Obesity

I knew that the historian Sir Richard Evans was a rather abrasive and quarrelsome man, but I was staggered by his vicious attack on Michael Gove in the Guardian last week. Here’s Evans’s first sentence: ‘Gove presided over the disintegration of our school system; he opened up teaching to untrained people in state schools, because he had contempt for professional educationalists. The restoration of professional teaching in our schools must now be an urgent priority.’ What? Those who follow these things will know that the two men have a history of exchanging insults, but how bizarre of Evans to vent his spleen on untrained teachers. Many great teachers are untrained

So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It may be ‘cost-effective’ to treat the obese before they go on to develop diabetes and other medical problems, but I’m not sure how much sympathy they will get when we already hear about cancer patients having operations delayed and drugs withheld because of stretched NHS budgets. According to the OECD, Hungarians are the most obese people in the EU, followed by Brits. Rather surprisingly, Romanians are the least fat. Surprising, because on a recent holiday to the island of Lefkada, there were a huge number of Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians.

Home The Somerset Levels continued to wallow in floods. The Environment Agency was widely blamed for not having dredged channels, and for putting the welfare of water voles before flood prevention. Its chairman, Lord Smith of Finsbury, said there were ‘tricky issues of policy and priority: town or country, front rooms or farmland?’ The Prince of Wales visited the area. At the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, 5.78 inches of rain fell in January, the most since its records began in 1767. Cuadrilla said it would drill and frack for shale gas at Roseacre Wood and Little Plumpton in Lancashire. Two men found 300 medieval silver coins in a field near Kirkcudbright.

When I was a child, growing up in Hertfordshire just after the second world war, my parents employed a cook called Mrs Sharp, who was a very kind and good woman. But she was also extremely fat and had an enormous protruding stomach that impeded her access to the kitchen stove. Lying around in the house at the time was a 78rpm record of a new popular song from the United States called the ‘Too Fat Polka’, of which the recurrent chorus was ‘I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me’. The song, recorded by the then famous but now generally forgotten American broadcaster and