The Reason I am Alive

When the producers of Desert Island Discs finally bring me in to give a breathless nation the soundtrack of my life story, my seventh disc will be Jackson Browne’s ‘For a Dancer‘. Sorry. It is one of those annoying ‘if you don’t already know then there is no point in explaining it to you’ things.

The song closes with the following lines:

And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Well, I already know my reason, and I’m still very much alive. It is Food.

I never fail to be amazed at just how much of my time is taken up thinking about food and, in particular, the details of the next meal. I am already talking about it when I bring Caroline her morning mug of Lady Grey, and I am still thinking about it when I switch the light off 16 or so hours later. In between times, I have probably been in a bakery, a supermarket and a delicatessan in search of it; if I fill my car up with petrol, I fill myself up at the same time with a Twix. If I meet someone for a coffee, then I try very hard to meet the contents of the bakery trolley at the same time. If there are biscuits in the house, I will sniff them out quicker than my spaniel could find a bone. If I am going out to restaurant (not something that you do a whole heap of as a nature writer), then I am all over their website like a rash for days beforehand, planning my meal.

We can all agree that I am no sylph, but I would like to posit that neither am I yet as huge as I might be, and indeed should be, for a man who ingests so many calories. My BMI is none of your business (and, let me tell you, I was extremely careful to diet for a week when I knew my GP was going to weigh me a few years ago), but I remain in some sort of shape because my buy-in to this world of eating is that I do an awful lot of walking. In fact, this is the 427th day in succession that I have walked a minimum of 10,000 paces (average 17,000), the calorie sacrifice from which keeps me more or less on the straight and narrow.

Depending on who you listen to, we spend around 14% of our income, nationally, on food, which is less than almost every nation on earth apart from you-know-who over the Atlantic. The fact that we place so little value on it has allowed two things to happen, of which the first is that we have delegated looking after our national food strategy to supermarkets. The second is allied to the first, which is that we therefore get roughly what we deserve, a reliable supply of cheap, not very good food, sourced in an efficient, but not very fair way. People like Henry Dimbleby do their best to help us out, but the patter of tiny feet you can hear wandering around the corridors of power almost certainly still belong to lobbyists paid by the food industry.

So actually, you need to be like me. Chuck over any notion of getting smaller and living the life of a monk. Find joy in food as far and wide as you can, and them take masses and masses of exercise.

And then go and listen to For a Dancer.