Backchat With Catboy

Our man on the radio loves a takeaway or 12

SSummer means one thing for many people in the UAE – lots and lots of takeaway meals, as we cower indoors in a bid to beat the heat. And that’s a big problem for me because right now I am the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.

It was all going so well, too. I was taking part in all the Spinneys Dubai 92 Cycle Challenge rides last year. I was eating a combination of rabbit food and air, whilst the diuretic tea was going through me like a fireman’s hose. But then I fell off the wagon. Actually, that needs fact checking – I didn’t fall off the wagon. The wagon creaked and splintered beneath my growing posterior, before finally giving up the ghost and collapsing into kindling.

Luckily for me, my fall from fitness and health was broken by a substantially dense mattress of menus that had been ever so carefully scattered amongst the salacious massage cards around my front garden.

The trick with these menus is to never throw them away. They’re like cockroaches. If you try to dispose of them in the wrong way, you inadvertently invite thousands more to your door. Just leave them in the garden. It’s the equivalent of saying “I already gave” to charity workers.

Of course, no system is 100 per cent fool proof and recently, when the pile of menus had prevented the normal operation of our front door and we could no longer get out to buy food or take the kids to school, I decided enough was enough. My hobbies – crane spotting and being a sewer-sommelier – would have to take a back seat. We were moving house again. A recent survey on moving house revealed that one of our favourite parts of the process was having a takeaway on the first night in the new house. Due to complications during our move, my family and I took that to the nth degree. In fact, through the handful of days it took us to move house, we managed to gobble our way through deliveries from McDonald’s (four), Oriental Box (one), Curry Box (two), Jack’s Plaice (one), Costa Coffee (three), Freedom Pizza (one) and Carluccio’s (one).

I was so embarrassed about this that I actually took to hiding the discarded culinary packaging inside the removals boxes, rather than have them bulging out of our wheeliebin for all and sundry to see. What would our new neighbours think? I assume they’d be checking to see if Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi were now residing in the UAE (imagine those two at a brunch?)

It’s got to the point where our children are now actively asking – nay, begging – for vegetables. I’ve even caught them sucking on Happy Meal toys in the hope of extracting a few nutrients.

So, thanks, What’s On, for not being feeders this month by writing about takeaways. I’ve got them all on speed-dial anyway…