Hungry

by Grace Dent

  Salvation beckoned weeks later: a piece of A4 paper stuck to a noticeboard in the English Department.

  ‘Writers Wanted’ for a new campus fanzine called Mental Block. This was a pun on the bleak, cell-like concrete-block rooms in which we all lived. I wrote down the number on my arm, took a deep breath and telephoned the editor. He was a boy called Keith, a gentle-sounding but mischievous third year. He wanted the fanzine to take an irreverent look at campus life. I liked the phrase ‘irreverent look’. That, alongside ‘sideways swipe’ and ‘backwards glance’, was my favourite type of writing. He’d found a few other willing writers already. It sounded perfect. It sounded a tiny bit Smash Hits-y.

  1994

  During the spring term of 1994 I sat at my desk overlooking the western extremity of the Ochil Hills, typing nonsense into an electric typewriter. I wrote a ‘cool or not cool’ barometer – which was an idea blatantly thieved from The Face magazine – and also some silly lists (the word ‘listicle’ was yet to be invented). After printing out these particular slices of copy at the newsagent, I trimmed the words with scissors and Pritt-Sticked them back onto a blank A4 page, fitting them around blurry black-and-white pictures. The finished product was nothing short of horrible to look at. It was part Smash Hits, part kidnapper’s ransom letter. It was festooned with spelling mistakes and blank gaps where the pieces didn’t fit. I filled these holes with shit BIC-pen illustrations. My writing style was verbose and erratic and it leaned heavily on weak in-jokes that only seventeen people understood. The following decades didn’t see me improve a great deal, but this was the rawest version. I delivered the pages to Keith by hand outside a pub and ran off before he could look at it. What if he didn’t laugh?

  ‘Do more,’ said Keith the next day when I passed him in the corridor. ‘It was great. There’s more space to fill.’ So I did.

  My next contributions were bolder. I invented news items about the ‘Balls Up’ Juggling Club and the patient girlfriend clique who hung around the rugby boys. I wrote about the glamorous clique of Erasmus students and prolific shaggers. I wrote tips on how to feign blindness in a thin corridor towards someone you’d drunkenly fumbled at the Coors Beer Two-for-One night. I rated the private study booths on the top floor of the library in order of the most exhilarating to copulate in. None of this could I ever show my parents. Along the way, I began to develop a style – or, at least, I began to rob and recycle bits of the things I loved. There were elements of Karen Krizanovich’s Sky magazine pithiness, plus the self-involved chuntering of Victoria Wood’s Kitty from As Seen on TV. Victor Lewis-Smith, restaurant and TV columnist, was definitely in there too. I loved how Lewis-Smith, in print, played the part of a man just on the edge of his own sanity. Each time we erected a little trestle table in the main uni foyer to begin flogging copies of Mental Block, I fretted that no one would care, but then a crowd would appear and the issues began to vanish. Then, within the hour, a blowback of fury and giddiness and shrieking would begin about the things we had said. Yes, some people were piggin’ livid, but most found it funny. And my name was printed all over it. The feeling was intoxicating. Better than any Class A. Better than a Brownie Badge or carrying a flag in church. Better, almost, than a letter printed in the NME defending Nicky Wire. When something you write strikes a chord and ends up widely read, it feels a bit, in your brain at least, like being loved. Particularly when you write silly things. Clearly silly things won’t win you as many prizes as being serious; however, you only have to write once at a silly frequency that makes a stranger really snort with laughter and then you’re in their hearts, just a little bit, forever. I’d take silly over serious any day.

