Desperate Husbands

by Richard Glover

  ‘I think you do need a little assistance,’ the young man says brightly, sweeping Elton’s spare pair to one side. His eyes sparkle with good health, as he jots down a series of numbers on his pad—no doubt optometrists’ code for ‘silly old goat, blind as a bat: get out the Coke-bottle bottoms and do it quick.’

  A week later the new glasses arrive and I pick them up on the way home. Jocasta can’t believe her luck.

  ‘Your eyes look huge in them. It’s like living with Marty Feldman. Or some sort of hyperthyroid bug.’ With that, she rushes towards me. ‘Quick, let me have a go,’ she says, slipping them on and squealing with delight. ‘The prescription must be three, four times as strong as mine. You’re so much blinder than me!’

  The glasses certainly give me a new angle on the world. Suddenly everything close up is magnified. I stare down at the keyboard as I type and my hands look alarmingly large, like they’ve suddenly grown by twenty-five per cent. I glance over to the phone on my desk and reel back startled. The thing is twice its normal size, as if it’s bulked up on steroids. I feel like Gulliver in the land of giants. I take the glasses off and let them dangle on a string around my neck. I look like a baffled librarian.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Jocasta. ‘It’s true, your pair is stronger than mine but that won’t last for ever. I’m feeling the need to go back to that optometrist quite soon, just to have a good look at his charts. That guy, he’s a sight for sore eyes.’

  I sit down at my keyboard and adjust my spectacles. It’s good to have a strong pair when a letter of complaint gets this lengthy.

  Fat chance

  Australia, we’re told, is in the grip of an Obesity Epidemic. The problem is so bad the government has even hosted an Obesity Summit, which I think is the wrong name. It makes me think of a group of red-faced fat men sitting atop Kosciusko, panting from the effort of getting there. They’d be better with the Obesity Depression, which might better sum up the nature of the problem.

  Mind you, I’ve been doing my bit to help. A few months ago, I signed up at a gym, paid $400, and now never turn up. Already my wallet is a lot lighter. The downside is they send me perky letters, straight off the word processor, with lots of exclamation marks!! ‘Hi Richard!! It’s a beautiful day down here at the gym!!! Where are you!!!! We are missing you!!!!!’

  This is so stomach-turning I usually bring up my breakfast. Already I am four kilos lighter. The program is worth every cent.

  I have some friends in the posher suburbs who’ve gone for the opposite approach. They go to a bloke who shouts at them. Apparently he’s a former Hungarian secret policeman. If you break your diet you get the full treatment of terror and torture. I love the idea of rich people paying to be abused. You can imagine how the one-upmanship will develop: ‘Our personal trainer was a paid thug at Israel’s Mossad headquarters.’

  ‘Darling, that’s nothing, our chappie ran the interrogations at South Africa’s notorious Modderbee prison. When he says to me “Run, kaffir, run,” the weight just pours off me. He’s such a bastard, it’s divine.’

  Lucy will have a paid assassin from Russia; Jilly an ageing Chilean secret policeman; while Ross will be seeing a standover merchant from Chinatown: ‘Ross, you either lose the five kilos by Saturday or there won’t be an unbroken lobster tank in your whole house.’

  I think our local gym is better. It’s mixed: men and women; fat and thin. Every time a young woman walks in, all the middle-aged men on exercise bikes pick up speed. It’s wonderful to watch. As soon as she’s gone, they slow down again, fighting for breath. I wonder if this could be a new source of green energy: whole squads of middle-aged men on bikes wired up to the national grid with an aerobics class starting somewhere nearby. There may be some fatalities but it’s a risk we’d be willing to take for the sake of global warming.

  Meanwhile, incidental exercise is now all the rage. The experts say you can get big results by making tiny changes. Already I’m watching SBS more, since its position on the remote control makes it a real stretch for my index finger. And if I switch to Tasmanian beer, I’ll have to use an opener each time I reach for a bottle. This, I think, is what experts mean by ‘dieting smart’.

