You’ve often heard me refer to flirting, although granted it’s usually been in the context of flirting with food. I’ve got an honorary  black belt in that, in the way that only a fat girl who’s spent the majority of her adult life on one diet or another could begin to understand.

All those teenage magazines that I read back in the seventies and eighties..? I paid attention, and they taught me everything I know about holding that gaze for just a beat too long, looking away with a coy smile and then looking back again…conveying I want you with my eyes whilst the rest of my body adopts an I couldn’t care less stance…whether it’s with a bloke or a sausage roll, the principle is the same, right?

I admit it…if I’m feeling mischievous I’m an outrageous flirt. I love the innuendo and the banter, and I’m here to tell you it’s possible to get away with far more as a fat girl than you ever could as a skinny girl. The reason for that? Nobody takes you seriously when you’re fat. Your banter is pretty much guaranteed to be taken as a joke..nobody’s going to believe that you mean it, you know that they’re actually being chatted up. By you.

More accurately the object of your banter would never in a month of Sundays think that you’d imagine they were remotely interested in you…I mean come on, you’re the fat girl. It’s a laugh. I’m not imparting this from a place of bitterness, heaven help me don’t think that for a minute…I’m a single girl by choice these days for the reasons I’ve already shared. But I still like to flex my flirting muscle from time to time, from the safety of my fully paid-for fat suit.

Some of my more risqué conversations have volleyed back and forth for hours, ending in a good laugh, a bear hug and all around agreement that it’s been a top night. If I’d turned serious and acted like I expected it to go somewhere the poor bloke in question would have almost certainly broken the land speed record getting the hell out of dodge, and spent the next few weeks afraid to leave the safety of his front room.

There are exceptions to that rule of course, I came horribly unstuck on a holiday once in the land of camels and hookah pipes…my attempts to secure a good price for a terracotta tagine almost ended in disaster when I found myself practically engaged to a man with funny eyes and something stuck in his beard. I mean how was I to know that buxom blonde women are highly prized in certain parts of the world.

If not for the quick thinking of my taxi driver who – thank God – had clearly watched Starsky and Hutch far too many times, my life could have turned out very differently indeed. I might have been tending goats now instead of writing my blog, imagine that.

So yes, I think I’ve found the one thing to talk about that perhaps I might miss about being fat. In Skinny Town I won’t even be able to flex my pulling muscle with a sausage roll but you know what…I’ll adapt. After all, nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels, right?

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