  Obviously over the next few issues, I began to push my luck. I wrote reviews of atrocious campus food and invented fake small ads for disgusting fake products. I took several pot shots at the Principal of the university himself, who was, according to my mushroom-addled pseudo-communist mind, both slothful and corrupt as well as a terrifying symbol of the petite-bourgeoisie establishment. It was quite a flight of imagination on my part, bearing in mind that the Principal was actually a terribly nice man called Alasdair whose main job was juggling teaching budgets. Thankfully, Generation X students were allowed to work organically through our stage of being nauseating little berks without it spoiling our futures. We could gob off, push people’s buttons, flip-flop between beliefs and act atrociously without anyone screengrabbing the evidence and storing it in a folder as a weapon. We didn’t know the Shangri-La in which we were living. After about a year, Keith, as the editor, was threatened with ejection from the campus without honours if we carried on. Mental Block ground completely to a halt for a while and then trickled on a little longer in a more prim, censored way, which upset nobody. This was no fun at all. All funny writing has to cause a little collateral damage. Then Keith graduated, taking his honours and running before the Principal could change his mind. Desperate to write something, I slunk back to the official student paper and begged them to let me write a less defamatory campus-life column called ‘The Squealer’. Kindly, they gave me the time of day. Of course, by now, I yearned to spread my audience wider. Cosmopolitan, I read, were looking for ‘student writers’. A competition in the back of one of the magazines offered a prize that included a trip to the Groucho Club to meet Marcelle D’Argy Smith, work experience at National Magazines in London and a chance to see your writing in their pages. They wanted a covering letter describing why I was the bright, vibrant young woman they needed and five feature ideas. One evening soon after, I drank half a bottle of Thunderbird, shoved a piece of A4 in my typewriter and bashed out the title ‘Clitoris Allsorts: Ten ways to make your hotspot work for you and him.’ It was a heinous title, but something told me it might get a reaction.

  Easter Sunday, 1995

  ‘’Ere, have an Easter chicken tikka balti pasty,’ Mam says, rustling inside a large brown paper bag. ‘That’ll cheer you up.’ Easter in our house is like a directionless Christmas: the house fit to bursting with Whoops! gun-stickered hot cross buns and Mini Egg cookies, but no real schedule for eating them. Just freeform grazing.

  The pasties, £1.99 for six, are from ‘Market Street’, an aisle at the back of Morrisons supermarket where the signage goes all mock Dickensian, as if you’ve taken a wrong turn by the tinned peas, stumbled through the mists of time and wound up in a magical Olde Worlde of baked goods. I pick up the pasty, aware without much thought that it contains approximately 320 calories. I cut the pasty in half, leaving the remainder inside the paper bag for someone else in the family to eat. In approximately one hour’s time I will pass by in search of a pen and hoover it up to help with my sadness. Cosmopolitan do not care about my revolutionary thoughts on the clitoris. Two months have passed. No reply. I vow to myself I’ll enter again next year and be grateful I still have my role at the student paper writing pithy words on the poor quality of scampi in a basket in the main bar. My self-confidence has reduced but the same cannot be said for my bottom.

  ‘I’m putting weight on again,’ I sigh to Mam. ‘I’d just got a stone off after Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, you’re volumptuous,’ Mam says, sounding out the errant ‘m’ clearly. ‘Men like something to keep the bed warm.’

  In my twenties I began in earnest my lifelong war against weight gain. The pounds slid on and I took them off again. Size sixteen in January, size ten by March, size twelve by April, back at twelve for June. Hungry, hungry, being good, eating again, fatter, hungry. When I am size ten, there is a size sixteen woman inside me dying to get out. She’s in there. Cramped and hot and giddy with starvation, giggling at my conceit. ‘I’ll be back,’ she laughs. ‘Enjoy your defined décolletage and your neat waist … I’ll be fucking back.’

  Binge-eating was not my style. Or filling my plate right up. Or over-ordering. Or eating late at night. Or ordering cartwheel-sized pizza deliveries and eating leftovers for breakfast. Or any of the ways thinner people think fatte
r people get fatter. In my twenties I ate smallish portions and was skilled at going without. But as my body filled out into curves, I already knew that if I wanted those magical Miss World measurements of 36-24-36, I would have a serious fight on my hands in this delicious, ever-changing new world of mega-processed food. You do not, I had begun to see, have to eat almost any of this stuff to put on weight. One thousand calories could pass in a few heavenly bites. Processed food is an extremely user-friendly, mega-efficient transference of fats and carbs down one’s gullet. It’s specifically designed this way. Extremely clever people in corporate test kitchens are paid top dollar to design each item to inspire joy and pleasure. These everyday heroes were wrapping chicken tikka balti pieces in shortcrust pastry and selling them at six for just short of two quid. Which mortal being could turn their nose up at this?

