Fat chance

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[/audioplayer]I’m a very off-message type of fat broad; one who gladly admits she reached the size she is now solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure, and who rather despises people (except those with proven medical conditions) who pretend that it is generally otherwise. I’m not attached to my fat in any but the most obvious way; would I lose it if I could snap my fingers? Without doubt. Would I work at losing it? Not a chance, Vance.

‘But it’s not about vanity,’ the weight bores bleat, ‘it’s about health.’ Hmm. I was the one person I know who didn’t have some sort of crippling cold this winter — not a sniffle, while my gym-bunny mates all claimed to be dying to some degree. On group holidays, I invariably perplex my companions by spending the evening drinking enough straight alcohol to stun a stevedore before sicking up into my hat, and then rocking up at the break of dawn at the swimming pool while they’re still at breakfast, and drinking shots between laps. As Douglas Murray once noted in this very magazine when we were in the same Ibizan wedding party:

At a late stage I have a well-oiled dance-off with Julie Burchill. The effort finishes me for the evening and I retire a sweaty mess. We reconvene the next morning by the pool. Hardier than me, Julie is having a two-martini breakfast and doing her Hebrew revision.

So imagine my lip-smacking delight at the news last week — according to the largest and most precise investigation into dementia to date — that the fatter one is in middle age, the brighter one is likely to be in old age.