The Bloody Mary, and 15 inches of Heaven - (extraordinarily, word for word as appeared in the) South Shropshire Journal 3/1/14

Were I not writing this column some time before you actually get to read it, I’d sympathise with your hangovers. Most of you I guess won’t be back at work yet so my musings on the perfect Bloody Mary may just about still hold some weight…but I imagine you’re too hammered to care. Although New Year’s Day has been and gone, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t still be knocking back the old BMs. This concoction of vodka and tomato juice is in my opinion, the very best cocktail of them all. My advice? Use cheapish vodka, tomato juice from the pricier end of the spectrum (there’s this stuff called V8 which is just the business), and whatever you do don’t add horseradish. The bits! Just ghastly. Some people add sherry, or even port, but not me. There’s gilding the lily, and then there’s opening yourself up to a whole heap of trouble.

So you’re probably under the impression that my body is the Holy of Holies, not so much a temple, but a veritable cathedral to healthy living and wholesomeness. You’d be wrong though. Just ten minutes ago I answered the door to a very polite young man from the Ludlow Pizza Company who (to my wife’s horror) delivered me 15 inches of pure deliciousness. Once in a while I like to stray from the path of hand-woven, biodynamic, fresh from the mud superfood and really spoil myself with something greasy and flip-me-over bad. To the LPC’s credit, the pizza I had, whilst utterly scrummy, was not quite the lard-fest I’d been hoping for.

If I’m on a motorway I will do everything in my power to pull over at Burger King or the ‘other one’ with the golden arches, and embark on gastronomic hari kari. Two bacon double cheeseburgers in rapid succession maybe twice a year is just about enough for me, but I truly adore eating this kind of stuff. It’s the treat of all treats and I’m sure that if I ate junk on a daily basis my body wouldn’t crave it at all. In fact the first time my wife gave birth and was incarcerated in Shrewsbury Hospital for four days, I subsisted entirely on supermarket ready meals and takeaway filth. My forehead sweated oily droplets and my guts churned angrily, full of empty calories, to the point where I craved lettuce.

While you’re setting about joining a gym that you’ll never go to, giving up the fags and starting a faddy-faffy new diet, this is probably not what you want to be reading. But, you know me, I like to buck the trend. And I like to keep the party going well into the new year before reality eventually and inevitably kicks back in.