  In Carlisle there were now two large ASDAs plus an enormous Tesco and a branch of Morrisons too. If grocery shopping in the Eighties had grown to be exciting, the Nineties sent it skywards. You could eat around the world. Continental and American deliciousness began to fill the aisles. I grew partial to Pom-Bears, Choco Leibniz and even glasses of Sunny D. In advert breaks on Border TV aspirational types with Filofaxes skipped through airports. They lunched on San Marco frozen pizzas and smeared Boursin on baguettes at lunch. They hung out in Brooklyn diners eating frozen griddle waffles, stuffed-crust pizzas or bulging hotdogs with sweet yellow mustards. And it was all available here in the North right now. Yet, not only was this food foreign and exciting, it was also time-saving. You pulled it out of the freezer, shoved it in the oven or banged it in the microwave. It was quick. This was important, the adverts reminded us, as we were busy, busy people. Family life was often portrayed as stressed mothers and slightly dim dads in need of octopus limbs to cope with their demanding brood. These families needed Birds Eye Pan Flair and McCain ‘Quickety Quick’ Micro Chips. The Dents were particularly enchanted by a woman called Aunt Bessie – a benevolent freezer goddess who sweated over roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings so we didn’t need to. No peeling. No measuring. No whisking. Soon everything in Mam’s fridge was so handy that we rarely cooked from scratch at all. I mean, imagine taking a peeler, scraping a carrot, chopping it and then cooking it in boiling water on a hob. I mean, what were we, Vikings? Why make a lasagne yourself when you can buy it for 99p in a plastic tray?

  Perhaps the most convenient thing about microwave meals for many families was that they allowed us to grab our dinners separately. This allowed us all to avoid each other. For long spaces of time in Currock, our posh dinner table with the extendable leaves was mainly just a place to shove knick-knacks, petrol receipts and the ironing pile. Things that needed to be discussed together as a family could now be avoided for months or years. Some things that needed to be said were never tackled at all. My dad, who had started to slide on the pounds at this point, came in from work as late as he could, then ate microwaved liver and bacon on a tray facing rolling news on Sky.

  ‘How was work, Dad?’ I’d ask.

  ‘Busy,’ he’d say, with no further details.

  Did Dad speak to his other kids anymore? None of us knew.

  ‘Bring us the pepper, precious,’ he’d say.

  Now nearing his sixties, he was facing retirement. Lord knows how he would handle having nowhere to hide.

  Britain may have now had food for busy people, but relatively speaking the pace of life was still rather gentle, no matter what the adverts said. Particularly in Carlisle, where Easter breaks passed so slowly I could hear my leg-hair growing. By Easter 1995, I was in the third year of a four-year Scottish degree and making a start on my final dissertation. Unless I made a plan soon for what to do after uni, I would need to go home. My Cosmo dreams were clearly over, and I’d just crashed and burned out of the second round of a search for trainee producers on zany, madcap Channel 4 morning show The Big Breakfast with Paula Yates, Gaby Roslin and Chris Evans. The twelve-page application form had rinsed me of every single brainfart I’d had about the show over the past three years. It cost me a seventy-quid return ticket to London, which was three whole Saturdays of my student job flogging Estée Lauder lipstick in Debenhams.

  ‘Which uni?’ a scrunch-faced woman called Fenella asked.

  Her bare feet were up on the desk, with her dirty soles facing towards me. This felt a bit rude, but I reasoned it must be a London thing, and as she was the gatekeeper to my future happiness, I should greet it cheerily.

  ‘Stirling,’ I said, my plump, Kookai-wrapped left arse cheek perched on the corner of a chaise longue.

  ‘Where’s that?’ she said.

  ‘Scotland,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ she said. It felt like a bad start.

  Fenella began the interview in haste.

  ‘If we wanted to launch a hot-air balloon from the Big Breakfast garden tomorrow, who would you call?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Um, I would get Yellow Pages and find someone with a balloon and speak to them first,’ I said.

  ‘And?’ she said.

  ‘And …’ I said. ‘Measure the Big Breakfast garden to give them details of space.’

  ‘And?’ she said, annoyed.

  ‘Um … I’m not … I don’t really …’ I said, having now exhausted everything I knew about balloons.

