Father’s Fortieth-Birthday Health Pledge is both a family breakfast announcement and the beginning of a deliberately improbable reform programme. Faced with turning forty, the narrator’s father presents a longer life as something he might win through smoking cessation, weight loss, and exercise, but makes even his discipline temporary: at eighty, he plans to smoke and eat freely again. The comedy is not that he does nothing; he does begin to change. It lies in the gulf between his grand timetable and the body, habits, and appetites he describes so vividly.

The Birthday Breakfast and Its Stakes

The pledge takes shape around a crowded birthday table. The meal includes smoked mackerel, Schillerlocken, fatty eel, and the Kiel sprats his father particularly loves. He eats the sprats whole, head included, while his greasy lips remain conspicuously open. Against this lavish breakfast, he reflects on the age he has reached: he had feared turning forty, yet now regards eighty as a possible and welcome goal. A hundred, he jokes, is too much to ask; an eighty-year-old would be entirely satisfied.

His announcement is also made in anticipation of a public occasion. The new clinic is expected to be completed in two months, and Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg, the Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein, has said he will attend its opening. The father calls it a great day and insists that his wife and sons should be there. He then frames the birthday as the right moment—perhaps his last chance—to change his life. The family listens as the private resolve and the approaching ceremony become part of one story about a future he hopes to reach.

A Plan with an Expiration Date

His first declared measure is to stop smoking, but not permanently. He proposes a forty-year pause, ending on the morning of his eightieth birthday, when he imagines beginning again. Weight loss receives the same peculiar condition. He says he weighs 106 kilograms in the morning and wants to lose sixteen, returning to the ninety kilograms he last weighed at twenty. With the clinic opening two months away, he calculates that losing a kilogram each week might bring him halfway to his target before the Minister-President arrives. At eighty, he says, he will once more eat whatever he can get his hands on.

The joke depends on how easily his future self overrules the very discipline his present self announces. He puffs out his cheeks, slips three cigarettes between his fingers, and pretends to have his mouth full, acting out the old, heavier, chain-smoking man he expects to become again. His imagined old age is not a sober reward for a healthy life but an extravagant return to smoking and eating. Even so, the targets are specific: sixteen kilograms, a weekly rate, and a deadline fixed by the clinic ceremony.

The family’s laughter also meets details that make the problem less abstract. His eldest son points out that merely avoiding food at night will not help if he eats too much during the day; the sweets kept on a high kitchen shelf are already gone. The father’s attempt to make them inaccessible has failed. He admits that he has to sit to urinate and can barely climb out of the bathtub. His jokes about his body—his breasts, his underwear, and his inability to see his penis when standing—make embarrassment part of the scene, but they also register the practical limits that have made change urgent.

Exercise, Resistance, and the Last Cigarette

When his eldest son says he must move more, the father agrees. He explains that he tried to listen to his own heart with a stethoscope and could not find it beneath what he imagines as layers of fat. From this alarming, comic image he draws the decision to start running. The narrator’s mother suggests tackling one undertaking at a time; the father refuses to separate the goals, insisting that quitting smoking, dieting, and exercising belong together. His resolve is theatrical, but it is not merely talk: he begins acting on the diet and prepares for exercise.

At the same breakfast, he declares that he will smoke one final cigarette in front of the family. He draws deeply on a Roth-Händle and savours it as the best cigarette he has ever had, then takes what he calls his last drag. A sudden bang interrupts the moment. The father spits the cigarette onto the tablecloth; the mother makes a strangled sound, the dog jolts upright and hits its head under the table, and the children recoil in their chairs. The abrupt shock breaks the solemnity of the farewell before the pledge can settle into a neat ceremonial scene.

What the Promise Changes

Later, the father follows the diet with a steak at midday and cucumbers instead of a late meal, while the rest of the family continues eating its favourite offal. He has, in fact, stopped smoking. For the running plan, he and the narrator visit the town’s only sports shop. The father buys running shorts, a tracksuit jacket, and shoes. He has always claimed to wear size forty-three, but the seller finds that even size forty-four is too small; he buys size forty-five and wears the shoes home to break them in, as his books recommend.

Over a meal at the family’s favourite grill, the father recognizes that these are the first shoes he has bought that actually fit. Until then, he had assumed that a shoe should press slightly—that discomfort meant a proper fit. The narrator offers the idea that a comfortable shoe might soon be forgotten, while a shoe that hurts keeps reminding its wearer that it is there. His father likes the answer and returns to it, linking comfort with forgetfulness. The exchange gives the health pledge a quieter consequence: amid the broad jokes and numerical targets, the effort to change also exposes an old, mistaken measure of what it means to be properly equipped. The promise remains comic and provisional, but its first effects are tangible: cigarettes stopped, food restricted, and shoes finally chosen to fit.