Dominic Prince - Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post

For Rose

Its early January and I am standing on the scales, singing. I come from a long line of people who sing out loud. My dad did it and my son Jack has inherited the trait. Not that I have much to sing about where I am standing now, mind. I cant see my feet and it is only by peering over the expanse of my stomach that I can see, aged forty-seven, I am topping 16 stone. While it was not always like this, it is not entirely surprising. I was born at the beginning of January 1961 at what was then the London Hospital, Whitechapel, in the East End of London. I weighed in at 11lb 6oz and remained for the rest of the year the fattest baby born at the London Hospital. I find it difficult to believe that my mother has ever forgiven me.

My clothes are tight. The waistband on my trousers cuts into my paunch and the 16-inch collars pinch at my Adams apple. The flesh rumples beneath the top button, and it feels like slow strangulation. I have been fighting an unwinnable battle for years, brought on by my own greed and slothfulness. Running for a bus is not nice. Little nodules erupt on the inside of my thighs and they are pretty painful. They are only there because my thighs are too fat and rub together like great elephant legs. I have a constant nagging paranoia about my health, high blood pressure and the possibility of a heart attack and a multitude of other life-threatening diagnoses, and yet I have hardly taken any exercise for two and a half decades.

Im a middle-aged journalist, with a twenty-a-day fag habit. I drink much more wine than I should, and eat more than almost anyone I know. The prognosis is not ideal. My wife says she fears for the future. What, that I might die? I ask, expecting her to break down in self-pitying tears at the prospect. No, that you might have a stroke aged fifty and Ill be lumbered with looking after you for the rest of my life. Shes nothing if not down to earth, my wife.

Although my condition is entirely self-inflicted, in my defence I must say that I do not stuff myself with junk food and drink gallons of lager. My girth has been built, not only on thousands of great restaurant lunches that were traditionally part and parcel of a hacks life, but on a delicious supply of home cooking. My wife, Rose, is a cookery author and food critic. For the last ten years she has written on a subject she is passionate about, and I have been happily sampling the by-product of her career. We both love eating and are obsessive about buying good food, going to what most people would think extraordinary lengths to eat the best.

In our house in London we grow our own vegetables in old wooden wine boxes and at the cottage in Dorset we plant them in a raised bed in the garden. I make bread from the wonderful oily flour supplied by Mr Stoate from Shaftesbury who mills his wheat between two stones using the River Stirkel to power the milling process. We have even kept sheep. When we were first married we kept a variety called Castlemilk Moorit and more recently I bought eight Texel lambs that we fattened and had killed in our local slaughterhouse. We then feasted on the sweet, crisp-skinned and beautifully butchered animals.

Over the years we have travelled thousands of miles to seek out the most delicious, well-hung, black sides of beef from an array of butchers around the country. The best sausages that I have ever eaten come from John Robinson, a butcher in Stockbridge, Hampshire. Sausages are one of my top ten favourite meals. Mr Robinson sells three tons a week at his tiny shop, on a counter no more than 15 feet long, and he employs around eighteen butchers. The meat and game is exemplary. Every child in the world I have ever met goes mad for Stockbridge sausages, and fights have even broken out over them theyre so good. They mince English shoulder of pork, add sage and other herbs and pump out the sausages by the trayful. They dont use preservatives, so they wont do mail order. If you want Robinsons sausages you have to go and collect them, but the journey is worth it.

A little further down the A30 from Stockbridge, going towards Salisbury, is Hollom Down Growers, a smallholdingcum-market garden where the most luscious soft fruit grows and ripens. In season, there are fields and fields full of huge, sweet strawberries, petite juicy raspberries, and tomatoes with such intense flavours that they might have been grown in Tuscany. Potatoes, leeks, apples, squashes, cucumbers, lettuces, peas, beans and onions can all be found there. And then there is always the creamy, sometimes sharp-flavoured cheeses assembled on the kitchen table for picking at and devouring after dinner in huge swathes of unadulterated, masticating passion.

Rose has always said that she has a terror of running out of food and, like me, she hates to miss a meal. She is sometimes recklessly extravagant when buying food and always buys too much. She does, however, love feeding people and having hordes of friends and family to dinner. On any given night, with our two children, we will eat a joint of well-hung and bloodied beef, then, the following day, we eat stacks of cold, rare roast beef sandwiches or bowls of spiced broth, made from the beef bones, with delicately cut strips of translucent, ruby meat.

Rose does the same with chicken. With the leftovers of a roast she will make a pot of rich stock from the simmered bones. She uses this to make sublime and creamy soups, sometimes with watercress, at other times with squash or celery leaves. Sometimes she scatters pieces of crisp smoked bacon over these soups, or crumbles a piece of fried black pudding, or adds an extra dash of cream. We will then eat the soup with the bread I have baked along with great glaciersized chunks of melting unsalted butter.

More stock goes into the comforting risottos that we eat regularly, unctuous pools of slowly cooked rice scattered with Grana Padano cheese. Sometimes these will have added porcini or asparagus; sometimes they are simply seasoned with saffron or handfuls of chopped fresh herbs.

Without question, my favourite dish is game. In winter we can always look forward to enjoying dishes of pheasant, grouse and partridge with buttered baby turnips, carrots and spinach. We will eat them with fried breadcrumbs, bread sauce or sometimes roast them on a slice of bread. Potatoes come roasted in beef dripping or goose fat, or are sometimes mashed with hot milk and butter. If there are seconds I am first in the queue. Then there are the peripheral delicacies I love to pick at between meals. We both love cheese, and spend far too much on artisan cheddar, buttery blue cheeses or interesting little rounds of bloomy rinded cheeses made with ewes milk.

Feeding children brings the inevitable opportunity to snack on their six oclock leftovers a nibble of bread-crumbed fish here, a mouthful of pasta there. Sometimes we will order a takeaway of a few deliciously buttery curries, popadoms, bhajis and chapattis, and when the children have had their fill I will put away anything that is left on the table.

But it is not just the food. For as long as I can remember I have drunk a lot of wine. Not every night but most evenings I will get through a bottle, perhaps a bit more. Although this is way above the recommended daily intake I do not seem to suffer ill-effects, apart from being too fat. There is no diabetes, few bad hangovers, no greater loss of concentration, in fact nothing that would serve as a warning that I am drinking too much and I rarely wake full of remorse, cursing the night before.

My exercise consists of walking to the newsagent for a newspaper and, if I am smoking, a packet of fags. Rose also takes up and gives up smoking intermittently, but regularly runs round our local park. The fitter she has become the more frequently she asks when I will try to do something about my weight, or take a break from drinking so much. I have always had a good line ready when under attack: I am putting a date in the diary, I will say. After the wedding/birth-day/dinner/Christmas party delete as appropriate. Exercise, if it is taken at all, has been both irregular and painful: the odd swim and game of tennis if the weather is nice. But both leave me feeling knackered and unable to move properly for days after. There was a game of football once with some friends in Battersea Park. We played against a group of young kids and after an hour we were so exhausted that we spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub and vowed never to play again.