of indigestion tablets. Which is delightful (eels aside) and fine to a point - that point being when one's clothes start to feel a little tight in places that they aren't meant to or didn't only a few days before.

And so it was today that, in a lull-before-the-cake-free-storm fashion, I polished off the last of the Easter chocolate and re-stocked my fridge with things of a duller but more virtuous nature. Admittedly, after our feast-a-thon of the last few weeks it wasn't really a challenge to find slightly less decadent foodstuffs. No, my challenge now after polishing my sweet tooth to a high glossy burnish is to try and convince it that yogurt and fruit really is as tantalising as cake and custard.

Hmmm... One can but try.

And I am going out for lunch on Tuesday.

And Wednesday.

And dinner on Friday evening...

*Rusty was probably doing the same in Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen but I couldn't bear to sit through either more than once. Unlike the first installment which I've enjoyed many times.