Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  Being on TV is a bit like being stuck in a state of arrested childhood, but instead of your mum wiping your face with a spit-soaked tissue and brushing your hair flat there’s a small dedicated team of professional fussers to do it. It’s probably just Nature’s way of making sure that once you’ve started earning enough in showbiz to be able to buy as many cheeseburgers or hotdogs or Mars bars as you could possibly stuff down your throat in one glorious, gluttonous sitting, you don’t actually do that. Although I’m strangely proud to report that, on occasion, I have managed to avoid thinking about the consequences and eaten as much as I possibly can. Honestly, it’s a miracle that I can still get about unaided, seeing as I have at various times eaten several large packets of biscuits in one sitting, then gone to the cupboard searching for marzipan or chocolate or cheese or something to finish with.

  I remember eating at least two Mars bars after a full Indian meal, including starter, and due to the slightly odd shape of my lower torso looked pregnant for most of the afternoon. Despite the sarky comments I got from people I worked with, as a dessert it was great and I recommend you try it. They should offer it in the restaurants to save you nipping into the newsagent’s on the way home. Imagine two Mars bars, slightly heated up, with vanilla ice cream. Sweet baby Ganesh, I’m drooling on my keyboard.

  I’ve also been known to consume a whole loaf – family size, not one of those stupid baby loaves that no self-respecting adult would want to be seen buying – toasting it and buttering each slice lovingly, maybe adding a smear of Marmite, and eating it standing up in front of the toaster while waiting for the next two slices to be done. I’m sure this is why most kitchens have the toaster next to the kettle – so you can keep a fresh supply of tea coming while you gorge yourself.

  Bizarrely, this gorging tends to happen more often when I am on a diet than when I am cruising along not dwelling on calorific intake, or trying not to eat carbs after four p.m., or not mixing green food with red food unless there’s also white food on the plate – or indeed wondering how many calories I’ve just burnt by walking to and from the toilet rather than having someone carry me there. Which doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as you might think – or I might like. If you were rich and lazy enough to employ someone to carry you to the loo, would you, do you think, have the strength of character to stop there, or would you eventually insist that, for a small cash bonus, they wiped for you as well? Horrible thought, I know, and I apologize. But I bet it has crossed Bill Gates’s mind.

  As Spiderman says, with great power must also come great responsibility. Equally, with great gluttony must come the occasional diet if you still want to appear recognizably human. Over the years, I have tried any number of those slightly potty new diets that come along, get several pages in all the upmarket Sunday papers, then a year later are being touted as the next big thing by all the tabloids.

  I rather like that – it upsets the normal order, in that the thin edge of society on the top get used as the testing rabbits for once, and only when a diet’s been declared to work and not actually caused anyone to drop dead do the more sensible and suspicious and perhaps slightly less vain lower classes jump on board. I tried food combining for a while – I think the main rule was not to mix proteins with carbohydrates, so you could have weird things like avocado sandwiches. I’d have two in one sitting – delicious, but I never lost weight.

  Jane and I, in an attempt to achieve svelteness in rhythm with each other, have from time to time co-dieted. We have embarked on the journey of weight-loss together, hand in pudgy hand. This is not necessarily the smartest thing for a couple to do if they want to maintain a happy household. For a start there’s the competitive element. On the one hand, it’s quite nice to have someone to compare your progress with, someone with whom you can celebrate or commiserate the fact that, despite eating only bacon and cheese and drinking only water for the last twenty-four hours on the Atkins diet, you have managed to put on two pounds. However, co-dieting is only a good idea if I win, and lose considerably more weight than Jane. This is not quite as mean-spirited as it may sound – it’s not just down to the simple joy of winning, but also because I have never looked at my wife and wanted her to look any different than the way she does at that moment. I have perhaps too publicly gone on record as being a lover of the fuller-figured lady. You can’t beat a girl with plenty of junk in the trunk as far as I’m concerned, so the female predilection for dieting has always seemed a little bit of a shame to me.

  One diet that Jane discovered and we both tried went under the not-so-catchy title of ‘Neanderthin’. You might have guessed, although it’s a long shot, that Neanderthin claimed we could get a lean and healthy look by eating like Neanderthal man and woman would have done. In other words, essentially we were allowed only food that you can catch or that might fall from the trees. Old apples, small rabbits, that sort of thing. But after a couple of days on berries, nuts and some chicken which I persuaded myself had been an old one that had died of natural causes, we started in on the Nachos and dips again. I suspect if we had taken the Neanderthin theory fully on board then it may have worked, especially if we had gone shopping wearing only animal skins. Nothing helps keep you on a diet more than having your love-handles out on display. That’s why it’s always easier to diet in the summer – in winter you can just tuck your extra folds away and forget about them.

  Another weight-loss adventure that Jane and I embarked on together doesn’t show either of us in a particularly good light. It was after we had dabbled with the Atkins diet several times and both found that it works to begin with, in that you do lose weight. But you feel sort of greasy, and you begin to suspect that you probably smell quite meaty, a suspicion not helped by the fact that dogs seem to get more excited when you walk into the room, no doubt seeing you with some sort of advanced dog-vision as a fleshy, walking bag of sausages and bacon rind that might one day split open and spill on the floor, creating dog heaven on earth.

