Chubby Chops – a life in pictures. Part 1

Perhaps this is more for me than for you. Sometimes it helps to sort out where it all started. If you feel a yawn coming on you can just look at the pictures…
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<< Picture № 1: 1956, aged 2 ½

Probably the one time in one’s life when it’s OK to have a double chin! I (um) grew into my ears later on….

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(I've just noticed when uploading the post that this picture has a lot of similarities with the 2009 blog profile picture over on the right - look at the fringe and double chin!! Hey, the gap is only 53 years...)
Picture № 2: 1957, aged 4 >>.

I don’t remember this picture being taken, and yet I can tell you the dress was blue and white and – er – clearly not my best one. Summers are hot in Argentina, and so was my grandmother’s patio. Cruel haircut!

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This was my last summer before I followed my older sister to boarding school for three years. It was 200 km SW of Buenos Aires along a dirt road that was a permanent, rut-filled, sticky mud bath and took my parents several stressful hours each way to make their permitted monthly “Parents Day” visit, and was managed by a British couple who understood very little about running a school for children under 11. There were 36 of us in the school, and only two classrooms, so the forms were separated by being put at different tables. Consequently I learned little, and only understood this many years later when I struggled in vain to keep up with my contemporaries at new schools, and finally recovered at 13 when I repeated a year. Bullying was unchecked, and in my first year I was 5 years old and knew little about defending myself. One particularly sharp memory is of being chased up a tree by some boys, and being held prisoner there for a very long time (a couple of hours perhaps) during which I shook with terror and tried not to whimper. My sister left at the end of that year to return to Buenos Aires and go to a senior school. I had to toughen up quickly after that...

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However the main problem with the school was the food – or the lack of it. They didn’t believe in mollycoddling us, and clearly thought they were feeding us enough to live on but nothing extra. Food brought by families on Parents Day sometimes got shared out later, sometimes not. I used to dream about mash potato dripping with butter – great mountains of it, which I would try to climb…

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<< Picture № 3: 1960, aged 7
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Two years into my time there and this picture was taken for an ID card to enable me to travel to Uruguay for a winter holiday. I was overjoyed to be out with my father having my fingerprints taken, and couldn’t stop grinning. My weight was right down from three years earlier, the skin drawn tight over my cheekbones, and I remember I used to lose a lot of hair. The untidy and severe looking alice band I wore was to stay in place for many years…

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During the winter and summer holidays (1 and 3 months respectively) I’d return to Buenos Aires deliriously happy to be home, and Mum would comment that I looked peaky, and would feed me up and deny me nothing. It wasn’t until three years had gone by that a doctor told her that my ailments were caused by malnutrition, and that I should be removed from the school straight away.

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Picture № 4: 1963, aged 10, at my new school back in Buenos Aires
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A set-up shot, where I’m supposed to be pointing at Argentina, but actually I’ve got my finger on Brazil….

The stoking up after the malnourished years has taken its toll: three heaped spoonfuls of sugar in hot drinks, many repeat helpings of mash potato later, and I’m fast turning into a little butter ball with a proper double chin. The good old alice band brings out the chubby face even further.

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<< Picture № 5: 1967, aged 14, wearing the school uniform of my secondary school

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The four intervening years were a constant battle to be as slim as my school friends, (it’s so important not to stand out when you’re that age, isn’t it?) and I was a bit on the chunky side and painfully self-conscious, hence the look into the middle distance. I was under the impression that long hair would make me look slimmer, so I was forever pulling it forward to cover my face, as you can see.

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I'll carry on next time.

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(To be continued)

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-oOo-

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