Romance:From Fat To Fatale(11)

One sniffs, sigh, pout or hint of a temperature and Mama Bulgari could always be relied on to roll out the big guns. It was time for a batch of the famous Bulgari penicillin - that uniquely efficacious goose fat soup with extra goose fat just to be on the safe side. It was true.

Mama Bulgari could detect a medical problem way before some magnetic resonance scan could even hint at a syndrome. And the cure was soon bubbling away and spitting malevolently in the depths of her industrial-sized, copper soup pan. No one was really sure where the recipe came from.

One great uncle claimed it had been used to heal burns back in the old country, a handy poultice for those occasions when hostile villagers with flaming brands came round to recover their stolen goats and apply a little corrective therapy to their sheep-rustling neighbours. Some said it had been generously applied to clothing and boots as an effective water-proofing agent - suitable for keeping the sheep-stealing villagers dry as they went about their business of sheep stealing in the rainy season. Some said it was used to exorcise pestilence from the beet crop. All we knew was that it killed bugs and piled on the extra protective layers of fat that kept the bugs at bay in the first place. I was sick.

According to Mama's practised eye, I might've been queuing at Death's dark doorway for a front row seat at the matinée performance.

So I got a triple portion. And I know you might find this hard to believe but I really began to feel better. The pestilence had been exorcised. Suddenly, constipation was the least of my worries.

Being able to hustle to the bathroom before nature struck with precious little warning, my desperately clenched butt cheeks barely holding back the tsunami - well, my friend, that became the most urgent challenge. I even came close to experiencing the joys of sprinting back there for a couple of days.

Time for another question. Are you by any chance interested in psychology?

Are you one of those people who always fill in the personality tests in the glossy magazines? You know the ones: What kind of a lover are you? Are you addicted to sex? What kind of animal would you be in the jungle? Are you safe to be let loose in the community without your medication? Those kinds of test. The ones that leave you completely confused and wondering if you should be getting professional counselling for some of your nastier personal habits.

Yes. I thought so. You know exactly what I'm talking about here, don't you? Well the nutritionist's questionnaire that I filled in was of a completely different order of magnitude. It was designed to dig deep and unearth the dark, hidden secrets of the soul. It was a major excavation of everything that had been driving my behaviour in the hidden recesses of my cobwebbed subconscious - but only since I was about three years old. Yeah. Heavy duty questions and shredded uranium ore answers. I had to answer questions about everything from my earliest memories about food to how often I liked to flick my bean. Oh, sorry. Hope you didn't spill your cappuccino over that last observation but we are supposed to be friends, aren't we? You know I don't like to hold anything back.

OK. So it was time to face the nutritional Inquisition and see what conclusions my new best friend in the exciting Campaign for a Leaner Misha would deliver.





Chapter 8:


Let's get analysed





I set off early for the appointment because I decided to walk since it still seemed a little premature to opt for the bus ride into town. We Bulgaris were always a mite sensitive to any uncertain issues such as the evil eye. No point taking unnecessary chances. So I walked.

And I sweated. And then I walked some more.

The lady was waiting for me this time with her office door wide open and a big smile to match, a glass of water held out to greet me and a small fresh towel to mop up the streams of perspiration. Wearing the same white cotton pants and smock as before she led me to a couch at the side of the office and sat down beside me, the completed questionnaire already waiting on a low, glass table. Glad you made it, she said.

Are you feeling any better? I started to tell her about the miraculous properties of Mama's goose-fat soup as I wiped my face again with the towel but she cut me off with a wave of the hand and said we should get right down to the analysis. It was about to get a lot more interesting. You expect the professional to present the evidence like some smart lawyer in a court room drama, building the case until the guilty suspect is condemned with the sweeping final statement. That's not how it worked with the lady nutritionist.

Rather than telling me what the answers meant, she wanted me to work it all out for myself. She believed that if I came up with my own conclusions, the answers would be much more meaningful to me than hearing them second-hand from some well-meaning third party -

no matter how well qualified the fit and feisty third party might be.

Now let's just hit the pause button and take a break. We could easily get carried away here with the snail-paced process of unravelling all those answers until they finally made sense but I'm guessing you might just lose the will to live whilst waiting. So to avoid the risk of you turning to drugs or grandpa's life-threatening, garage-brewed moonshine to kill the boredom, I'll just cut right to the chase.

See. I can be nice. Sometimes. The questionnaire ultimately revealed - are you ready for this? - That underneath my gargantuan body and grinning balloon face - I was an unhappy bunny.

There. I knew you'd be as surprised as I was. And there you have it - smiley face, unhappy body. I'd picked up a bunch of obviously unhealthy habits around food, of course, and it was clear that I used food as a daily source of comfort. There were a lot of latent, self-destructive tendencies lurking just below the surface and they showed up in so many obvious ways. And that also included my slightly unorthodox approach to a love life. But the lady agreed with me that deep down I was an unhappy, insecure, self-destructive, whoring, devil-worshiping, binge-eating Jezebel who deserved to be bull-whipped through the burning scrub of Perdition until every blighted shred of fat was stripped away from my sinful heaving carcase.