Did I have my last onion?
Back about to go out
Ageing’s a bit like that line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “How did I go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, and then suddenly.”
It does feel like, all of a sudden, the sun is setting on my youth. Like I’m watching the bit where it looks like a fried egg before it slides off the pan altogether.
I think the first sign was seeing my Samson-like hair thinning to reveal my Mr Burns-like head. Then it was my back going out when I got up from desk, forcing me to style it out into a pimp walk. And now it’s this doctor-enforced diet that’s gluten for punishment.
The FODMAP diet sounds tantalisingly close to the “food map diet”, where you try foods from every country to see which one you like the most. FODMAP is almost the exact opposite of that: You cut out all the foods you love, to see which one makes your tummy hurt.
For 6 weeks, I have to cut out a baffling array of foods: bread and pasta, some fruits and vegetables, some nuts and seeds, milk but not cheese. It’s such a confusing list that when someone offers me a crisp, I have to check its ingredients in an app before I inevitably sigh and say ‘no’.
I don’t mind it, really. It’s just when they discover which food is bothering me, will I have had my last slice of sourdough? My last square of chocolate? My last… onion? If I’d have known, I’d have savoured them with more ceremony. Closed my eyes. Used a tablecloth. As it was, they were probably thrown down the hatch, hunched over the kitchen sink, while the kids shouted for “more raisins!” (which I can’t have, incidentally).
It's this idea of not going back; of being ‘over the hill’ – an expression that’s quant until your knees are buckling on the descent. If I could somehow twist my aged body round and look back at my young self, all lithe with luscious locks, would I want to swap places? And what would he think of me? (Other than I now walk like a pimp.)
Lithe-and-luscious me might have been able to get in and out of office chairs without doing his back in, but FODMAP me, despite my deteriorating eyesight, can actually see things more clearly.
In my youth, I thought I had all the answers. Everything was black or white. Now in my middle age, I appreciate the grey areas. Like the diet, it’s not just carbs and dairy. Life’s more nuanced than that. And while I don’t know how either’s going to end, I’m going to enjoy every gluten-free cupcake like it’s the last. And I never much liked onions anyway.