  I’ve also developed my own diet called the Mechanical Breakdown Diet. This involves sitting on the couch after you’ve had dinner. Every ten minutes you jump up, walk to the fridge and conduct a battle of wills while standing bathed in the fridge’s ghostly light. Eventually, you master yourself and sit down again, having eaten nothing. The process is repeated all night until the fridge breaks down and you have to throw out all the food, which makes the next day’s dieting so much easier.

  Sadly, even this method is not entirely successful. Perhaps we need a dieters’ code of practice:

  A second helping of dinner contains no calories, as long as it is eaten directly from the plate of leftovers while standing at the kitchen counter.

  Squares of cooking chocolate contain no calories, as long as they’re eaten straight from the fridge while bathed in the light of the open door.

  If you eat something but don’t really like the taste, then the calories don’t count. Feel free to fetch yourself something better.

  As noted in my book In Bed with Jocasta, broken biscuits located at the bottom of the Tupperware contain no calories. (Since publication of the book, I have heard of some people purposely breaking biscuits in order to render them broken. This is, however, not permitted. Even dieters should have some standards.)

  Fundraising chocolates contain no calories, their consumption better covered by the phrase ‘community service’ than by the brutally reductive term ‘eating’.

  If there’s only one slice of cake left, its consumption is best described by the phrase ‘saving Glad Wrap’ than by the mean-hearted observation ‘breaking your diet’.

  Licking icing from utensils at the end of the cooking process involves no intake of calories.

  If the product is labelled ‘lite’, go ahead and eat twice as much.

  Dessert eaten in a restaurant does contain calories—but only if you were the one who placed the order. Feel free to encourage your partner to order dessert while demurring politely: ‘Oh no, not for me, I just couldn’t. I’m absolutely full.’ Once the plate arrives, lean over menacingly with a spare fork and polish off the lot, down to licking the plate with a maniacal laugh and warning off others with your knife.

  Celery, bran and spinach all contain negative calories. Eating them in large quantities allows you to double your consumption of everything else.

  Ice-cream scraped off the bottom of the lid contains no calories.

  Sausages which have fallen off the BBQ contain no calories.

  The last piece of cheese on a platter does contain calories but only if eaten in one go. Try cutting it in half, eating that, cutting it in half again, then eating that, and so on until there is just a tiny sliver left. Then eat the sliver on the basis that ‘there’s only the tiniest sliver left’.

  Crackling consumed while carving is exempt from calories. So is any food eaten while cooking.

  A bite taken from your child’s chocolate bar contains no calories, as long as the bite is preceded by the explanation: ‘I’m just checking it’s not poisoned.’

  Chips from McDonald’s contain no calories if eaten from your child’s packet and preceded by the explanation: ‘I just wanted to check they were hot.’

  Food cooked by your child is exempt.

  Birthday cake eaten while standing at a child’s birthday party is exempt.

  Food left over after filling a Tupperware container is fair game, and your actions, standing there at the kitchen counter, are best described by the phrase ‘tidying up’ than by the overly pointed ‘being a disgusting pig’.

  The quicker you bolt something down, the fewer calories it has. Remember: squares of chocolate only contain calories if you are fully cognisant of what you are doing.

  You can eat anything—three pies and a box of donuts—providin
g you wash it down responsibly with a couple of Diet Cokes.

  If you slice the ham thinly you can have twice as much.

  Any failure to lose weight is due to one having ‘a slow metabolism’ or ‘big bones’.

  If your diet is not working, feel free to choose a different diet. Or, even better, different friends. By surrounding yourself with fatter mates, you’ll instantly look thinner.

  And, finally, there is a complete exemption for food eaten after a particularly horrendous day at work. Or, for that matter, a particularly wonderful day. Indeterminate, mediocre, neither-good-nor-bad days can also be pretty hard to take in a way that can only really be redeemed by a good self-saucing butterscotch pudding.

