Desperate Husbands (15 page)

For six months, every breakfast has been a misery. ‘You need glasses,’ Jocasta says matter-of-factly, as she spoons down her cereal. ‘Go on admit it. It’s just vanity that’s stopping you. You just can’t admit you’re getting old.’

‘I don’t need glasses,’ I reply with measured dignity, as I resume my reading of the newspaper. ‘I just find the printer’s ink a little smelly at this time of day. That’s why I choose to hold the newspaper at arm’s length.’

Jocasta was issued with her reading glasses six months ago. To be ahead of her partner in this matter has been driving her crazy. As soon as we sit down to read the paper it begins. ‘The way you’re holding that paper is ridiculous,’ she’ll announce, peering at me over the top of her new glasses. ‘Is there any way you could be holding it further away? I mean, give it six months and you’ll need a pair of
binoculars just to get the gist of the TV guide. Two years on and you’ll need the Hubble Telescope.’

I ignore these attacks but secretly realise something is amiss. The newspaper, I come to understand, is in the grip of drastic cost-cutting—with stealthy reductions in the type size just to save money. It is a scandal not limited to the newspaper industry; I spot the same practice among the major book publishers, and noticeably among the manufacturers of supermarket goods. On cans, pill packets and cereal boxes the information on the back is now impossible to read.

In the face of this conspiracy I have no choice but to approach Jocasta’s optometrist and seek assistance. I arrive at the shopping mall with the name and address Jocasta has supplied. I’m surprised to discover that the optometrist is a disturbingly young man with no apparent need to wear spectacles himself.

He takes me into his rooms. It’s quite a process. Once in the chair, the young man swings this huge metal contraption in front of my eyes. It has two tiny eyeholes surrounded by metal levels and multicoloured cogs: it’s like being fitted with a pair of Elton John’s sunglasses. He asks me to read off various charts.

‘It’s all part of the ageing process,’ he says, as he twiddles with Elton’s glasses. ‘As we age, the muscles in the eyes can weaken,’ he continues, using the word ‘we’ even though he clearly isn’t doing much ageing himself. ‘You’ll find that process may continue as ageing proceeds.’

Frankly, I don’t care for his overuse of the term ‘ageing’. Nor his wrinkle-free, spectacle-free face which stares down at me. It’s like being served a bottle of overproof rum by a
teetotaller barman. I wonder if I should write a complaint letter to his employer.

I toy with asking him whether he can look up Jocasta’s eye-test results and whisper them to me. That way I could head home and tell Jocasta how far ahead of me she is in the race towards old age, infirmity and bed-wetting. I then remember her first appointment and how she’d come home in such high spirits, describing the optometrist as ‘very helpful, quite young and extremely good-looking’. Certainly the complaint letter will be a long one.

‘I think you do need a little assistance,’ the young man says brightly, sweeping Elton’s spare pair to one side. His eyes sparkle with good health, as he jots down a series of numbers on his pad—no doubt optometrists’ code for ‘silly old goat, blind as a bat: get out the Coke-bottle bottoms and do it quick.’

A week later the new glasses arrive and I pick them up on the way home. Jocasta can’t believe her luck.

‘Your eyes look huge in them. It’s like living with Marty Feldman. Or some sort of hyperthyroid bug.’ With that, she rushes towards me. ‘Quick, let me have a go,’ she says, slipping them on and squealing with delight. ‘The prescription must be three, four times as strong as mine. You’re so much blinder than me!’

The glasses certainly give me a new angle on the world. Suddenly everything close up is magnified. I stare down at the keyboard as I type and my hands look alarmingly large, like they’ve suddenly grown by twenty-five per cent. I glance over to the phone on my desk and reel back startled. The thing is twice its normal size, as if it’s bulked up on steroids. I feel like Gulliver in the land of giants. I take the glasses off
and let them dangle on a string around my neck. I look like a baffled librarian.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Jocasta. ‘It’s true, your pair is stronger than mine but that won’t last for ever. I’m feeling the need to go back to that optometrist quite soon, just to have a good look at his charts. That guy, he’s a sight for sore eyes.’

I sit down at my keyboard and adjust my spectacles. It’s good to have a strong pair when a letter of complaint gets
this
lengthy.

Australia, we’re told, is in the grip of an Obesity Epidemic. The problem is so bad the government has even hosted an Obesity Summit, which I think is the wrong name. It makes me think of a group of red-faced fat men sitting atop Kosciusko, panting from the effort of getting there. They’d be better with the Obesity Depression, which might better sum up the nature of the problem.

Mind you, I’ve been doing my bit to help. A few months ago, I signed up at a gym, paid $400, and now never turn up. Already my wallet is a lot lighter. The downside is they send me perky letters, straight off the word processor, with lots of exclamation marks!! ‘Hi Richard!! It’s a beautiful day down here at the gym!!! Where are you!!!! We are missing you!!!!!’

This is so stomach-turning I usually bring up my breakfast. Already I am four kilos lighter. The program is worth every cent.

