Only Sixteen

The group of nutters who published my Ambrose Bierce piece, who go by the collective name "We're Not Funny", posed a question yesterday that's been on my mind ever since. Well, not so much a question as an opportunity.

Dear 16-year-old me...it said.

I gave a few random answers, but it strikes me, on balance, that the one thing I'd really tell the 16-year-old me would be to lose the weight and keep it off.

Like a whole lot of people who've long since stopped crying about it, I was bullied as a kid and a teenager. There were a handful of reasons - in the Valleys of 70s and 80s South Wales, kids thought I was a) Posh, b) English and c) Gay - pretty much all because I had a vocabulary and appeared to have picked my accent up more from watching the barristers on Crown Court than from anywhere local. Plus of course I was always a smartarse, and I was The Fat Kid.

Given that I was a) Poor, b) Welsh and c) Errrm...just Welsh, there wasn't a whole hellofalot I could do about their preconceptions of my accent, and clearly, I was always gonna be a smartarse. But the whole Fat Kid thing - well, clearly that I brought on myself. I'm not about to indulge in revisionist history, and tell you that it sucked to be The Fat Kid, cos all in all, it really didn't, and the things that really screwed me up had nothing to do with it...

Well....not much, anyway.
But the weird thing is, I did this sort of experiment when I was about sixteen. I was, as memory serves, about fifteen stone and probably not yet my ultimate 5ft 6. I fancied the brains out of one particular girl who was different and brilliant and altogether shiny-souled. And what was infinitely more, she seemed to understand the way my mind worked. So, for the possibility of turning her first into a friend, and then posibly more, I lost something like five stone (75 pounds, or 34 Kg), to try and turn myself into something other than the Fat Kid. Clearly in purely clinical terms, it worked - I lost the weight. But the objective never panned out, and in something like disappointment, over time, I stopped caring so much and grew bigger again...and then bigger and bigger.

I don't know what my life would have turned out to be like if I'd kept the weight off back then. Probably very little would have been different - as I say, the things that actually screwed me up had already happened by then, and were only tangentially weight-related. But one thing I know - if I'd kept the weight off as a sixteen year old, I'd probably never have become a diabetic, never developed the health problems I've got now.

Strikes me that'd be something worth knowing and taking seriously as a sixteen year old.

On the other hand, knowing me, what I'd probably really tell myself is that one day, Doctor Who would be cool, and to keep working on those stories of mine.

Didn't do that either, but it would have been easier advice to follow...