Post of pic

[lexin]

See this picture?



The lady in the pink suit is my Aunt Ursula, my mother's sister. The woman behind her in blue is my mother, the Aged P, but before she was aged. The miscreant in the Afghan coat is me. I don't know who the others are. I must be about 15 in this picture, because that's when I owned that coat.

Now, I have a persistent memory that I was a fat child, fat teenager and have always been fat. This turns out, very strangely to me, not to have been the case.

I mean, I'm not skinny by any manner of means, but I'm not fat.

The Aged P. hated that coat with a firey hatred. She made me keep it in a separate cupboard from the rest of the family coats because it smelled really strongly of dead goat.

Note: the picture is back to front. The slides I'm working from aren't marked.

Comments

[hunningham]

There's an essay somewhere by Dorothy Allison where she writes about a similar experience; believing that she was fat and always had been fat and then discovering and looking at old childhood photographs, and thinking "that little girl is not fat" I must try and find it again - can't even remember if it was library book or internet.

[lexin]

That's very much it. I was a healthy, rather busty, teenager, but I was not fat.

[hunningham]

Yes, looking at the photo you had much the same build as myself and it had never ever occurred to me to think of myself as fat (lucky me).