Toasting Dr Atkins

The moment I heard on the radio that Dr Atkins was dead, I was in a caravan next to the beach at Polzeath, in north Cornwall, eating tinned spaghetti on toast. Me, my boy, and my boy’s half-brother were there for a fortnight’s surfing – well, body boarding anyway. On three consecutive days in the first week there was a heatwave. I went brown, Mark went pillar-box red and Dan stayed about the same pale-green colour. It was at teatime, during one of these astonishingly hot days, that we heard it on the news. Dr Atkins, author of Dr Atkins’s Age-Defying Diet Revolution (Feel Great, Live Longer), had slipped on an icy pavement in New York and hit his head. He was only 72.

I’ve been a devotee of Dr Atkins since the Sunday Telegraph sent me on one of his Caribbean diet cruises two years ago. On the Atkins cruise I ate about four times what I normally ate, did far less exercise, drank gargantuan cocktails more or less continuously, had an on-board romance with a lady with silicone breast implants –and at the weigh-out on the last day found I’d lost just over two pounds.