I am calm now.

I went to Starbucks today to read Margaret Atwood and write about the other customers there. I started to write instead about fat, and how I felt about it; pitiful or disgusting or both, in essence.

Overeating (which I have been indulging in at the moment) happens when I am bored. It's something nice and indulgent and utterly futile to do that occupies me; so what I need is an equivalent, that's satisfying and pointless, to stop me doing it.

Or I could simply make believe. This was always one of my favourite games as a child, to pretend I was thin and bronzed like Enid Blyton's book heroes and heroines. Of course, I was ginger and lardy, and dressed hopelessly (a mix of the nineteen-nineties influenced by my parents and the eighteen-nineties, selected by myself) but I was nontheless happy.

I worry about my own attitude to fat, not least because of the consequences on myself but because of what it implies about how I feel about Little Bird. I, as much as anyone, can look at a person and feel pity because they are so large, or that they are stupid for eating so much. Those are people that whizz round on scooters because they're so large, or have a belt cutting into the expanse of their stomach. Do I just want someone to pity? I don't find Little Bird repulsive or pitiful; I want to comfort her when she is sad about it, but I think that her own stomach, her legs and her arms, are beautiful and strong. She's maybe stocky; she is nowhere near the scooter scale. It is strange; I do not want to possess her figure; but I do adore it.

Deep down, I do think that everyone should look 'healthy'. That isn't to say that BMI values hold; more that one should look as if you can run for a bus without breaking sweat. My Mum, who must weigh 12 or 14 st at 5ft5 is fine. Little Bird (maybe twelve or eleven stones at five foot four) is also fine; she can run and run and run, though they're both very different builds; my Mum is the kind that will always look slim or toned, she's muscular and, even at forty-eight, has no hint of jowl or double chin. Little Bird is softer and smaller built, and so looks larger, though she weighs the same or less. I can only think of one friend that I'd rate as unhealthily large; a friend and two acquaintances. Funnily enough, one I find self-absorbed and I feel bored with the other two; I wouldn't dislike someone on the basis of fat, but it's something to feel schadenfreude over.

I simply find it strange that I can abhor a rotund figure for myself, and on some others, yet rapturize over hers.