  You really do get to eat a lot of meat and cheese on the Atkins diet, and consequently the things you miss most are all the things you’re not supposed to have: bread, crisps and sweeties. You can only eat so many chunks of ham wrapped in cheese with cream on top and a teeny-weeny bit of salad on the side, washed down with creamy coffee, before you start to feel both nauseous and bored. But Jane found a brilliant-sounding diet online that seemed to offer the benefits of the Atkins diet with a delightful get-out-of-jail clause. You had to stick to very strict Atkins rules all day, but for one hour, after dinner, you could eat what you liked. Anything. We read it at least three or four times to be certain. Any bloody thing you liked for a whole hour, after a day of rather lovely cheese and meat indulgence. Now, with the benefit of hindsight – always a wonderful thing after the event – I realize that they probably meant you can eat anything within reason as a little reward for being so good the rest of the day. Maybe half a KitKat, or a couple of digestives. Not, as Jane and I chose to interpret it, that you can eat as much as humanly possible in those golden sixty minutes, especially all those foods and treats that are clearly going to make you swell up like Augustus Gloop. A comparison that will become all the more relevant when I tell you what happened at the end of our short experiment with this remarkable eating plan.

  We were on holiday when we tried it out, and all day we’d be kind of good, only eating loads of cheese and double cream and mountains of meat and the occasional tiny bit of salad or a green bean, and drinking only water or diet drinks or black coffee or coffee with that double cream in it again. Then after our evening meal, when the golden hour of eating anything started, we would swoop back to the buffet and devour any and everything left. Like sugar-crazed, wobbly pink locusts, we’d comb the table for bread-based treats. One evening I went back for – and I’m not exaggerating – three extra portions of tiramisu. I say portions, but each helping that I ladled out to myself would have satisfied four normal people. That’s like polishing off your meal with twelve desserts. Is it
shameful to say that I’m oddly proud of that accomplishment? Further to this gut-busting adventure in gluttony, we had taken the trouble, before dinner, to stock up on a tooth-rotting selection of old-school confectionery from the holiday village shop. Sherbet dib-dabs, flavoured liquorice, Twizzles, sugar mice, those foam shrimps that I suspect have a shelf life of decades, and my personal fave, the foam banana. Christ, I love those little spongy fellas. In fact, if I ever wind up on Death Row, I promise you that, no matter what the main course is, my last dessert on the planet will include foam bananas. Having stocked up on just about every calorie-laden, totally-bad-for-you sweet we could find, and with the clock ticking on this wonderful one-hour, all-you-can-eat window, we relocated to the square and ate and ate until we could eat no more. I’ll be honest with you, that diet was quite hard work, and only the amateur scientist in me made me carry on, even when after day three I felt I could have survived for the rest of the holiday on only water.

  Did we lose weight? What do you think? But we kidded ourselves it might be working, and as there were no scales in the somewhat basic chalet-style rooms in the resort, the traditional method of checking your progress was impossible. There was no point asking my wife because she is a well-meaning liar when it comes to this sort of thing. However, by the end of the week I strongly suspected that something was up. The room Jane and I had was next door to the room that our children were in, and to get from one to the other either you had to go into the hallway and knock on the door or, as we discovered early on, you could squeeze through the gap in the partition on the balcony. It was hot, so normally the doors on to the balcony were open, and so we nipped in and out of each other’s rooms via this shortcut.

  The first few days, no problem. But after about three evenings of golden-hour gorging, when the children called me to come and look at something, or fix something, or stop someone arguing about something, I could barely squeeze through the previously quite roomy gap on the balcony.

  The perhaps predictable ending to this sorry tale is that on the final morning I actually got wedged there. Stuck, wearing only white underpants, for all who passed by below to see. A fat man, possibly a porky, under-dressed burglar, who knew? Wedged in between holiday rooms while the hot sun beat down on his lobster-coloured paunch. With Jane pulling my sweaty thigh and the children pushing my shoulders we finally managed to get me back on to one side, horribly grazed from the light pebble-dashing on the partition and robbed of any dignity I might once have been able to count on in front of the kids. The fact that they had first searched for the camera and taken some pictures of me in my trapped state only added marginally to the embarrassment. And upon arriving home, I was further delighted to discover I’d put on just under ten pounds while on my ‘diet’.

  Holidays aren’t the best time to lose weight, obviously. Especially not Christmas holidays, and especially not Christmas holidays on a cruise ship. Have you ever been on a cruise? I’ve done it now and hope I never need to again. There’s nothing to do but eat. Eat and watch films you’ve already seen, or look at the sea, which doesn’t change much, or talk to people with whom you have nothing in common apart from the fact you are stuck on a bloody giant boat together, bored out of your minds.

