It never occurred to Amberkraut Wellington that he might be out of his league when he signed up for the Birmingham Buffet Bonanza, the infamous all-you-can-eat gala, but still he made an effort to appear confident.

He had started that day with a raw egg and half a glass of tepid water, and, God, was he hungry. It was now well beyond the hours’ traverse into midday and the table of contestants stretched out to his sides like a veritable Rubicon of manhood. And this was no mere oratorical exaggeration to Amberkraut. His masculinity depended on his constructive management of the soon ensuing moment of gluttony. Five minutes of sheer western dissipation that had to be fully administrated down to the very last second of excess.

To his immediate left sat Engelbert Fitzpatrick, the esteemed and oft’ praised major glutton of the western hemisphere, four-time winner of the Triple-B cup, and oligarch of obesity, who had signed nearly as many cookbooks for his adoring fans as there were cookbooks that he hadn’t written – and bear in mind he was the illiterate bastard child of a coiffeur and a cocktail waitress, not that his parents’ career choices are of any significance – and whose name would forever echo in the annals of insatiability. With his immense girth, his ridiculously chequered shirt, and the enormous cutlets of sideburn on the sides of his gigantic sphere of a cranium, his Herculean persona was a frightful thing to be in the presence of to poor Amberkraut, himself a rather small and incomparable figure.

To his right sat someone unknown to both him and the crowd that had gathered before them, though at first glance he seemed not to be without potential. A significant threat to Amberkraut’s honour and imminent victory, this man – for they were all men – Herbert Grindlecook, a huge lump of a creature, looked with no small amount of disdain from deep inside his ocular cavities at Amberkraut Wellington and smiled the sort of smile that one might assume a hippopotamus to smile, were it faced with an ice-cream truck after a particularly warm afternoon on the savannah.

On the table was every dish conceivable by man as well as every beverage ever drunk by anyone aware of peoples’ enchantment with liquid nourishments. There was bread, cheese, pie, meat, beer, vegetables, three types of butter, cake, syrup, liquor, liqueur, quiche, pirogues, candy, gravy, cornflakes and every known form of sweetener invented since the industrial revolution.

The rules of the game were simple. The referee would blow his whistle and the contestants would perform their finest five-minute re-enactment of Roman overindulgence, stuffing themselves with as much food and drink as humanly possible in order to prove the most remarkable weight gain in said interval of time, and thus winning not only the highly desirable trophy and the respect of every stocky member of the audience and of society at large, but also the hearts of every tubby-loving woman out there. Thus, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand why this was too great a chance for Amberkraut Wellington to pass up.

There she was. Puberta Oppenschmidt, daughter of the mayor of the town from whence he came, sat in the front row just by the aisle and waved her flabby arms at him as a demonstration of allegiance and an encouragement of sportsmanship. Taking up three lawn chairs with her preposterously broad hips, and her massive belly distending almost so far away from her backbone as to scrape the ground beneath the pair of torrential anvils that were her feet, Puberta looked as radiant as ever to young Amberkraut. In her eyes was a hunger that he had never met in the eyes of any other woman, and he desperately wanted to be the object of her desire. And in winning the Triple-B Cup he would ensure that his success spilled out onto the romantic front as well.

Now there he sat, in an uncomfortable lawn chair of his own, squeezed between Engelbert Fitzpatrick, Herbert Grindlecook and a dozen other stout middle-aged men, who boasted greater mass in their thighs, respectively, than Amberkraut could hope to accomplish with his entire corpus of skin and bones.

The whistle blew. His competitors ducked into the plates before them and reached out into the buffet with their huge and spongy forearms. And Amberkraut closed his eyes for just a second, and pictured the young mademoiselle Oppenschmidt – and how he’d court her when he’d emerged victorious from the bacchantic battlefield an aficionado of seldom witnessed glory – in his mind, before grabbing the pitcher of gin only a foot in front of him.