I ate no yoghurts today; I ate one yoghurt yesterday (as a pudding after lunch). On average this means in the last two days I have eaten half a yoghurt today. Hardly the actions of someone who has an obsession with eating yoghurts or any kind of unhealthy interest in yoghurt based snacks. Remember this was not for want of yoghurts to eat. I have a further eight yoghurts sitting in my fridge, just waiting to be eaten. If I was a person whose love of yoghurts was worthy of comment, one might assume that at least four of these extra yoghurts would have been consumed by this stage. But they haven't been. I think proving beyond any kind of doubt that my yoghurt intake is average or even below average. And before you start with your accusations, accusations, accusations, I haven't deliberately avoided eating these yoghurts, resisting the overwhelming impulse to spoon them one by one into my yoghurt-craving gullet in order to prove some kind of point about my average or below average yoghurt consumption. Until this moment I haven't even thought about the yoghurts, except possibly when opening my fridge to extract some non-yoghurt-based foodstuff or on the one occasion yesterday that I decided to eat one of the yoghurts, like any normal person would.

I don't want you to think that by denying the charge so perniciously laid against me in the sarcastic phrase, "Somebody likes yoghurts," that I am protesting too much or have something to hide. I am merely proving what I said yesterday, using empirical evidence to back it up. You might think that if I wasn't yoghurt obsessed then I wouldn't have spent two days of Warming Up discussing my feelings towards yoghurts in quite so much detail. But I would say to you that you have never felt the burning embarrassment of being accused of liking yoghurts more than an average person would and the inherent implication that you had no control over how much yoghurt you devoured. I have control over that. I ate one yoghurt and that was yesterday. I may eat another one tomorrow. Maybe I will have two. That doesn't make me a monster. Maybe I will have none. I might just have a piece of fruit or a biscuit. It's up to me.

I hope you now see that I am not obsessed with yoghurt and that if someone wanted to entrust me with guarding a fridge full of a wondrous selection of all kinds of yoghurt based snacks and drinks they would come back to find all their yoghurt safe and intact and undigested. Unless they had said I could maybe have one yoghurt of my choice as a reward for having taken on the yoghurt guarding, which would only be fair. I don't think it would be unreasonable or show any kind of yoghurt dependency if I were to insist on that arrangement.

I only go on about it because if it got out that I had a problem involving yoghurt then I would be likely to lose work in my chosen industry. A comedian who wasted hours a day gorging on yoghurts would get overlooked for a lot of work, when there are so many other performers willing and wanting to work, who either don't like yoghurts or who can go for months or years without eating one (or drinking one if it's a drinking yoghurt, or a quite liquidy normal yoghurt). Any producers or directors reading this, I am capable of going for months or years without eating or drinking a yoghurt and any yoghurt I consume during any job I am doing, will be strictly confined to designated breaks in filming (eg lunch. A yoghurt is an ideal pudding. For anyone. It's a normal thing to eat, occasionally).

A few American readers have expressed confusion over yesterday's entry. What I call "yoghurt", you refer to as "yogurt". It's amazing the differences in our languages isn't it.

I am not obsessed with yogurts either though. I am entirely normal as regards yoghurts or yogurts. I just wanted to make that clear.

I hope I have made that clear.

And if it is clear then maybe you'd like to explain that to the check-out girls at the Shepherd's Bush Sainsburys Local.

Just go in and shout, "Richard Herring is not obsessed with yoghurt, so stop going on about it or he will sue you for loss of earnings," and then run out of the shop laughing.

Buy Collings and Herrin T-shirts here and AIOTM T shirts here.

For details of the Christ on a Bike tour click here and you can book tickets here for The Lyric Comedy Nights

[ Email this edition of Warming Up to a friend ]