I have some friends in the
posher
suburbs who’ve gone for the opposite approach. They go to a bloke who shouts at them. Apparently he’s a former Hungarian secret policeman. If you break your diet you get the full treatment of terror and torture. I love the idea of rich people paying to be abused. You can imagine how the one-upmanship will develop: ‘Our personal trainer was a paid thug at Israel’s Mossad headquarters.’

‘Darling, that’s nothing, our chappie ran the interrogations at South Africa’s notorious Modderbee prison. When he says to me “Run, kaffir, run,” the weight just pours off me. He’s such a bastard, it’s divine.’

Lucy will have a paid assassin from Russia; Jilly an ageing Chilean secret policeman; while Ross will be seeing a standover merchant from Chinatown: ‘Ross, you either lose the five kilos by Saturday or there won’t be an unbroken lobster tank in your whole house.’

I think our local gym is better. It’s mixed: men and women; fat and thin. Every time a young woman walks in, all the middle-aged men on exercise bikes pick up speed. It’s wonderful to watch. As soon as she’s gone, they slow down again, fighting for breath. I wonder if this could be a new source of green energy: whole squads of middle-aged men on bikes wired up to the national grid with an aerobics class starting somewhere nearby. There may be some fatalities but it’s a risk we’d be willing to take for the sake of global warming.

Meanwhile, incidental exercise is now all the rage. The experts say you can get big results by making tiny changes. Already I’m watching SBS more, since its position on the remote control makes it a real stretch for my index finger.
And if I switch to Tasmanian beer, I’ll have to use an opener each time I reach for a bottle. This, I think, is what experts mean by ‘dieting smart’.

I’ve also developed my own diet called the Mechanical Breakdown Diet. This involves sitting on the couch after you’ve had dinner. Every ten minutes you jump up, walk to the fridge and conduct a battle of wills while standing bathed in the fridge’s ghostly light. Eventually, you master yourself and sit down again, having eaten nothing. The process is repeated all night until the fridge breaks down and you have to throw out all the food, which makes the next day’s dieting so much easier.

Sadly, even this method is not entirely successful. Perhaps we need a dieters’ code of practice:

1. A second helping of dinner contains no calories, as long as it is eaten directly from the plate of leftovers while standing at the kitchen counter.
   
2. Squares of cooking chocolate contain no calories, as long as they’re eaten straight from the fridge while bathed in the light of the open door.
   
3. If you eat something but don’t really like the taste, then the calories don’t count. Feel free to fetch yourself something better.
   
4. As noted in my book
   In Bed with Jocasta
   , broken biscuits located at the bottom of the Tupperware contain no calories. (Since publication of the book, I have heard of some people purposely breaking biscuits in order to render them broken. This is, however, not permitted. Even dieters should have
   some
   standards.)
   
5. Fundraising chocolates contain no calories, their consumption better covered by the phrase ‘community service’ than by the brutally reductive term ‘eating’.
   
6. If there’s only one slice of cake left, its consumption is best described by the phrase ‘saving Glad Wrap’ than by the mean-hearted observation ‘breaking your diet’.
   
7. Licking icing from utensils at the end of the cooking process involves no intake of calories.
   
8. If the product is labelled ‘lite’, go ahead and eat twice as much.
   
9. Dessert eaten in a restaurant does contain calories—but only if you were the one who placed the order. Feel free to encourage your partner to order dessert while demurring politely: ‘Oh no, not for me, I just couldn’t. I’m absolutely full.’ Once the plate arrives, lean over menacingly with a spare fork and polish off the lot, down to licking the plate with a maniacal laugh and warning off others with your knife.
   
10. Celery, bran and spinach all contain negative calories. Eating them in large quantities allows you to double your consumption of everything else.
    
11. Ice-cream scraped off the bottom of the lid contains no calories.
    
12. Sausages which have fallen off the BBQ contain no calories.
    
13. The last piece of cheese on a platter does contain calories but only if eaten in one go. Try cutting it in half, eating that, cutting it in half again, then eating that, and so on until there is just a tiny sliver left. Then eat the sliver on the basis that ‘there’s only the tiniest sliver left’.
    
14. Crackling consumed while carving is exempt from calories. So is any food eaten while cooking.
    
15. A bite taken from your child’s chocolate bar contains no calories, as long as the bite is preceded by the explanation: ‘I’m just checking it’s not poisoned.’
    
16. Chips from McDonald’s contain no calories if eaten from your child’s packet and preceded by the explanation: ‘I just wanted to check they were hot.’
    
17. Food cooked by your child is exempt.
    
18. Birthday cake eaten while standing at a child’s birthday party is exempt.
    
19. Food left over after filling a Tupperware container is fair game, and your actions, standing there at the kitchen counter, are best described by the phrase ‘tidying up’ than by the overly pointed ‘being a disgusting pig’.
    
20. The quicker you bolt something down, the fewer calories it has. Remember: squares of chocolate only contain calories if you are fully cognisant of what you are doing.
    
