Last week at dinner, I had to telephone my date from the toilet, to come and assist with the zip on my dress. My date - a clever guy, whose advice is sought from as far as Singapore - had no luck in his negotiations with my zip, and we returned to the restaurant with my bare back gaping through the chasm of unfettered red fabric. Well, I wasn't going to miss dessert.
I'd been unable to lift the dress up to go to the loo, because the hem had no hope of clearing my hips. I'd discovered this in the shop where I bought it earlier, when I'd torn the dress I was trying on.
Since I started working from home, I've been accumulating kilos like Louise Mensch racks up Twitter blunders. Jesus turned water into wine - I can turn it into fatty deposits at the side of my thighs. This is what happens when you work for yourself, slumped at a screen, engaging in as much physical activity as Melania Trump's face.
Of course I care about the weight gain, but rather than deal with it, I simply manage my social media image. I've spent the last year strategically cropping my photos just beneath my boobs, where my rib cage is at its slimmest, before it broadens out into the bumpy terrain of my tummy. As I recently realised, I am one loaf of bread away from looking as lumpy as Lena Dunham.
And so I feel for Kim Jong-un, who's also a fatty with no desire to do anything about it, except obliterate any mention of his fatness in the media. Apparently, North Korean officials have asked China to ban any references to him as "Kim Fatty the Third," a nickname so popular, it gets suggested by auto-complete on China's leading search engine, Baidu.
When your eyebrows resemble coffee beans decorating panna cotta, it's actually quite a feat to get so much attention for being fat. Kim excels at this. Other versions of the nickname include "Kim Fatty Fat," and "Kim Fat Fat Fat," while the New York Daily News notes that, "Slim Jong-un he is not." They add, "his wife, Ri Sol-ju, has not been seen in public for seven months, prompting jokes that he ate her."
While Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Geng Shuang claimed that reports of the ban didn't "comply with facts," searches for "Kim Fatty the Third" have since shown no results in Baidu.
We've all been here. If Kim wants to pretend no-one's calling him Fatty, by browbeating China into censoring their search engine, I get it. I once did amateur Photoshop on my thigh, using the "rubber" feature in Paint. I just rubbed a bit off the side. Then I submitted the photo for a charity newsletter, which wanted a picture of me running the British 10K. And then there's Reece Witherspoon's client in Legally Blonde - classic - who nearly went to prison for murder, rather than reveal that her alibi was a spot of liposuction.
We're kidding ourselves, people like us. We'll lie about liposuction, coerce entire countries into colluding with us, and do shit Photoshop rather than admit we're fatties, or make any effort to lose weight. We're deluding ourselves, more than we're attempting to fool other people - because we're vain and we don't want to think of ourselves as blubbery beasts. But maybe there's something in it -an entire weight-loss industry has been built on the premise that all you have to do is "think yourself thin."