Monday is my Friday. You can swap the days around a bit when you’re retired. More specifically, I mean that Monday night is my Friday night. Monday night is when I can have a glass or three of the red stuff because Monday tea-time is when I get weighed at Fat Club. Forget Tuesday morning when I have to take the car for a service and later try to be reasonably intelligent with a friend that I’m meeting at the museum for a spot of culture. Yawn.

Knowing that the weekly weigh-in is imminent, Monday is nothing short of paranoia: up early for the gym and thirty tiresome lengths in the pool. Back indoors for black coffee and a boring Weetabix accompanied by skimmed water masquerading as milk. Walk here, walk there, followed by a sorry attempt at gardening; driven on only by a winking bottle of Shiraz that’s been opened and allowed to breathe at 9am. It’ll need a respirator by the time The Archers starts.

Finally, it’s time to fight a way through the tea-time traffic towards the community hall where all the other fat folk are anxiously gathered. We have a new leader. He calls himself a consultant. The last one got the push for being too fat. When I joined, way back in the mists of January, I mistook Toby for the leader. Toby turned out to be another newbie but it was an easy mistake. He looked pretty trim in my swollen eyes. ‘Oh no’, said Toby. ‘Here’s Roger now’.

Roger was pretty big. Well, not so pretty – just big. A bit like the weebles that don’t wobble. They just fall down. ‘He’s not a very good role model’, said mouth of the south without thinking. Toby pretended he wasn’t with me. I mean, I’m the last person to judge anyone but you need a before and after version in which the before is bigger than the after. Obviously, Roger was very nice. Everyone said so when he was presented with his leaving gift: a large box of Black Magic.

Then the new bloke arrived. Jeff. He turned the joint around. Literally. No-one knew where the hell they were. The books and syn-free chocs were at the wrong end of the room. Jeff was entertaining the next cohort of ginormous Twiggies slap bang in the middle of the weighing queue. Folk waiting for the inevitable disappointment shuffled around aimlessly and the ladies with the scales were lost behind a bunch of posters ten feet high. ‘I can feel a different atmosphere’, said the returner in front of me. Bloody right. It’s bad enough having to rock up here when you could be at home on the settee watching Pointless.

I’ve lost one and a half stones. Will you be staying asks the lady who dispenses the certificates? I stayed the other week when I was presented with my piece of paper for losing ten per cent of my body weight; at which time I was greeted with mass hatred from the onlookers. I don’t think so, I say and make some inane excuse about traffic and further gardening duties. She’s not stupid. She knows I’m going home to down the Shiraz. Have a good week, she says. I certainly will until I get to next Sunday.