21. You can eat anything—three pies and a box of donuts—providing you wash it down responsibly with a couple of Diet Cokes.
    
22. If you slice the ham thinly you can have twice as much.
    
23. Any failure to lose weight is due to one having ‘a slow metabolism’ or ‘big bones’.
    
24. If your diet is not working, feel free to choose a different diet. Or, even better, different friends. By surrounding yourself with fatter mates, you’ll instantly look thinner.
    
25. And, finally, there is a complete exemption for food eaten after a particularly horrendous day at work. Or, for that matter, a particularly wonderful day. Indeterminate, mediocre, neither-good-nor-bad days can also be pretty hard to take in a way that can only really be redeemed by a good self-saucing butterscotch pudding.
    

I’m happy to give evidence on all these matters to the Obesity Summit. Just as soon as they install a lift to get me there.

The Neatwhistles are a quiet and industrious family who, up to this week, have rarely been in the news. Yet late yesterday Jenny Neatwhistle felt it necessary to issue a dramatic profit warning for the family group, pointing to rising input costs and ‘bugger all’ chances of a pay rise. Grocery cost projections, last calculated in January, had not taken account of the growth in appetite of their sons, Mark, Hugo and Philip, who these days ‘just pack it away like there’s no tomorrow’. In addition, income from Lotto investments had been well down on expectations in the June quarter, with suggestions that Tom Neatwhistle be forced to reconsider his current system of choosing all six numbers from the last but bottom row.

Some analysts say they are surprised the Neatwhistles have been able to limp on this long, and have questioned the income base of the whole operation.

Says Bill Moneypenny, an analyst with the Bank of Texas-BRL Porkbros: ‘At least half the group’s income is dependent on Tom Neatwhistle and yet he’s in his mid-forties, and unlikely to see any real growth in income. Plus, with every year, his running costs rise.’ Indeed, says Moneypenny, close study of the family accounts reveals that Tom has taken to buying wine at $14.90 a bottle, telling his wife that ‘If a bloke can’t have a decent drop when he’s over forty, then what’s the point of it all?’

Moneypenny says this has broken the ‘psychologically important $10 barrier’, and could result in an almost limitless blow-out just keeping Tom running. ‘You watch,’ he says. ‘By December it will be the Wynns Cab-Sav at $18 a go and I’m talking weeknights.’

The situation does not improve even when you examine Jenny’s contribution to the income stream garnered through work as a teacher in the education sector.

Says Moneypenny: ‘The Neatwhistles’ sector exposure is all wrong: they’re fully weighted in mature low-growth sectors. They also are carrying these three completely unproductive boys.’ Moneypenny says the initial decision to have the boys was made in the late 1980s ‘when people were making all sorts of mad decisions to expand’, but years later they were still splashing nothing but red all over the balance sheet.

‘It’s hard to see what contribution they will ever make, except the odd pack of smelly soap on Jenny’s birthday and some bath gel at Christmas. Having boys is like investing in a boutique winery—OK if you can stand the losses and the constant disappointments.’

During a detailed phone call, Moneypenny questioned Jenny’s future plans, suggesting that she get rid of the
underperforming parts of the group—Tom and the three boys—and seek some high-value exposure in new areas. Says Moneypenny: ‘There’s far too much sentimentality in these small family groups. It may be that Tom could achieve a pay rise, yet he’s too scared to ask his boss for one. At the same time his health care costs have doubled over the last four years. Does Jenny pay for the back operation that Tom desperately needs or is it just throwing good money after bad? These are the sort of decisions the group faces.’

Tom, however, disputes the analysis. He says that he and three other non-executive directors have been deceived and had no idea of the problems emerging for the group. ‘Honestly, we’ve been kept in the dark,’ Tom says. ‘I’d also like to ask some questions of this Bill Moneypenny. Frankly, I think he’d like to see the break-up of the group. I question his motives.’

Moneypenny admits that if a break-up of the group did occur, then it would be ‘only natural’ for him to seek exposure to the group’s best performing sectors. ‘And, yes, I guess that means Jenny.’

Interviewed in his 43rd-floor office, atop Sydney’s imposing Semtex Tower, Moneypenny admits he first met Jenny at university in the late 1970s. He proposed a merger at the time but found himself rebuffed. ‘I think I was a bit too pushy, a bit too brash,’ admits Moneypenny, ‘but today I think I could really offer her something.’

Says Jenny: ‘Of course, it’s nice to get the overtures from Bill after all these years. He’s a real sweetie but Tom and I remain on course. The approach has been useful. It has brought problems out into the open, where the group will be able to address them in the coming period.’

At last night’s meeting of stakeholders, Tom’s back operation was green-lighted, the three boys agreed to do more work around the house, the blow-out in Tom’s drinking was tackled, and a new Lotto strategy was agreed upon, based on filling out the second but top line.

As Jenny puts it: ‘I guess there’s lots of ways of reading the same balance sheet.’