Leith, William Read Online Free PDF

and rolls, with pitta breads and flatbreads, with Danish pastries and English muffins and Polish bialys, with potato chips and corn chips, with blinis, fries, pasta, rice, potatoes, noodles. Immigrants from all over the world have brought their carbs here, adapted them, refined them and enlarged them. A New York croissant, for instance, is exactly twice the size of a croissant in Paris.
    It's dinnertime for me, even though it's only late afternoon here, so I sit on a stool at a bar and watch sushi coming towards me on a conveyor belt, and I pick out a plate, two slices of raw tuna on matchbox-sized puddingy sushi rice, and I eat the tuna sushi in five bites, and I pick out, and eat, two slices of raw salmon on rice, and two slices of cooked, flattened prawns on rice, and two chewy strips of octopus on rice. I pick it up in my chopsticks, dip it in soy sauce, and chomp it with robotic, pleasureless vigour, always more interested in the sushi I'm about to eat than in the sushi I'm actually eating. I pick the prawns up in my chopsticks and slide them into my mouth, nipping off the tails with my incisors, picking the nipped-off bits of tail from between my lips with my chopsticks, placing the tails with a flourish on the empty plate. Cool. I hope the waiters are watching. I'm still hungry, or rather not quite sated, so I order a hand roll, a cone of seaweed filled with the puddingy rice, and also mayonnaise and seafood, and unfortunately I am sated by the
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    time it arrives, but I eat it anyway, chomping it while I watch bits of salmon sashimi and California rolls buzz past me at the level of my fingers, and I'm filled with nausea and also a sort of greed that borders on the pornographic, and later, a few hours later, I go to a seafood place and have something really healthy, tuna and brown rice, a whole fucking mound of brown rice, and by the time I go to bed I feel painfully bloated, as if someone had cut me open and crammed something large and indigestible into my stomach, and sewn me up really tight, and, just as I'm falling asleep, I wonder if, maybe, starting tomorrow, for a little while at least, I should do Atkins.

The Swimming Pool
    I have this memory from the last time I was not at all fat, ten years ago. My girlfriend at the time, Anna, was staying with some friends in a villa somewhere in the middle of France. It was hot. I travelled down on my own, and arrived in the afternoon. It was a fine place, big, with good furniture, a swimming pool, a few girls lounging by the pool, wearing not much. I walked out to the pool in a T-shirt and shorts. I was down to 190 lbs. I'd taken the weight off by playing tennis about 200 times over the course of a year, and swimming, and jogging, and going for long, brisk walks. I had become fixated with exercise. I ate and drank what I liked.
    So I'm standing by the pool, chatting away, being introduced to people, and up comes Anna's brother, who is also an old friend of mine, and he's holding a racquet and a ball. He's
    on the other side of the pool. He tells me he's invented a game, which is hitting the ball across the pool to each other, and if you mis-hit the ball, and it falls in the pool, you have to jump in and get it.
    `Come on then,' he says.
    I can feel panic rising in me. I know what's going to happen next.
    `You'd better take your shirt off,' he says.
    I'm wondering how I can get out of this, what diversionary tactic I can use, whether I should just jump in and ... but nothing would work. I am trapped. I look around me, choked with the fat person's panic at having to reveal your body, and I realise there's only one thing I can do. I'll have to take my shirt off. The girls are watching, mildly interested. And I take my T-shirt off. And I'm slim. Of course I'm slim. I'm 190 Lbs. Waist size 31. I had forgotten.
    What Does It Feel Like to Be Slim?
    So there I am, standing at the edge of the pool, stripped to the waist, holding my T-shirt in one hand. I'm slim. What does it feel