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.