Eating for two

J sends us healthy eating advice. The Washington Post wants me to eat more nuts and seeds. The Guardian tells me to take a walk after dinner. I need to stay away from ultra-processed foods and eat 30 plant-based ingredients a day. I devour every article with insatiable interest as I peel a Malteser reindeer from its shiny silver wrapper.

We take a family trip to Venice and there is less discussion there about what is healthy and what is not. We eat gelato every day and I become particularly addicted to the cappuccino flavour, which has very little to do with a cappuccino at all. It's made up of vanilla ice cream layered with large dark chocolate shards and a kind of molten chocolate coffee centre. We eat it standing up in a piazza by the canal and I wonder if I'll ever taste this flavour again. 

This, of course, is the main conundrum of eating on holiday, especially in Italy. You will have some of the best meals you'll ever have and then you'll spend the rest of your life pining for them. You can try and come back in search of your favourite gelato but even if you find it, you'll come to it differently. 

This year, the gelato is all-encompassing. One day I have two gelatos. I tell everyone it's because the baby wants it, and even though I'm joking, the alien unknown thing inside me always kicks when I eat chocolate. And why wouldn't they? There's research that shows babies can taste different foods in the womb. And the baby comes by it honestly. Mum likes chocolate, but was surprised when she met Dad to find that there is someone who likes chocolate even more. 

Apart from the usual advice (whether or not to eat for two), I note that several people tell me what to expect from a newborn with the same aphorism: the days are long but the years are short. It's hard to imagine this in Venice, where the days are short, filled with hot chocolates and anchovy pasta and pink-golden light that glistens on turquoise water. 

It's also easy to imagine that in Venice the years are long. J shows us a picture of her old friends in raincoats in front of Saint Mark's Basilica. Decades later, the backdrop is unchanged. Inside, it's a bastion of the luxuries of time. How long did it take to piece together each glinting golden mosaic piece? How much longer have people been looking at it? Everything about Venice is a palimpsest. Its walls are layered up with the history of people who've lived there and people who've come to look at it — and us now, eating a giant slice of margherita pizza in front of it. 

I wake up in the night when the baby is pressing on my bladder and realise I'd been dreaming about my father. We'd been shopping together in John Lewis and he bought me a set of patio furniture. We sat on it in the car park and neither of us said anything of consequence. My conscious brain tells my dream brain how stupid that was. There are so many things I could have said.

It occurs to me as I fumble around in the darkness that newborn baby time follows hospital time. The days are long but the years are short. I remember my dad being endlessly fed up as a week in Oncology felt like an eternity. But then, on one visit, in an effort to make conversation, I remarked that my sister-in-law's pregnancy had gone by very quickly. She was almost due. He responded by telling me that his life had gone very quickly. There was nothing I could say to that.

On the flight out to Venice, T asks me a question. If the technology existed, would you grow your baby in an external, artificial womb rather than be physically pregnant? I think about the tank baby, and having my body to myself again. It's appealing. I tell him it's hard to say, and maybe it would be better to ask people who'd already done it. 'People who've already had tank babies?' 'No,' I said, 'People who've already had babies.'

For the moment, anyway, I am the tank. It doesn't feel like such a chore when I can walk around a city I've never been to before, but always imagined, and stare at the intricate marble walls of churches that look like Liberty print sofas. It doesn't feel like a hindrance when I eat whipped potato with artichokes and deep-pan anchovy pizza that's crispy and pleasingly greasy. We look out at the water and I have a sip of T's Aperol Spritz with lemon foam and then I eat sticky gnocchi with ragu. We try fried custard at the end of the meal, as though it's a petit four, sweet and surprisingly robust — a thing that's best left to be experienced rather than explained.

Supposedly, the theoretical baby in the tank that T is offering would have no experience of any of this. And who knows if the real baby that kicks me almost non-stop will be better or worse off because it got a diluted taste of epically good cappuccino-flavoured ice cream, but it's a nice thing to imagine. 

One day, when I tell my own child that when things were difficult the days were long but the years were short, I can also tell them that there were some days that went by too quickly purely because of the joy of gelato. And in certain cities, it's almost possible to perceive that we'll be here for a while, and when we're not, the world will stretch out happily without us.

That's the magic of well-made gelato at a time when you really needed it. When it was a joy to share it, for a moment, with something small and entirely unknown to you, except for its love of chocolate. That, I suppose, is what it might mean when people say you are eating for two.

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This week I'm eating: Falafel wraps, porridge and frozen berries, Toffee Crisps.