Day 54: I Go To Harvey Nichols

Regular readers of this blog will be aware, by now, that I am quite the porker. They will also be aware that I am in the middle of a strangely entertaining project called "Shift The Pork 2006". Now, my excess pork cannot be ascribed to late night cake-eating. Nor can it be put down to "glands", a "big frame", or a "low metabolism".

Truth is I have an extremely irritating 'condition' that is fairly common, utterly dull and that kindly helped me go from "l would" to "well, she's quite pretty, until she gets her kit off". I don't have a problem with food. I don't binge eat and I haven't got a weird emotional relationship with it other than I like it a lot but, annoyingly, not very much of it makes me fat. And to be less fat, I have to work very fucking hard. So I have worked very very fucking hard, and in the last six weeks I've shifted about seventeen pounds, and found muscles I didn't know existed. (If you're wondering, my weight loss can be ascribed to that astonishing combination of eating less and moving around more.) So I was feeling quite perky about myself until I went to that centre of fashion excellence, Harvey Nichols.

Harvey Nichols is, if you don't know, a flash department store in Knightsbridge full of posh clothes and makeup and handbags that cost £2,300. I was there because they've got good clothes if you're like my best friend, who is 5ft 9, good-looking, and a size 10 (or sometimes 8). We went to look at things to buy for her to wear to her wedding. She bought something unutterably lovely that she looks really beautiful in, and that made me very happy.

But I felt miserable when I came out into the chilly afternoon. It's not like I have to buy all my clothes from specialist retailers for the larger lady, but I'd expect to be able to fondle a (UK) size 14 with a certain "it's only 4 months away" wistfulness. But in Harvey Nichols, the clothes on the racks only go up to a size 12, and that was obviously slightly obscene: the girl serving us described it as "very big". Down the road in Yves Saint Laurent they had a skirt that was so small I (genuinely) thought it was made for a child, and everything in Marc Jacobs seemed to be a size 4.

I'm not going to bother to go into what the media may or may not do to women. I can argue about who's most to blame, advertising or magazines, and I'm not sure there is an answer; both parties would, I've no doubt, say "we give people what they want". (Which is, incidentally, the tabloid newspapers' justification for what they do.) I'm not going to go into the social or sexual politics of it, quote Orbach, Paglia and Dworkin, tell you that over 50% of British women are over a size 16, that Nicole Richie looks shit that thin and will probably die soon if she carries on like that, that Victoria Beckham's waist size is the same as the average 10 year old girl and that only women over child-bearing age can afford those Marc Jacobs shirts in size 4. There's no point.

But I do know this: I will never, at 36, look good in a bikini. I will always have the very fine (and now, to my eyes, rather beautiful), silvery stretch marks on my tummy and arse. The best I can hope for is that I will be very fit one day, wear the clothes I want to wear, and that I won't have any bits that wobble or hang off. I'll be strong, able to run for half an hour without passing out, do cartwheels, climb trees, eat nice food, and die when I'm quite old. And that'll be good enough for me. As long as I avoid Harvey Nichols.