  I’m happy to give evidence on all these matters to the Obesity Summit. Just as soon as they install a lift to get me there.

  An unsustainable financial proposition

  The Neatwhistles are a quiet and industrious family who, up to this week, have rarely been in the news. Yet late yesterday Jenny Neatwhistle felt it necessary to issue a dramatic profit warning for the family group, pointing to rising input costs and ‘bugger all’ chances of a pay rise. Grocery cost projections, last calculated in January, had not taken account of the growth in appetite of their sons, Mark, Hugo and Philip, who these days ‘just pack it away like there’s no tomorrow’. In addition, income from Lotto investments had been well down on expectations in the June quarter, with suggestions that Tom Neatwhistle be forced to reconsider his current system of choosing all six numbers from the last but bottom row.

  Some analysts say they are surprised the Neatwhistles have been able to limp on this long, and have questioned the income base of the whole operation.

  Says Bill Moneypenny, an analyst with the Bank of Texas-BRL Porkbros: ‘At least half the group’s income is dependent on Tom Neatwhistle and yet he’s in his mid-forties, and unlikely to see any real growth in income. Plus, with every year, his running costs rise.’ Indeed, says Moneypenny, close study of the family accounts reveals that Tom has taken to buying wine at $14.90 a bottle, telling his wife that ‘If a bloke can’t have a decent drop when he’s over forty, then what’s the point of it all?’

  Moneypenny says this has broken the ‘psychologically important $10 barrier’, and could result in an almost limitless blow-out just keeping Tom running. ‘You watch,’ he says. ‘By December it will be the Wynns Cab-Sav at $18 a go and I’m talking weeknights.’

  The situation does not improve even when you examine Jenny’s contribution to the income stream garnered through work as a teacher in the education sector.

  Says Moneypenny: ‘The Neatwhistles’ sector exposure is all wrong: they’re fully weighted in mature low-growth sectors. They also are carrying these three completely unproductive boys.’ Moneypenny says the initial decision to have the boys was made in the late 1980s ‘when people were making all sorts of mad decisions to expand’, but years later they were still splashing nothing but red all over the balance sheet.

  ‘It’s hard to see what contribution they will ever make, except the odd pack of smelly soap on Jenny’s birthday and some bath gel at Christmas. Having boys is like investing in a boutique winery—OK if you can stand the losses and the constant disappointments.’

  During a detailed phone call, Moneypenny questioned Jenny’s future plans, suggesting that she get rid of the underperforming parts of the group—Tom and the three boys—and seek some high-value exposure in new areas. Says Moneypenny: ‘There’s far too much sentimentality in these small family groups. It may be that Tom could achieve a pay rise, yet he’s too scared to ask his boss for one. At the same time his health care costs have doubled over the last four years. Does Jenny pay for the back operation that Tom desperately needs or is it just throwing good money after bad? These are the sort of decisions the group faces.’

  Tom, however, disputes the analysis. He says that he and three other non-executive directors have been deceived and had no idea of the problems emerging for the group. ‘Honestly, we’ve been kept in the dark,’ Tom says. ‘I’d also like to ask some questions of this Bill Moneypenny. Frankly, I think he’d like to see the break-up of the group. I question his motives.’

  Moneypenny admits that if a break-up of the group did occur, then it would be ‘only natural’ for him to seek exposure to the group’s best performing sectors. ‘And, yes, I guess that means Jenny.’

  Interviewed in his 43rd-floor office, atop Sydney’s imposing Semtex Tower, Moneypenny admits he first met Jenny at university in the late 1970s. He proposed a merger at the time but found himself rebuffed. ‘I think I was a bit too pushy, a bit too brash,’ admits Moneypenny, ‘but today I think I could really offer her something.’

  Says Jenny: ‘Of course, it’s nice to get the overtures from Bill after all these years. He’s a real sweetie but Tom and I remain on course. The approach has been useful. It has brought problems out into the open, where the group will be able to address them in the coming period.’

