Fat-shaming didn’t do me any harm

One of the genuine pleasures I always take in arriving back in the north-east after being in London is that I am suddenly transformed from being an aged fat pig with bad teeth into a youthful, lissome creature with teeth no different to anybody else. It is not the clean air or the glorious countryside which has this effect; it’s just that everything is comparative.

Giles Coren once observed that for every 50 miles you travel away from our capital, you go back in time about ten years. If this is true — and I suspect it is — then up here on Teesside we’re in the middle of that very agreeable summer of 1970, with hot pants, Ted Heath suddenly elected, Rivellino scoring goals for fun in the World Cup and The High Chaparral on the telly. Suits me just fine — indeed, it’s close to idyllic. But I think also that for every 50 miles you travel north from London, the weight of an average individual increases by one stone — and that by the time you reach Dundee you have entered the land of the unimaginably, fantastically vast; the land of Mr and Mrs Jimmy McBrobdingnag.

The government is getting nannyish about obesity once again, given that we are as a nation stricken with it, an epidemic far more dangerous than anything Covid has to offer. The problem is, I think, that the government is getting nannyish in the wrong way. We have had 20 years of governments trying to impress upon us the need to lose weight, but the graphs show that, whatever measures are introduced, our waistbands continue to expand by the year.

This is because — at the behest of the well-meaning but stupid charities and the woke health professionals — each government has bought into the three obesity canards of the liberal left.