  Jane and I went on a Disney cruise with the kids once, mainly because they had nagged us into it, but also because we’re huge fans of the whole Disney experience for families, and figured if anyone could get the cruise formula right it would be them. Our youngest, Honey, was about three at the time, which would make Harvey about six and our eldest, Betty, about nine. The kids’ clubs were of course tailored for different age groups, so we had three different places to deposit them. And of course, like all cruise ships, the Disney boats are huge . You’d no sooner dropped one child off at the first club down the far end of this huge boat, walked back with number two to drop him off at his club and then carried on with the youngest to put her in the crèche, than you had to walk all the fucking way back and get number one out of the first club because the hour would be up, and then get number two from the second club, and then come and retrieve the little one, who inevitably needed to have her nappy changed. It was about as un-relaxing a holiday as it is possible to have.

  Apart from dropping children off at and picking them up from activities, the only other pursuits on board appeared to be ping-pong and eating. So we played a little table tennis, but that keeps you occupied for no more than an hour, tops. The rest of the time I ate. Huge buffets are laid out at meal times, and for the rest of the day you can buzz the kitchen from your room and have them send cookies and ice cream down. I enjoyed this service more than most, and by the third day I was on first-name terms with the waiter. By day four he knew exactly how huge my appetite for cookies was, and by the end of the week he would just bring a couple of packets with him every time he knew he would be passing.

  Pretty soon it looked like we might be heading for a repeat scenario from the previous holiday, but this time I would be wedged in the cabin door rather than just a partition. So Jane suggested that rather than only eat, I might enjoy one of the many spa treatments on offer. This was a radical suggestion, because I’m not one for treatments. For example, I don’t favour massage as an experience. I don’t like people poking or prodding me – I really don’t see the appeal of having strangers touch and rub you. It feels a little like you’re being prepared for the oven, and they always rub too hard or not hard enough and I get embarrassed having to tell them what to do, and frankly I’d rather just have a nap.

  So I didn’t want a massage. The only thing that sounded vaguely tempting was something called a body wrap, which was meant to make you feel rejuvenated, refreshed and – oh happy coincidence! – lose about two inches around your waist. So I plumped for that, and although part of me suspected it may well be embarrassing, I consoled myself with the certain fact that seeing as we were sailing towards a small Caribbean island at the time, there was no way I was going to be recognized and made to feel all self-conscious about stripping off.

  I reported to the small changing room at the set time and got naked, before climbing into the small white paper pants that had been thoughtfully provided. They ripped as I pulled them on, so I had to hold them in place with one hand while I waited. It was also a little nippy in there, and the seat was shiny plastic, which initially was too cold, then became hot and sticky and caused my arse to sweat an alarming amount. If there is a scenario in which an overweight male in his early forties can be made to feel less happy about his situation and appearance, I can’t think of one. But when the young lady who was to give me the wrap came in and turned out to be a girl from Manchester whose mum was apparently a huge fan of mine, I accepted that no matter how bad things are, they can usually still get worse.

  The young Mancunian sized me up, then began wrapping me in this sort of hot seaweedy bandage before asking me to lie down for half an hour. The weather wasn’t great that day and the sea was quite choppy, so we were lurching about a bit, and I recall thinking that this was just about the most unpleasant experience you could ever have on a boat.

  Thirty minutes later I was unwrapped, allowed to stand up in my torn paper pants, now looking not just blobby but bright red and with a hint of a stripe. I could tell from the disappointed look in the girl’s eyes that not only had the miracle seaweed wrap failed to work its magic, but also that her mum was going to be told every awful detail. Thankfully the fridge in my cabin had been restocked in my absence, and I found the seaweed had stimulated my appetite enough to go for a new personal best of three packs of cookies and four scoops of ice cream.

  Use it or lose it. The art of sexing

  At this point I’d like to advise my children, my parents and anyone else who doesn’t want to delve too deeply into my hugely enjoyable, if at times fruitless adventures in the realm of Venus to skip ahead. For those with the stomach and enough morbid curiosity to press on, I can promise that you will, by this chapter’s end, know more than you’d probably care to ab
out sex and me. That’s not to say I don’t intend to cover a lot of other topics. But even though what follows is a bagatelle of pubescent and pre-pubescent memories, sex inevitably rises to the top.

  Perhaps it’s because I have always been inordinately fond of sex. Some may say a little too fond, because it is a subject that crops up with remarkable regularity in my conversations both when I’m working – which more often than not means talking for a living – and when I’m just living and happen to be talking, in my regular day-to-day encounters with people. That’s not to say that if I open the door and the postman’s there I start the conversation with a cheery ‘Did you get any last night?’ No, that would probably be the second or third thing I’d say – normally I build up to it, I give them a little conversational foreplay first. But it is a subject which fascinates me. I’ll be honest with you – sex is probably my favourite physical activity.

  In recent years I’ve developed a love of tennis and I’m also quite fond of skiing, although I’ve only been twice and I didn’t show any particular aptitude for it. Skiing loses out to sex because you occasionally get a bit cold and frostbitten, and unless you’re interested in going al fresco that’s not going to happen with sex. And although I love tennis dearly, and like to think I’ve grown reasonably competent at it, on occasion I do have a tendency to knock the ball into the net when serving, which is frustrating. I can say with all honesty that I’ve never endured the sexual equivalent of a double fault. Tennis and skiing both lose out, too, because neither of those fun, calorie-burning pursuits guarantees that you’ll see at least part of a lady naked.