My Fat Friend
by Charles Laurence

Vicky, who runs a book shop in Hampstead, is a heavyweight.

Inevitably she suffers, good humoredly enough, the slings and arrows of the two characters who share the flat over the shop, a somewhat glum Scottish youth who works in an au pair capacity, and her lodger, a not so young homosexual.

When a customer a handsome bronzed man of thirty seems attracted to her she resolves she will slim by hook or by crook.

Aided by her two friends, hard exercise, diet and a graph, she manages to reduce to a stream line version of her former self only to find that it was her rotundity that attracted him in the first place.

When, on his return, he finds himself confronted by a sylph his disappointment is only too apparent.

The newly slim Vicky is left alone once more, to be consoled up to a point by her effeminate lodger.