sports food

as a broken limb
altered my spin
i bonk by bonkhill
(they slip a shag
in every gap)
i could be ripped
i swear
aside a predilection
for chocolate and beer
it’s a bitter sweet dichotomy,
but i need treats
eat sweet gelatine,
spluttering
up the mountain
traffic jam

what got me into sport? as a child, i just liked playing football. i was obsessive, it was all i did. i was a skinny wee boy. but i always thought i was fat for some reason. i wrote a short story about body image and social difficulties when i was about 15. i called it sunburn, but my teacher said it should be called ‘in your shadow’ and i just went along with it. i was thinking about it the other day, and decided to rename it ‘shade’.

i will dig it out and post it the blog sometime. but that was just a digression. i lost my connection to sport when i left school, and did get a little bit fat. because i love eating sweets. so i started dieting and running. lost the weight. felt accomplished.

but to keep the weight off, i needed to keep running. and, the sums are no good. a 40 minute run might only burn off two mars bars. so i got into road cycling. and now i just eat whatever sweets i fancy whenever i want. i’m not sure i would recommend this as ‘healthy’ or anything.

and in a fog of lousy vibes await an operative positive.

calling back to yesterday’s quite literary post, i am suddenly reminded of a literary/confectionary connection of note. roald dahl was one of my favourite childhood authors. i am ashamed to say my inner reactionary preferred enid blyton generally. but long before i had started on adult books i had reaslised that dahl had the superior worldview.

anyway, while of course dahl famously wrote ‘charlie and the chocolate factory,’ you may be unaware he also wrote a non-fiction essay ‘the chocolate revolution’ which revealed him to be a keen lover and historian of confectionary, and a particular aficionado of the ‘golden age’ of chocolate, 1930-1937, a heady seven years of sin which saw the inventions of many of the great confections of our age of tooth decay: the mars bar, the crunchie, the curly wurly, the aero, and the ‘energy balls’ – which are now known as ‘maltesers’.

what is your favourite chocolate bar?