Suit Anxiety

So I’ve had my first experience of blog guilt, a page neglected for ten days, two new followers with no fresh postings.  What a dissolute idler. Of course I had perfectly good parenting excuses; it takes a week to prepare to bring your children to a wedding and three days to recover. There’s also the distraction of suit anxiety, days worrying just how ill-fitting your one suit has become since last you wore it, knowing full well that it’s not the suit that’s changed shape but you.  I hadn’t found out just how much of me was going to be excess when I saw that a growing number of us Irish men are becoming obese.  Of course there’s a growing number of people getting fat in every first world country but there appears to be some evidence that us Irish men are expanding faster than anyone else.  We had thought it would be our American cousins who'd lead the exploration of the outer limits of the waistband to find out how fat a person could get without becoming a geographical feature, but alas years of over-compensating for the famine has left us a nation dart players.  Without the darts.  Getting fat is an emasculating experience. Suddenly very female concerns are thrust upon us; the size of clothes, how much sugar is in the thing I’ve been eating since midday, can we still get away with wearing that shirt, even does my bum look big in this?  Gone are the firm straight male lines of youth, replaced by first a single, then multiple folds, turning in on themselves creating shapes that are no longer recognizably human.  Parts of your body retain their original positions, so that an outie bellybutton becomes first an innie, then a dark, forbidding cave, holding the last pin in a neglected cushion. Your belt is a constant reminder of this slow but irresistible growth.  So much so that it assumes a sinister mocking personality, telling you first thing in the morning that (a) you are fat and (b) you’ve got one hole left before you’ve got to get a needle out and make your own.  Women live with these concerns from at least their teenage years and are equipped to constantly do battle against fatness; they may not always come out on top but conduct a heroic guerilla campaign with small victories enough to maintain the audacity of hope.  For us men the onset of fatness is unexpected and devastating and we wallow, immobile, in Vichy-like defeatism.  There is nothing more emasculating than dieting, that has to wait for doctor’s orders and a firm prediction of death.   So there’s exercise, but exercise only works if it carries some utility, if I get sweaty chopping down a forest I am a man, if I get sweaty running nowhere in a gym I am a bit sad.  Unfortunately there isn’t much call for journalists to cut down woods.