Spectator
HOW should we do this?’ Zam is looking both worried and confused. ‘I’ve been told we should stop eating anything white.’ He is slicing from the latest loaf. ‘Bread and cheese are white,’ I say firmly. ‘But this is brown,’ he protests. ‘If that was on a paint chart, it would be buff, stone, warm… and definitely in the whites.’
His first step is to order some bathroom scales. When they arrive, he stands on them and declares a fairly ambitious target. At lunchtime, I find him eating a bagel with chicken-liver pâté. ‘What?’ He looks at me: ‘I’m not having a second bagel.’ ‘I think we need soup for lunch and a little grilled fish with steamed vegetables for supper,’ I say with more confidence than I feel, especially as we have half a cow in the freezer and nobody wants to go shopping so it will be stew for supper again. ‘But without potatoes,’ I tell him. ‘Stew without potatoes?’ he repeats, as if I’d told him the earth is flat. ‘I think we can have lentils.’ He nods, until I add the word ‘instead’, at which point the only word for his expression is panic.
By teatime, he’s questioning me closely on whether I’m having a biscuit. Which I am. And then we settle down to watch the local news, which is running a piece on English sparkling wines being among the best in the world. Zam was filmed for this a while ago, in pouring rain and a vicious wind with a hat clamped down on his ears. Immediately afterwards, he gets several texts from friends who say it looked as if he actually lives at The Grange, the neo-Classical house where the festival takes place and after which the wine is named. ‘Did it?’ he asks me. ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think,’ I say, carefully, ‘it looked like you were wearing a lot of layers.’
The following day, we try to take my passport photograph on my phone. ‘I had no idea I look like that,’ I cry. ‘This is terrible.’
I’m so short-sighted that, happily, I cannot see myself clearly without wearing my glasses so an image of me glasses-naked is truly a shock. The passport office is equally unimpressed and every image I try to upload is rejected.
‘Try to look less depressed,’ Zam urges me on the fifth attempt. ‘But I’m not allowed to smile.’ ‘I know, but I think your resting face could be a little less unhappy.’
A few days later, we drive to his vaccine appointment. Zam is unusually nervous in the passenger seat. This is a man who gives blood on a regular basis. At the hospital, we are among the last cohort of the day and I wait in the car until I am the only person in the car park, by which point I’m wondering, mildly, if he might have had what’s called an adverse reaction, but he reappears, rips off the mask and says he felt flustered throughout because he can’t hear anything with a mask on.
On the way home, we fill up with petrol and he buys two bars of chocolate. Dark chocolate, he assures me, is on the diet. ‘But what about the other one, the fruit and nut?’ He shrugs, as if to say the appearance of this is out of his hands. We settle down to stew with lentils, again. ‘I’m not sure it’s actually falling off me,’ he says, taking a sip of red wine. ‘But yesterday you said you’d already lost 3lb.’ ‘It turns out that if I lean forward on the scales I lose weight and if I lean back I put it on again.’
“Stew without potatoes?” he repeats, as if I’d told him the earth is flat
Next week Joe Gibbs