This week I delay gratification
To be honest, I just don’t trust people who can keep an open packet of TimTams in the fridge for two weeks. Are you one of these? Can you take one biscuit and leave the rest, and not think about them incessantly until you’ve demolished the lot (rationalising that, hey, they have to be eaten some time.)?
Yes?
Well, I don’t trust you.
I mean, I’d trust you with my biscuits, should I ever require someone to mind a packet for me. It’s just I don’t trust that you are fully human, in the messy, unrestrainable way I am.
My brother Ben’s one of these types. At Easter we used to get two small, hollow eggs each (hidden in the lavender bush…yours too?). He’d be able to nibble at his Charlie Bucket-style, until June. My friend Zoe’s the same. Every spring she cuts all crap from her diet so she can shed her winter cushioning. Just like that. No fuss, no distress. “I just decide to do it…what’s the big deal?!” she says wide-eyed when I ask for her secret.
Self-controlled types are certainly oddities. They’ve also, of late, become a quirky source of scientific enquiry. Little wonder. A lack of will power – our inability to curb our over-eating, over-spending and overly-addicted-to-email ways – is killing us. Finding out what makes the self-restrained tick is only going to get hotter in academic circles, I tell you.