Sniffing The Boobies of Doom

It's time to talk about perversity.
Most of you don't know me from Adam, and some of you do. After even just a few posts though, you'll probably all snort coffee down your nose if I try to tell you I'm basically an innocent, clean-living lad. But it's time to come a little bit cleaner about a habit I've gotten into over the last year.

My...
(Sigh...)
My name's Tony, and I'm a dessert-sniffer.

Yeah, you heard me. Faint now or come with me to the Dark Side.

When I stopped actually eating desserts a year ago, I was sick of the sugar, the cream, the everything-wonderful-in-this-world...ness of my life after a hedonistic week in the States. Frankly, I think plane tickets to the States should come with a Government health warning if you're coming from the UK. Brits are simply not equipped for the insane, gorgeous, wonderful, deadly amount of choice there is in the States, or the acceptance that your destiny is nobody else's business, come to that. The first time I went, I wandered for an hour, eyes glazed, close to tears of wonder and joy...and that was just the cereal aisle of the local Wal-Mart. If you're from a country that loves nothing better than complaining about the rain and queueing, and which has actually experienced post-colonial guilt, rationing and socialism in government, it tends to leave you with a shruggy, accepting mentality and low culinary standards, so being exposed to the sheer wealth of choice of sweet things that most Americans take entirely for granted tends to leave you shell-shocked with wonderment, and drooling into your beard.

Orrrr.....maybe that's just me. Anyhow, the combination of orgiastic choice and the lack of anyone appearing to think badly of me following acts of gorgeous, and indeed gorging, gluttony, rather sated me in February 2010, and at Chicago Airport, preparing to fly home to the land of steamed puddings, steak and kidney pie and fritters, I swore off desserts forever in a fit of ascetic, vaguely weird, moral superiority.

Which is all very well and pompous of course, but it's not something that should be taken too seriously or kept up for any length of time. Especially not by someone like me, because just in case anyone's confused here and thinks I got to be the size I am as the result of a cruel glandular condition, let's call a fat fuck a fat fuck here. I got to be the size I am through sheer, unremitting dedication to the joy of sugar, the lust for lard and a craving for carbs. I love desserts. Love them. I mean, I've written poems to cheesecakes before now. Hell, I've written an epic novel about a custard slice, for Christ's sake. I LOVE desserts. Swearing off them was probably one of the most sensually stupid ideas I've had in my nearly-40 years on this planet. And frankly, when it comes to desserts, I have no discretion, and I'm very much a man. The more crap you can pile on top, the more twinkly and gloopy and outright slutty the dessert gets, the happier I am. If you've ever wondered who the designer had in mind when you see one of those insane seven-story ice-cream desserts with unidentifiable things dangling off them and sparklers stuck in the top...it was me. Well, me and seven-year-olds, but you get the picture. I reeeeeallly love desserts.

Which makes deciding never to eat them again...shall we say...a little tricky. Because you can make the decision in a fit of moral superiority, but I'm here to tell you, that lasts - at most - about a week. And then you're stuck with the inconvenient truth that your body is on its knees in gratitude for the decision you've made, so you can't really stop now, and you're left with only your own bastard-stubbornness to get you through. Which isn't enough.

Unless...
Unless you have a partner who's prepared to let you get all perverse from time to time. The partner could be a real partner, a good friend who doesn't want you to fall off the dessert-cart, or even, theoretically, an endless stream of Strangers In A Restaurant. Though if you ask a stranger if you can sniff their dessert, you have to pick the stranger carefully, or you could end up wearing their dessert....which sort of defeats the purpose, really.

d, bless her, has taken the development of my dessert-sniffing habit in her stride. All she asks is that I don't breathe out in her bags of candy (and no, that's not a euphemism), because the condensation makes them rather grim.

So when I have a skin-crawling dessert-craving, like I did last night, and the beams of "I hate you all, and the desserts you rode in on" are shooting out of my eyeballs like I've turned into BuzzKill, the Diabetic Super-Villain, d will occasionally, meekly and with a look of bemused amusement, hand over her dessert, for a pre-spoon sniff. That's true love, that is.

Last night, it was two small Sainsburys creme caramels, turned out onto the same plate, side by side, and draped in rich, heady Waitrose Caramel, till they were enrobed in dark, thick liquid sugar.

"Oh look," she said, as I literally chewed the furniture with lust. "The Boobies of Doom!"
Then she handed them over for sniffing.

Probably saved her life, to be fair. Still, I prefer to think it was true love...