All that talk of armchairs the other day reminded me of an incident with a chair that happened years ago, when my son was little – he’s in his late twenties now but I think he was about 7 years old at the time. We were enjoying some hospitality courtesy of the Golden Arches, and as we made our way to a free table and sat down with our lunch, disaster struck.
Now you know how sometimes when you watch an accident unfold it feels like it’s happening in slow motion..? That’s exactly how it was. I sat down, and then he sat down, but he carried on getting lower and lower until he landed on the floor with a thump. To give him his due, he never dropped so much as a chip – he held onto his lunch like his life depended on it.
I assumed that perhaps he’d perched on the edge of the chair and that it had simply tipped over, but once I’d picked him up and dusted him off, on closer inspection it transpired that the front leg had parted company with the rest of the chair.
He was fine, other than being mortified that lots of people had seen him topple over and thankfully the only injury was a bruise to his pride but I was cross – he could easily have hurt himself. So, chair in one hand and chair leg in the other I set off through the restaurant and approached the counter. Now, picture if you will, the scene; very fat lady carrying a broken chair…what conclusion would you draw?
Yeah, me too actually. Well you would, wouldn’t you…but at the time it didn’t even occur to me until I was standing in front of the duty manager holding the offending chair leg aloft that he’d automatically think I’d broken it. As realisation dawned that he was about to blame me for wrecking his furniture because I was too fat to sit safely I felt like wrapping the chair leg around his chops. I resisted the temptation to do so, and we sorted it out but it’s true you know – fat people are usually the fall guy.
Only yesterday, a colleague was telling me about how he’d sat on a bar stool at the weekend and it had fallen to bits underneath him, depositing him on the floor. The bar owner had been full of apologies, they’d had a giggle about it and he got a free drink by way of apology. I can guarantee that if I’d been the one to sit on that stool only for it to collapse in a heap, first of all I would’ve died a thousand deaths, the asshole in my head would have gone in for the kill by immediately blaming me for being so fat (and screaming at me that everyone else in the bar thought so too), and I would have been the one apologising profusely for breaking the stool and offering to buy another one immediately.
Makes you think, doesn’t it…we all judge, based on what we see. But when you’re fat, you judge yourself more harshly than anyone else does, without question.