  ‘Is that it?’ she said, recrossing her feet and flexing her grubby big toes.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Air traffic control!’ she said manically. ‘Would you not telephone air traffic control? They are the first people I’d call! You’d find the coordinates of the garden and alert air traffic control.’

  ‘Would I not call the balloon expert first?’ I mumbled.

  ‘NO,’ she said, and soon I was back at Euston Station, which was galling, as I’d planned to be wearing a vintage puff-ball dress and flirting with Rick from Shed Seven by 5 p.m.

  On the train back to Carlisle in time for Easter Sunday, I felt foolish to have even tried.

  ‘Oh, bugger them,’ Mam said when I got back. ‘Have this Mini Egg cookie. There’s only one left in the bag. Look, it’s lonely. Go on, you look hungry, eat!’

  If I was going to be a media person, I needed to be brighter and cooler and cleverer – and I definitely needed a smaller bottom.

  1996

  Checking my newly re-bony décolletage in the mirror of my uni room, above the desk where my final dissertation sits awaiting its closing chapter, I remind myself that at least I am skinny again. No plan is in place for the future, but skinny takes the edge off everything. I wonder if my daily calorie allowance permits a Knorr Quick Soup. The one without croutons as the croutons are quite fatty. I’ll have it with Ryvita and low-fat cottage cheese, then head off to ‘Float, Don’t Bloat’ aqua aerobics.

  Earlier, on my way in to the posher, more grown-up halls of residence that students move into to write their final dissertations, I found a Post-it note attached to my door.

  ‘Your mother called. She says she will keep trying.’

  This does not seem good. It feels instinctively bad. The last time she did this was because Gran had passed away.

  Now the shared payphone in the hallway is ringing again.

  Mam sounds frazzled. She is on a payphone in the disembarkation hall in Southampton docks.

  ‘Dad keeps getting dizzy,’ she says. ‘He was going into the cabaret bar on the ship the other night and his head went all waffy.’

  ‘Was he tipsy?’ I say.

  Booze measures on these P&O Euro-cruises they keep going on are famously generous.

  ‘No. Not really,’ she says. ‘I mean, we’d had some Irish coffees and a carafe of Merlot. And he’d had a couple of little beers, but he wasn’t drunk.’

  Mam and Dad, throughout their whole lives, never had proper hobbies. Or any sort of frivolous pastime. They worked and they watched a bit of telly and they
slept. Holidays were mainly spent in England or at a push in North Wales. We went to Spain once in the Eighties by coach. It took days to get there, but our adventure was the talk of Currock. Sometimes my parents holidayed within twenty miles of Carlisle itself in a static caravan in Silloth-on-Solway overlooking the West Cumbrian coast. After retirement, with me and Dave gone, a new focus entered their lives: cruising.

  ‘’Ere, keep an eye out for Page 22 coming back round.’ Mam has got the Teletext cruise pages on. She chucks me the remote control. ‘It’s just gone past, but it’ll be back. Press pause if you see it!’

  Mam’s special skill was seeking out last-minute cruise bargains.

  ‘Mam, there’s 198 pages,’ I’d groan, as the screen beeps and flashes with neon print.

  ‘I know, but they come round fast, the little buggers,’ she’d say. ‘It’s fourteen nights going out of Palma, for 256 quid, all-inclusive with a balcony! It’s a good one!’

  Although the thought of being stuck on a glorified ferry left me cold, my folks loved everything about this new nautical lifestyle. They loved the planning and the packing. It gave them something neutral to chat about. They loved the whole microclimate of being on ship with a thousand other like-minded sixty-somethings, taking Latin American ballroom dancing lessons and enjoying visits from celebrity chefs like James Martin or Gary Rhodes. The ship plodding methodically from port to port, with a schedule posted under their cabin door each night, appealed to my ex-army dad. You could see the Sphinx or the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Vatican City for two or three hours and, most importantly, be back in time for tea. Because the main thing they loved about cruising was the food. Delicious, plentiful food served 24/7: buffet breakfasts, elevenses, long lunches, afternoon teas by the pool, formal dinners and midnight top-deck pizza buffets. Getting your money’s worth was easy. No passenger on a cruise went hungry.