Shakiness

Sometimes I don't get hungry. Of course, this happens to everyone, but that's normally because, for instance, they've just eaten a massive cake just before the girl jumps out and have eaten her as well (leading to an expensive public inquiry), or because someone once served them a cocktail with liquid nitrogen and now they don't have a stomach (for fuck's sake).

No, sometimes I don't get hungry even though I haven't eaten for ages. The first I know about the fact that actually I'm a couple of meals short of a picnic is when the end of my nose turns slightly numb and I come over a bit indistinct until I eat a samosa or something. It's the only time I ever consider eating a Mars Bar, a confection almost perfectly designed to be unappetising. Looking as it does like a small bit of fungally infected wood and tasting sweeter than the stench of a dead mouse under the floorboards, Mars' crowning glory is the way they've made the chocolate so sticky that I have to clean my teeth about five times before I stop spitting brown like a chewing-tobacco addicted cowboy. At least Coco-Pops only turn the milk brown.

Anyway, that's all rather beside the point. I have no idea why my stomach sometimes decides it can't be bothered to alert me to the fact that I should, in fact, have eaten a cheese sandwich several hours ago and am now on the verge of catatonia. It's a bit like having a car with a malfunctioning fuel light that works some of the time, so that not only do you not have any idea how much fuel you've got, you forget to keep track of it because on the last three occasions everything was working just fine.

It's potentially awkward, since I tend not to have much food in the house. This is because I have a slightly erratic lifestyle and there's no guarantee I'm going to be home at mealtimes, so if I buy perishables they tend to, well, perish. So I live hand to mouth - or rather, Morrison's to mouth - leaving the very real possibility of forgetting to eat and then having to crawl shakily on my hands and knees to the nearest corner shop so they can sell me an overpriced flapjack.

In fact surely you'd have to be on the verge of starvation to buy one of their flapjacks, and yet they seem to have quite an acceptable turnover* of them. Which makes me wonder if there are not hordes of shakiness-beset Londoners crawling into convenience stores across town forking out £2 for a life-giving square of stickiness. I may not be alone after all.

* or possibly an acceptable flapjack of turnovers