I never did have a problem with eating too much.
Quite the opposite. For many unfashionable years I was an uncomfortably skinny little thing with knobbly knees and a delicate constitution. Several vain attempts to beef me up saw my desperate mother fill vast glasses with raw egg and milk and make me swallow them. At school I would wonder at the impossible slab of cheese in my sandwiches and realize with horror that it was butter. The result was a general abhorrence of most staple food products and an avoidance of anything that even slightly resembled a calorie.
That is, until I discovered wine.
I unearthed my Nan’s stash of cream sherry one night in my eleventh year as I deftly avoided going to church by feigning illness. (Yet another reason to go to Hell).
It was an introduction of biblical proportions and, vile though the consequences were, it did little to quell my interest in the nectar of the gods.
My dad, skilfully and subversively, began taking me along as his partner in crime to the annual Wine Festival from the age of fourteen and an interest in getting comfortably pissed was born.
I have my family to thank for an uncanny skill in judging frontignacs and viogniers but also for the introduction to my gluttony of choice.
No boxes of chocolates for me, no greasy dripping legs of chicken. Give me a glass of fine shiraz, no two, just another then, oh just one more. I know, let’sh open just another bottle and thank you, thank you for carrying me from yet another party.
