Sweet relief

Tonight I am going out for dinner with my lovely friend, who is named Siobhan and who is a very nice lady and who is probably reading this blog which is why I got the complimentary stuff in early but also because it's true and anyway this sentence is turning out to be way too long and cluttered so I will end it NOW. So we're going out for dinner, and I know, already, without fear of contradiction or being proven wrong, that I will not be tempted by pizza at any point.

This is because we're going to a French restaurant.

Temptation bombards me from every flank

So I am at the office last night, just preparing to go home, and I get a call from a friend in PR.
"Hello Pete," she / he says (I am protecting not just her anonymity, but her gender. Although not very well). "Do you want a swish hotel room for the night? I've had a client pull out of a meeting at the last minute and so the room's only going to go unused, but it's already paid for. It's yours if you want it."
"Hmmm," I say. "Let me get back to you."
A few moments later...
"Hello, Hilton Croydon, how can I help you?"
"Ah yes. Can you tell me how many different types of pizza there are on your room service menu please?"
"One moment sir... There are four types of pizza available through in-room dining: salami and prosciutto, chicken and green pesto, rocket and..."
"That will be all, thank you."

I called my PR friend back immediately, and told her I'd pass.

The gauntlet is run

Well, apologies, first of all, for the sizeable delay, which has probably kept you all on the very tenter-most of tenterhooks and has had you all afeared that I have lapsed mere days into my quest. Well, I haven't, so ner. But it's not through a lack of my parents doing their damnedest to fuck it all up. See, I just spent a delightful 10 days in the family bosom back in Wolverhampton, which was made all the more delightful by the fact that my family weren't actually there to offer their bosom. 10 days in an entirely empty house doing entirely nothing - yes please. However, when I got home, I found the usual 26-page document from my mum explaining how the washing machine works, where all the keys where for all the house's domestic orifices, what numbers I should ring in case of emergencies, and, last of all, where all the food was that I could eat. And wouldn't you know it, they'd gone and bought about 20 pizzas and practically filled the freezer with them. Oh, the waste! The terrible, terrible waste! However, through judicious use of locking the pantry door, then getting so drunk that I couldn't remember where I left the key, I was able to avoid that paradise of doughy delights for the entire 10 days of my stay AND I didn't eat any compensatory burgers either.

No, I just got drunk, which I am finding to be quite the way to avoid eating pizzas. Because if I drink, then eventually I pass out, and I can't eat pizzas when I am unconscious. Although I wouldn't put it past me.

I have faced the first real trial of my quest, pizza-withdrawal fans, and I have not come up wanting. Fuck you, pizzas. Yeah, you heard me. FUCK YOU.

Pizza Express: My Hatred

While I was out dining last night, I explained my year without pizza to my dining partner, who said, "Ooh, I couldn't last a year without my Pizza Express!"

Make no mistake about it, my year without pizza will be a cold black hell of loneliness, longing and pain, but one thing I won't be missing will be Pizza Express. I cannot abide their wares, cannot stand everything about them. I hate their self-conscious positioning of themselves as the higher quality alternative to regular pizza. I hate the way they allow jazz musicians to play in their restaurants, soiling an evening of pizza appreciation with their improvisational horrors. I hate their pissy little pizzas with their tiny rabbit-shits of cheese, as if the very notion of something as uncultured and plebeian as, you know, CHEESE COVERING THE TOP OF THE PIZZA, fills them with horror. And above all, I hate that they don't home-deliver, like their whole dining experience, with its jazz and its gleaming surfaces, is so infinitely superior to every other pizzeria that they don't have to. We're so good, let the people come to us!

Well, as you know by now, I am not going to any pizzerias for the next 361 days. But I am ESPECIALLY not going to Pizza Express.

Victory is mine

I did it! Despite the fact that there were twenty types of pizza on the menu, including one all-meat affair that is basically my idea of pizza heaven (I don't like to have vegetables on pizzas, I don't like to be eating anything on a pizza that might plausibly be doing me some good), and despite the fact that there wasn't anything else on the menu that I particularly fancied, I resisted temptation and ordered something else. A burger, since you ask. Now, I don't normally like burgers, but this one was absolutely orgasmic. Which means that, in the short-term, I need to make sure I don't get addicted to burgers too. Because I think that, when it comes to the major junk-food groups, I'm a bit like Pete Doherty. One day I'm sure I'll be stopped by the police, driving erratically on the wrong side of the road at 6.30 in East London, and they'll find a Filet-O-Fish, some KFC popcorn chicken and a meatball Subway in my glove compartment.

For the moment though, I have passed the first test of my willpower with vaguely flying colours. They even had pizza ON THE DESSERT MENU, for heaven's sake! A dessert pizza! Are you trying to test me, o Lord? Because if you are, bring it on, you beardy cunt. I don't believe in your existence anyway.

