Well, we tried everything.

The Atkins Diet.

The Ketotonic Diet.

The High Fat Diet.

The Eat Fat Get Thin Book.

Eat Keto.

The Have as Many Steaks and as Much Clotted Cream As You Like Diet.

Ok, fair enough, we didn’t try quite everything. Not Weightwatchers, for instance. (Too complicated.) Or Calorie-Counting. (Too finickity.) Or Ryvetas and dry pasta. (Enuf sed.)

Thing is, there are some things I can kiss goodbye to without a second thought. Mainly because they’re so mind-numbingly boring.

White rice. White pasta. Mother’s Pride. (Other brands available just as boring.) Cheap shop vanilla catering-style ice cream made of thinly disguised whale blubber and chemical oil. White sugar. Nice Biscuits.

Let’s face it, nobody’s life is any the poorer without these foods, right? I mean, they’re not even food, most of them.

Other deprivations, however, can cause serious hardship.

Suppose someone offered you a juicy, well-matured 8 oz piece of rare fillet raised on the Devonshire hillside… or dessert-spoonful of fresh clotted cream with the yellow crust glistening at the top… or a glass of Moët full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim…

Way I see it, I don’t mind going without the pancakes as long as I get the Peking duck. With all the crunchy bits.

I’ll go further: I don’t even mind giving up skimmed milk in my coffee as long as it’s got plenty of double cream in it.

So obviously, I mean obviously, the Atkins Diet is a no-brainer. Because you don’t have to give anything up that you actually want to eat. (Except, perhaps, apples. And alcohol.) It’s just, like, normal.

So far so good.

Except that after about twenty years of this regime of roast beef and red wine, Shaun still hadn’t lost any weight.

Personally, I think this is because he never quite got the hang of the whole diet philosophy thing. He would dutifully eat all the things in the Atkins book that we were supposed to eat.

But then walk past a bowl of Kettles Crisps and just check that they were every bit as tasty at the bottom as they were at the top. That’s not a meal, right?

Or conscientiously eat the full ketotonic English breakfast… but then get a bit bored before it was not quite time for the cappuccino with triple cream mid-morning, so just open the fridge to check there were no chocolate brownies in there that were in the way and needed getting rid of.

In other words, he didn’t have any problem eating all the right things. It was eschewing all the wrong ones that he seemed to consider a bit fanatical.

And then, last year, we went to the Ruby Wedding of a friend whom I’d adored since she was a lovely cuddly seventeen-year-old… and my word! She had lost three stone and looked utterly amazing.

How? I said.

Well, we tried her method too. Paying someone to ring up every week to check that you really haven’t been cheating.

Which is all very well, but it just makes you cheat twice. You eat the contraband. And then lie about it afterwards.

Actually, that is a vile slur: Shaun is a man of the cloth.

Did you tell Rachel you had a slice of pavlova? I would ask. In a totally unnaggy-just-being-a-supportive-wife, way of course.

Certainly not, he would say. She didn’t ask.

Fair enough. Ahem.

The main difficulty, though, was that some evil genius inspired Ben to use lockdown to progress from a really, seriously, very good cook indeed, to being so far above and beyond, that not to eat his meals would have been like throwing one of Anatole’s creations into the Empress’s sty.

I can’t do this alone, Shaun said. And actually, I thought that really was pretty reasonable.

So given that we were going to be away on our own, for some weeks, it seemed like now or never…