My personal trainer has told me to stop eating bread.

There are some words you wouldn't expect to hear from a dedicated salad dodger like me aren't there?

I'm not paying him, you understand. He owns the gym I go to and he's adopted me. It isn't that he really wants to train me, it's just that the sight of me gradually turning purple on the treadmill before breathing my last sprawled across a Swiss Ball is likely to put people off. It could even be that he isn't trying to get me fit - just to scare me off.

Anyway, it's seven days since I last ate bread. Almost. It's actually six days and twenty hours since the instruction was delivered. My response was to come home, eat three slices of toast with beans for tea and then top up with a couple more with marmalade. It wasn't greed, it was part of a mourning process. So it's really six days and nineteen hours since life was worth living. It seems longer. Since then I have eaten just half a slice of bread and one panini, despite the many offers of sandwiches and toast from the Spawn of Satan that masquerade as my children.

And there we have it, the crux of the matter - sandwiches. Without bread you can't make sandwiches. And without sandwiches...

...you are forced to eat salad.

I hate it. It's one step too far in getting in touch with my feminine side. Besides that, there's something so unBritish about salad. The French and Californians, to name but two expendable groups of people, eat salad. Until I can come up with an alternative, so do I. And I don't like it.

Think about it. Agincourt, Trafalgar, Rorke's Drift, Zeebrugge, D-Day - does salad enter your mind? No, I thought not. That, I think, proves my point.