  At last night’s meeting of stakeholders, Tom’s back operation was green-lighted, the three boys agreed to do more work around the house, the blow-out in Tom’s drinking was tackled, and a new Lotto strategy was agreed upon, based on filling out the second but top line.

  As Jenny puts it: ‘I guess there’s lots of ways of reading the same balance sheet.’

  Decline and fall

  Madonna, the American singer, has revealed she’s a different mother with her second child than with her first—less paranoid and more relaxed. She’s not the first parent to notice how attitudes shift with each additional child.

  First child: ‘We’ve decided to play Beethoven sonatas to him while he’s in the womb and read him passages from the great poets.’

  Second child: ‘Whenever there’s classical music on a TV ad I turn it up.’

  Third child: ‘I’m sick of the little bugger kicking me. It’s not my fault Big Brother is over.’

  First child: ‘He’s only two days old and he just gave me a smile. I think he’s advanced.’

  Second child: ‘When he burps it almost looks like a smile—so cute.’

  Third child: ‘He’s the farting champion of the Western World. At least there’s now no doubt who the father is.’

  First child: ‘We’ve repainted the room and I’ve hand-stencilled some animal pictures onto the ceiling.’

  Second child: ‘There’s a room off the back that’s not too bad, and when he’s older we’ll move all the boxes.’

  Third child: ‘Kick the dog out and there’s a perfectly good spot there by the back door.’

  First child: ‘He’s got fourteen different hand-knitted cardigans and ten pairs of OshKosh pilchers.’

  Second child: ‘Target had twenty per cent off, so we bought a job lot.’

  Third child: ‘If we soak the jumpsuits long enough, you’ll hardly notice the stains and silverfish holes.’

  First child: ‘We’ve booked him into four different schools, started an investment scheme and put him on the waiting list for the Melbourne Club.’

  Second child: ‘Nana’s opened an account at the Commonwealth Bank and whacked in the first five dollars.’

  Third child: ‘I just wish someone could come up with a name. When he starts high school he’s going to hate being called Bub.’

  First child: ‘I don’t think he knows what a lolly is. I don’t allow them in the house.’

  Second child: ‘We’re trying to keep a limit on it, especially on weekdays.’

  Third child: ‘Quick, your Dad’s in the shower. Let’s split the pack of Tim Tams and scoff the lot before he even knows they’re on offer.’

  First child: ‘I don’t believe in discipline, or even saying anything critical, as it may crush his little spirit.’

  Second child: ‘We’ve adopted a time-out system, especially after the problem with the cigarette lighter.’

  Third child: ‘Come on, son, make my day. One more step and I use the capsicum spray.’

 
; First child: ‘We only allow him to watch BBC nature programs.’

  Second child: ‘We only allow him to watch nature programs and the odd episode of Blue Heelers.’

  Third child: ‘Hurry up, Trent, and bring the beer and nachos, you’re missing the start of The Sopranos.’

  First child: ‘Each evening, we’re going to read—as a family—for an hour.’

  Second child: ‘Sit and read where I can see you while I cook the dinner.’

  Third child: ‘You can tell those bloody teachers he reads the TV program every bloody night, so what’s their problem?’

  First child: ‘Only when everybody is finished eating may you leave the table.’

  Second child: ‘You can jump up now but put your plate in the sink.’

  Third child: ‘Darren, stop wiping you hands on the couch. Use your T-shirt like your father.’

  First child: ‘I’m going to teach my child the value of money.’

  Second child: ‘I’ll give you some pocket money if you stop crying.’

  Third child: ‘Fifty bucks and you don’t tell Dad it was me who backed into his Commodore.’

  First child: ‘We try to limit it to nine or ten photographs each day, plus the odd bit of video filming.’

  Second child: ‘Those disposable cameras are great for capturing the really significant birthday parties.’

  Third child: ‘Of course we took photographs of you. Look at this photo of the dog—I’d swear that’s your foot in the background.’

  The real road rules