I am of larger build, cuddly but not tall enough to be described as statuesque.  Bottom line (and mine is not a pert derriere) I am a smidgen over chubby but (not yet) obese. I suppose the word I am avoiding is fat.
I like food. I like different tastes and textures. I don’t like routine. I don’t want the same thing for breakfast each morning. For a while I thought the best way to get the five-a-day was to start the day with a portion of our amazing home-made fruit salad but now I’m bored with it.  In fact, as I’m never hungry first thing I’d rather skip that meal altogether.

Once a week I lunch with The Aunt. Just as my husband always starts the day with porridge she invariably has egg on toast, sometimes varied by egg and chips and once she really lived dangerously by having an omelette.

Me? I treat a menu with the same sort of respect I’d study the theatre listings page on a New York website. (I don’t often get to New York and when I’m there I want to see something I’m unlikely to see in London but which has got the sort of review which leads me to suspect that I’d find the show interesting. “Next To Normal” was amazing. I digress. I am good at digression.)
The language of a menu fascinates me as does the arrogance of even the simplest café to restrict the sundry element. For instance a typical one will offer salmon with new potatoes, egg with chips, meatballs with rice and chicken with salad. Yes, of course, me I’ll want the salmon with rice,  or some chicken with new potatoes, or meatballs and salad, because I’ll like the sound of rice for lunch but not be in the mood for meat.
I try to combat the bad health aspect of my propensity to over-eat by exercising. Fortunately living in Central London, I actually enjoy walking. I walk a lot. It is interesting. When I lived in a village I found walking boring.

• “Oh look!
• There’s a tree.
• There’s another tree with different shaped leaves.
• There’s a bush.
• There’s a bird in a bush – oh, whoops, there it goes up in the air.
• The bird, that is.
• It would have been more interesting to have seen a flying bush.

In town there are buildings with statues and cupolas and blue plaques. There are alleys and garden squares and grand houses and mansion blocks all holding stories to be told. There are shops and lots of people to watch and second-guess. There are conversations to over-hear and street entertainers and a mixture of odours some enticing as from the restaurants, some cloying as from the Arabian perfume shop and some downright unpleasant.
And yes, there are shop windows.

I also go to the gym. I am proud that I can cycle without knocking anyone over and stretch upwards on the arm press thingy so that I have now lost most of my bingo wings.
I can sit on the floor and get up without using my hands and I can sprint for the bus.

That was my prime aim; being able to “beat the bus driver.”

There he is at bus stop, sees old lady scuttling towards him, he smirks, puts bus into first gear and is about to close doors and release hand-brake when,“WTF! How’d she get here?” he thinks as I swipe my oyster atop of his little bowl of custard.

The gym could be even more boring than a country walk if it were not for my little mp3 player. As mentioned in a previous blog, I don’t exercise to boom-boom music but to the spoken work. It’s hard to stop exercising before the end of a Liars’ League story-podcast or an episode of The Archers or a play from The Wireless Theatre Company.
I’ll never be lithe and slim but I tell you what, I’m agile and, having given up smoking for over nine years, fairly healthy.
As an actress I’m not going to get the role of a sophisticated cougar or one of a Polish ghetto resident but I had fun last week playing a bossy gran, enjoyed being a nouveau riche lady of the house in GB Shaw’s Misalliance last June and enjoyed running around screaming as a zombie monster in a short film last year.

So, if you hear of a job requiring an imaginative portly actress with firm arms able to run short distances then direct them to the other parts of this website.