At my request, Saturday’s ceremony was a low-key private affair with just me and the local shoe repair man, though I doubt he felt the same rollercoaster emotions as he punched a new hole in my leather belt and shrugged away payment.

For me though it was a moment of spiritual joy, brought about by the two-pronged catalyst of an insensitive guest, (see diary entry of August 23rd), and Alex’s gentle advice that I couldn’t do the book tour looking like a muffined slob. So on March 15th. I gave up alcohol, wheat, dairy and caffeine and started eating a lot of everything else, coupled with three days a week at the gym.

The result is five inches off the waist, which may not sound much on paper but to me reflects a daily triumph of the will. (You work out the weight loss as I never weigh).

The problem of growing sideways has lived with me since my mother told school bullies that I wasn’t fat but big-boned, with the subsequent fuller figure blamed on genetics, cheap mirrors or bad tailors.

It’s not resolved of course, it never will be – ‘my name is Clive and I’m addicted to buttered crumpets’ – but when friends ask if this will be a lifetime’s regime I tell them six months without the aforementioned is a lifetime.

Waiting in the slow line for car rental at LA Airport, there’s time to taste the city’s current zeitgeist with September’s ‘Los Angeles’ magazine where the readers’ query page leads with the question, ‘Why does LA seem to be the only city in the country with pink doughnut boxes?’ Hottest new item in the Prime Finds shopping page is the Further candle, ‘extracted from Osteria Mozza’s cast-off kitchen grease, but all you smell is bergamot, exotic grasses and olives.’
The Style page lead is on Jesus Beards, quoting pro skateboarder Gareth Stehr who says, “Some people might think my beard looks tough, some might think it looks stupid – but they thought of it.”
Perhaps the best guide to the City’s spiritual climate, though, comes from this month’s L.A. Archetype, Pet Psychic Jackie Cronin who for a $190 session, ‘relays messages between animals, both living and dead, and their owners.’ Half her work is with dogs, but she’s also read cats, rabbits, turtles, birds and a guinea pig, (‘He didn’t have a whole lot to say’), but it’s horses who prove the biggest problem for Jackie. ‘They’ll be telling me all of this information and it turns out it’s all made up.’

Meanwhile, at the other end of Reality Avenue, comes news of the death this weekend of a man who saved an estimated billion lives. Ten guesses. No? Times up. He was agricultural pioneer Norman Borlaug whose development of high-yield strains helped avert a worldwide famine. In 2006 he said, ‘We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability. Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.’

Labor Day on the beach at Westport, Connecticut, as the locals soak up the last rays of the day, maybe summer too, and it’s America as Americans think it should be; a light breeze for the yachts, good sand for the kids, and the fish are biting all along the inlets.
Time to catch up on Sunday’s New York Times where the Styles section leads with news that Harvard University has endorsed a line of preppy clothing to soften its elitist image, but under that is an incongruous piece about Marine Philip Van Cott, invalided out of Vietnam with a Purple Heart and now, forty years later, still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
He’s not alone of course – over 400,000 are being treated for it, costing $44 billion a year – and his rages, fistfights and nightmares are little different from all the others. But then you get to his quote, “I thought you go to Vietnam and kill a few people and forget about it.”
It’s a line that hits so hard you get no further; it’s a line that might be said in forty years time by veterans from Afghanistan, Iraq or the Gulf Wars. And it’s a line that spoils your Labor Day on Westport Beach.