The Sixth Boy

It was hot in London today, and as I walked along High Holborn I remembered that I was approaching a shop selling good ice cream. Temptation reared its ugly head. I was hot and the ice cream was cold. It seemed like karma. Somehow I could picture the ice cream cone in my hand – I could feel the waffled texture on my fingers - I could sense the anticipation of the first taste – then I could taste it (it was chocolate flavour by the way) but somehow at the back of my mind there was a little nag of guilt. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, I knew it wasn’t healthy. Not only that, but it was sweeter and gooier than anything I usually eat, in fact it wasn’t really as great as it should have been. Eventually it began to cloy and with nowhere to dispose of the blessed thing I had to go on eating it to the bitter/sweet end. Even the cone which I didn’t like at all. And then all I was left with was a sense that I had let myself down in a moment of weakness. It reminded me of the old fashioned Fry’s Five Boys advert. There is a series of five pictures of a boy going from stages of unhappiness, to expectation of a treat, to being pacified with chocolate to joy at the realisation it was Fry’s. I was the sixth boy, the stage that was negative, the realisation that I shouldn’t have given in to a whim and that all I had was regret and a lot of calories fat and sugar in my body that shouldn’t have been there. Now I didn’t actually buy or eat any ice cream! All those feelings were explored in my mind as I walked along. By the time I had reached that last stage in my mind, I didn’t want the ice cream. I think that most people eating just whatever they fancy actually never get to the sixth stage, or if they do, they get there after they have eaten the thing that tempts them. We have all heard people say ‘I shouldn’t really have eaten that – I’m on a diet/allergic/it upsets me etc etc’. The trick, of course, is to get to the negative stage of regret before and not after eating. And it is a trick. I have no idea if I can pull it off again, but I know I am going to try. I went home and ate some delicious cooling fresh fruit.