Support for seasonal self-love comes from an unexpected quarter: the French daily Libération has issued a plea for us to embrace our “winter buddy”. That’s a soft, friendly winter body, forged of chestnut-based desserts, cheese and chouquettes, those sugar-topped mini choux buns they sell by the dozen in French bakeries (I’ve never seen a basket of them that didn’t make me yearn to unhinge my jaw and consume it in one gulp, like a python with a nest of bird’s eggs).
This winter buddy stuff is pure French fancy. The article conjures a wild, wish-fulfilled universe, in which having a bit of solstice padding makes you sexually irresistible rather than drawing barbed comments from your mother-in-law. I bet French intellectuals will remain whippety slim and elegant, though it’s reassuring to realise they’re probably dreaming of raclette, that nutritionist’s nightmare of molten cheese, potato and charcuterie.
Still, it was a perfectly timed rallying cry for me. I’m turning 50 next week and the inevitable taking stock and finding myself wanting has left me flirting with dismal old deprivation. I talk a good game of self-compassion, but this looming half-century has sent me back to the lonely business of trying to be the “best” at staying alive which I thought I had shed in my 20s – eating leaves and gravelly seeds and being just marginally, optimally hungry.
I might live hungrily for ever, but where’s the joy? So on my birthday holiday in Venice, I’m trying to embrace softness and prepare for winter like a fat bear. I’m reminding myself that the real self-sabotage would be to refuse pastries overstuffed with pistachio cream, Campari luminous as a stained-glass window, fat green olives and crunchy, oily, salty snacks. That being alive and open to pleasure is the greatest privilege and I should gobble all this happiness up and lick my fingers, because this is as good as it gets, and because winter is coming.
I’m taking two weeks off to work on my winter buddy, to become “plump and moist like a frog”, as a friend counselled. I plan to return rested, rounder and maybe even a fraction wiser.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
