David Beckham was asked in an interview with a Spanish newspaper last month what his favourite food was. Quicker than a one-two with Zidane, he replied, 'Jamón'. It was a historic moment. His first unscripted public pronouncement in Spanish. Evidence also that the lad had got the measure of his public. Nothing could be more guaranteed to warm Spanish hearts than his endorsement of their beloved porcine delicacy.
I fell for it, anyway. I loved him for loving jamón. As I love my wife for letting me eat it; for allowing us to keep some, on an almost permanent basis, in the fridge. It is the one great concession she allows me, the one deviation from an otherwise severe system of domestic culinary control.
She runs the kitchen along rigid gastrofascist lines. Meat is strictly rationed; cakes, save for a special dispensation on our little boy's birthday, verboten; grease, in all its manifestations, outlawed.
I imagined when we moved from Washington to Barcelona five years ago that things might be different. After what seemed like an eternity in the land of 'no-fat chocolate cake' (one of the many unforgettably ludicrous 'health' options available at our local Safeway), Spain offered brave new vistas: daily consumption of churros, chorizo, manchego cheese.
We bought a house soon after we arrived. My wife had other criteria in mind but for me what set this place apart from all the others we had seen was the kitchen, and specifically an electric deep-frying apparatus built into the marble next to the stove. Fried calamari here we go, I thought. I thought wrong. No sooner had we moved in than - in a hideous vision of what was to come - she disconnected, dismantled and generally rendered utterly inoperative the contraption on which my oily dreams had been set. We never got to use it once.
As for churros, fingers of grease-hardened pastry typically consumed at breakfast with hot chocolate, not one has darkened our door. Chorizo, queso manchego and assorted other delights from the char cutería did have their day, but soon enough they too were exiled from our home. What we do eat, apart from loads of fish and once every 10 days - as a reward for good behaviour - a nice piece of Argentine steak, is industrial quantities of lettuce. Friends who drop in for lunch are staggered when we serve them what we serve ourselves. Not a plate of salad each, but a wide, deep bowl containing - yes, for each person - what in a regular home would be considered more than enough to feed a family of six. I try to remember ahead of time so that we spare ourselves the embarrassment of being found out for the oddballs that we are, but usually I forget and our hapless visitors are left with no choice but to digest enough green fibre to ensure a busy night for their untrained bowels.
What's it all about, you ask? What lies behind this oppressive regime I have chosen to endure? Having conducted interviews with friends from her former life, I have established that it is in large part a matter of ingrained habit. She has always been like this. Someone who knew her at university said that even then she stood out. 'The rest of us all ate chips and burgers and other crap rush-and-go food but she would never eat that stuff. Instead she always had a piece of fruit, some nuts or a rice cake ready to hand.'
She still does. Talking of ingraining, our three year-old is already being trained to perpetuate the mother's ideological verities. Brainwashed, actually, might be a better word. Here is an example of what I mean. The other day we were watching the Disney Channel together. It was - of all things - a cookery programme. An unnaturally cheerful adult was showing us how to bake biscuits. Each biscuit had a Smartie on it. 'Yukky!' cried my son. 'That's with chocolate inside. I spit it out!'
See what I mean? And it wasn't a one-off. The lesson has stuck. We go to people's homes, someone offers him a chocolate (obviously we do not have chocolate at home) and he turns away, often in disgust. (Perhaps more sinister yet, he loves raw carrots.)
Eating out with my wife is a challengingly ambiguous experience. On the one hand I am free from the tyranny of the home; on the other, I remain under close watch. So I read the menu, but I know I am not free. I must juggle two criteria; what I want to eat and whether she will be pissed off if I choose it. On a recent restaurant outing, emboldened by the presence of half a dozen friends, I thought I'd really push the boat out and ask for dessert. I asked - it was one of the most flagrant acts of rebellion since Spartacus - for cheesecake and wild berries. And then, as she glowered, I shovelled it down. On the way home, where we never have pudding, she gave me hell, naturally. 'But once a week is OK, surely?' I cried. 'Once a week is outrageous!' she replied. 'Once a month, maybe, but preferably never!'
Sometimes, even if we are out with friends, she is unable to contain herself. Such as when her beady eye spots me eating the fat on a piece of meat. She'll nudge me or, if I am across the table, give me a kick. If she is too far for either of those she will give me a really filthy look. In extremis, she will say something. Whereupon, in a lame attempt to disabuse our fellow diners of what is shamefully self-evident, I will either bravely gulp down the offending lump or make some ludicrously unconvincing remark along the lines of, 'when we get home you shall be soundly thrashed for that, wife!'.
The truth of course is that in the privacy of our home I endure what I imagine most ordinary men would consider to be a regime of relentless indignity. I feel it all the more keenly when I return from the frequent trips I make for work. While I am unable - whether I am in London, Johannesburg or Buenos Aires - entirely to shake off the sense that Big Sister is watching me, I do tend to break free of my shackles; wolf down the odd plate of sausages and chips. When I return one thing I always find that I have missed is a good piece of jamón . So one of the first things I do on getting in is dive into the fridge and fish out a slice or two of Extremadura's finest.
In my haste to savour Becks' favourite food I cannot always be relied upon to consider too closely whether the slice in question has a little or a lot of fat on it. My wife will. Just the other day she caught me at it, lunged wordlessly and grabbed a slice out of my fingers inches before it made it past my lips. I don't know what got into me but just this once I managed to stand outside the mad orthodoxies of our home life and see ourselves as others might. I burst out laughing. Then I asked her if she had ever in her life heard of a spouse behaving in such a way.
As a matter of fact she had. She told me about the father of an old boyfriend of hers who used to do the same thing with his wife. 'He was a ghastly man,' she said, rather contradictorily. '"Ulla! Now, Ulla!" he would warn her, terribly stern, across the table if her eyes so much as lit on a piece of cake. It was dreadful. He was a disgusting man!'
The reason his behaviour was disgusting and my wife's is not, in her eyes at any rate, is this. The old boyfriend's father was concerned merely with one thing. With preserving the anatomical integrity of his trophy wife, with avoiding the horror of being seen in public with a dumpy woman. My wife's motives are entirely more noble. She is not concerned whether people are making judgments on the aesthetic merits of her husband (otherwise she would be a very troubled soul indeed); she is concerned with keeping me alive.
There are people who kill with kindness. She loves me with meanness. My father did die young of a heart attack. My cholesterol levels are higher than they might be. (The reason the jamón slips past the barbed wire, by the way, is that she has been convinced by Spanish doctors that if you buy the best, which we do, the cholesterol levels are minimal.) My considered judgment, therefore, is that if I were to exchange my wife for a more indulgent partner I'd probably be dead in a week.
As for her - you will not be amazed by now to learn that for inscrutable reasons of her own I caught her the other morning sifting the raisins out of her Optimum Fibre breakfast cereal - she is a spare little thing, built like one of those teenage Russian gymnasts. A few years back she went for one of these tests that measure your percentage of body fat and the doctor was astonished. He'd never seen such an unnaturally low reading in a fully-grown woman. Were he to do the test today, one pregnancy later, he'd find no significant deviation. Which happens to be just the way I like it. In fact, I like her just fine. I wouldn't trade my gastrofascist wife for all the meat in Argentina.
