Fat Chance by Nick Spalding Read Free Book Online Page A

clearly wasn’t prepared for the scale of this enterprise. No event that I’ve been involved in at the station has been on this scale before, so I guess I lulled myself into a false sense of security. More fool me.
    They’ve really gone to town on this bugger, though. It feels like they’ve thrown more cash at it than a Hollywood movie company would at a blockbuster.
    Everywhere I look I seem to see billboards, advertising banners, flyers, posters, and cardboard standees—a majority of which feature my ugly mug.
    I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope with this kind of local celebrity . I know damn well that Greg won’t.
    I know one other thing for certain. If I hated Mondays before Elise convinced me to take part in Fat Chance, I loathe them with a passion that’s almost holy now.
    Quick side note: Who thought the title Fat Chance would be a good idea? I’m willing to bet all the money in my bank account that it was a thin person. They probably thought it sounded extremely clever, without taking into account the fact that it sounds pretty fucking unkind to those of us taking part.
    Anyway, Monday is ‘check in’ day at the radio station, where we go all on the Elise and Will morning show and chat about how our weight loss programmes are going. If it wasn’t bad enough that I have to spill my guts in this diary all the time, I also have to stammer my way through a mini-interview with my so called best friend and her effeminate co-host at the start of each week.
    And while Elise is a lovely person off air, once you stick a microphone in her hand she turns into the kind of door-stopping aggressive journalist that cheating politicians have come to know and fear.
    A good case in point was yesterday’s show.
    It was our third appearance on the radio, and by now Greg and I are getting to know the rest of the couples engaged in this madness . Before every on-air conversation with Will and Elise, we get to sit in the green room together, drinking poor-quality instant coffee and trying to pretend we’re not nervous.
    Here’s a rundown of our fellow contestants. I’ll largely skip the physical descriptions as there’s only so many adjectives I can use to describe someone who’s overweight without descending into insult (and obligatory self-loathing).
    Valerie and George look like they should be running a tea shop somewhere. A successful one, no doubt. Both in their early sixties, they look like the sort of kindly rotund grandparents we all wish we’d had when we were kids. George has the variety of bushy moustache that milk must stick to like a magnet every time he consumes it. Val wears a tiny pair of round spectacles that she hangs around her neck on a silver chain when she’s not using them to peer into her copy of the latest Mills & Boon. You can just tell that these two homely, avuncular folk owe their weight gain to a lot of foodstuffs containing cream. I doubt they’ve ever looked a Big Mac in the eye, but are entirely at home around clotted cream and scones.
    Angela and Dominica are a lesbian couple, who look completely bewildered most of the time. It’s as if they were convinced they’d be firmly rejected for the show given their sexual orientation, were dumbfounded to discover that they weren’t, and are actually now part of this madness. I love the pair of them, though. Even in the few brief conversations we’ve had, they seem like friendly, open people. Angela is a bit of an old hippy, quietly spoken and calm of manner, while Dominica is a loud, flamboyant Spaniard, who throws her arms around in an animated fashion even when she’s talking about the most mundane of subjects. Neither wears dungarees, which is rather disappointing, but Angela does favour a headscarf most of the time, which conforms to at least some of the hideously outdated imagery of the average lesbian I carry round in my twentieth-century brain.
    Then there is—and I kid you not when I say this—Frankie and Benny. I don’t know