The day of reckoning is come

So far, my quest to remain pizza-free for one of your earth years has been a breeze, but today I will face temptation for the first time. I am going to a pub near my home tonight, called The Magdala, and the Magdala specialises in wood-fire oven pizzas. Now, frankly, I don't give a stuff what kind of fire they use to bake the pizza, just as long as there's a pizza at the end of it. But what I am effectively going to do is the equivalent of a former junkie going to sit in a room that has lots of "MMM! Delicious heroin!" signs in it. Do I dare? So early in the quest? Surely I will just unravel and beg them to fire entire 12" meat feasts into my mouth until gunked dough oozes from my pores?

Watch this space.

A joke with pizza in it

So this guy is spending his first day in prison, and he's understandably not happy about it. His cellmate looks at him and says, "Hey, this place isn't so bad. It's actually quite easy. Do you play pool?"
The new guy nods.
"Well, every Monday we have Pool Night. We get the pool table out and we all have a tournament. Do you like PIZZA?"
The new guy nods again.
"Well, every Tuesday, the wardens send out and we all have a couple of slices of PIZZA for dinner. Do you like to watch football?"
"Yeah," says the new guy, cheering up now.
"Well, every Wednesday, we get the big screen TV out and we watch the night's big football match. Do you like gay sex?"
"No!" says the new guy.
"Oh well," sighs his cellmate, "you're not going to like Thursday."

Through the 24-hour barrier with no ill effects

Well, that's the first day out of the way, and not a sliver of pizza passed my lips. I met a lady in the Crystal Palace Tavern and had a long passionate discussion about pizza that could very easily have reignited my lust for crust, but no. We were both in agreement that Firezze pizzas are rubbish and the only reason for them to exist is as somewhere to order wine from when you're stuck. Put some cheese on your pizzas, you smug fuckers!

Anyway, my pizza withdrawal is manageable so far. But then it is only Wednesday and I had a huge fuck-off Dominator on Monday so I can't exactly claim to be out of the woods just yet. Wolverhampton is going to be the sternest test, not least because I have been informed that an award-winning pizzeria has opened in the village where my parents live. What kind of picturesque Staffordshire village has a pizzeria in it? What is the world coming to? Do they not know what I am trying to do here?

I think I'll have sushi for lunch.

Here goes nothing

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. It is also the first day of 365 in which I intend not to have a pizza of any description. Even a shitty little Weightwatchers one.

"What's so impressive about that?" you might think, "I don't have pizzas all the time." Well, the fact is, I am painfully, hopelessly addicted to pizzas. To me, pizzas are as heroin was to Charlie Parker, as all the forms of alcohol were to Oliver Reid. I fiend for pizzas. My mind races with thoughts of my next pizza. I can honestly say that I crave the company of pizzas more than I do my fellow human beings. I like them that much.

To be more specific, I like Domino's Dominator pizzas. They are my syringe of junk, my miniatures of Scotch in the desk at work. For those who don't know, Domino's Dominator pizzas are two slim pizza bases pressed together over a layer of garlic and herb cheese sauce, and they are the nectar of the Gods in pizza form. What you put on the top of them is up to you - I tend to go for sausage and jalapenos, barbecue sauce and no cheese (the 'no cheese' bit being purely to assuage my own guilt at the creamy delights contained within) but you can go for what you like, since you are the only one of the two of us allowed to eat pizzas any more - but that stuff in the middle... What's even better about them is that they are so gloriously unpredictable. You may be lucky and get one so stuffed with middlecream that, when you bite into a slice, it spills down your chin like the liquid dénouement of a particularly frothy pornographic movie scene, or you may get a slice in which there is hardly any at all - it's a lottery, in which the jackpot is a particularly bad-for-you dinner. I used to think that the volume of middlecream in any given Dominator was determined geographically, on account of the fact that I once ate one in Wolverhampton that was overflowing with the stuff, and it didn't seem totally implausible that Domino's were targeting our nation's fat hotspots, of which my own home city is one. But no. The next one I had in Wolvo hardly had any in it. And, frankly, I wasn't happy.

I reckon I knock back a pizza every five days, and as such, I have a stomach of which I am neither proud nor able to spoon particularly easily into a 36 waist pair of jeans. And so I am going cold turkey. For a year. I am transnavigating a 365-day desert of non-pizzaness. The boys at East Dulwich Domino's may wonder where I have got to, and the chaps at Pizza GoGo, Sydenham (home of the medium Alligator with stuffed garlic and herb crust, which is the one I have when I am not in the mood for a Dominator) will be approximately £8.99 a month worse off. This is how it must be. I have got to kick this habit once and for all, before it kills me, or simply makes me so fat that nobody wants to have sex with me again.

This blog will be my methadone. It is where I will come when I am beset by hunger pangs, dreams of garlicky fillings, tortured visions of perfectly round frankfurter discs. If I die in the course of this year without that which I love so much, cremate me in a wood-fired oven, and bury my ashes in a square recyclable flip-top box.