Home Front

‘Am I overweight?’ I asked daughter Betty after finding I couldn’t do up my jeans. I sucked in my stomach as she gave me a cursory inspection.

‘You could do with losing two stone,’ she concluded, before returning to the Kardashians on her laptop.

I was prepared to lose half a stone. Or one, at a push. But two? A tall order.

So I googled, ‘Am I fat?’ An austerelooking NHS chart showed my body index nestling in the overweight curve. A few more cakes and I’d be teetering on the edge of obese. Annoyingly, Betty was right. I am exactly two stone overweight.

Another dismaying revelation: I used to be 5ft 4 until a nurse at Guy’s hospital recently informed me I had shrunk to 5ft 3. Not only am I morphing into one of Les Dawson’s Roly Polys; I’ll soon be the ideal height for the killer dwarf in the TV adaptation of Don’t Look Now.

I have found myself making old-person ‘Oof’ noises when sitting and ‘Aaaghhh’ sounds when standing up. My children think it’s an attention-seeking ploy. I’m also not allowed to rest my cup of tea on my stomach when watching TV any more.

It’s all very unfair. I take the dog for a long walk every day. I often give myself

Weightwatcher portions of potatoes and rice. Apart from red wine at the weekend, and the occasional Wispa I try to avoid sugary drinks and puddings.

As if in sympathy, Mr Home Front has developed an Oliver Hardy paunch. It’s his own fault: my spy Betty, who occasionally commutes with him, has revealed he eats crisps on the train home, as well as Milky Bars (‘You’re not seven!’ she told him). He also gets driven around a lot.

If it’s not his colleague Ben chauffeuring him to and from work as if he’s Alan Sugar, Betty or I will give him lifts to the station (a brisk 12-minute walk). Then there is Hassan round the corner, the taxi driver Mr Home Front has singlehandedly kept in business since 2006.

Appalled by their parents’ expanding waistlines, the children ordered us to do something about it – ‘before Channel 5 put you in a documentary’.

So I started driving us to Leatherhead Leisure Centre once a week. Mr HF goes to the gym; I swim. I said it was the only time we ever went anywhere together.

‘That’s not true,’ said Mr HF. ‘We go to the Esher Everyman.’ He sighed.

Our leisure-centre trips lasted a month. I can’t say I miss going. If it wasn’t Speedoclad 20-somethings swimming in the fast lane as if they were in the Olympics, it was human turtles clogging up the slow lane.

What really did it for me was getting cramp during my last ignominious visit. It was so acutely painful I couldn’t move. A teenage lifeguard spotted me flailing about in the deep end and frantically blew her whistle. As children dispersed in terror, another lifeguard pulled me out with a long noodle-shaped float. ‘Cramp!’ I gasped. ‘Oh right,’ she said. ‘My nan gets that.’

As for Mr HF, lifting weights turned out not to be as enjoyable as playing online chess with Lars in Stockholm.

But he’s right. We do go regularly to the Everyman in Esher. Watching the big screen while lovely young bar staff bring food and drink to your armchair is delightful. My guilty pleasure is their hamburger and chips (the best in Surrey). Mr HF always has a fresh banana milkshake and a slice of Bakewell tart. He thinks eating lunch there is common and is rather sniffy when mine arrives. Although I’m infuriated by rustling sweet wrappers, I confess that eating a hamburger in the semi-darkness of the cinema is one of life’s pleasures.

And because the Everyman has a hint of a private members’ club about it, with its armchair seating and dividing tables, it is somehow not objectionable.

Mr HF and I have made a pact not to tell Betty about our Everyman diet. We’d never hear the last of it.