Let's hear it for the fatties – the noise of crunching crisps

Published on Monday 24 August 2009 20:03

IT'S time someone spoke up for lardbuckets. Bullied by a slimmist press, banned from public transport and many churches, even blamed for global warming (they put their carbon finger in many pies with their insatiable appetites bringing pressure on food-production, transport and so on), they are caught in a vicious cycle, with the misery of their oppression leading them to seek succour in fish suppers and tubs of ice cream.

Is it their glands or a lack of self-discipline? I fear lardiness sneaks up on a fellow or burd and, once it gets hold, it's hard to jettison. It's also difficult for the rotund citizen to pluck up the courage to visit the gym and wobble among the sexless thinnies and bicep-flexing baldies.

How wide, as it were, is the problem? Well, in some ways, it depends where you're standing. Recently, I was sitting on the Belfast-Stranraer ferry and, bored out of my mind, decided to count the number of bloaters vis-a-vis normal people. I'd noticed many baby elephants struggling to keep their feet on the moving ship, balancing medicinal crisps in one hand and gland-relieving Cornettos in the other.

So many were there in fact that I wondered if they might even be a majority. As a top political commentator, I had to think of the implications here. What if a Bloaters United Revolutionary Party were formed? Such a BURP could take over the country, and the next thing you knew Greggs would be nationalised.

However, there is no cause for alarm. Yet. My scientific study on the ferry yielded 52 normals to 26 bloaters. Meaning one in two or three (you do the maths, I'm hopeless) is lardular. But that was on a ferry between lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland, two places renowned for unsubtle cuisine. On the good ship Sugarelli, every other bloater was eating crisps. Crisps are easily available in this country and, at the time of writing, you don't have to go outside to eat them. The temptation they offer is considerable and, watching hippo sapiens trauchle by, it's possible to think: "There but for the grace of God waddle I."

Compare and contrast with Festival Edinburgh at the moment. The place is positively pullulating with slim, blonde salad-suckers from the Home Counties. These people wouldn't know a pie if it removed its top crust and poured its innards over their honey-fed heids. Even relatively slim people are made to feel inadequate by the sun-kissed, fashionable culture-consumers. They just look so healthy. You can tell them from the relatively few Scots at the Festival instantly.

I write all this merely as preamble to the bombshell news that British people suffer from "fat blindness".

A top dietician said the more fatties there were around you, the more likely you were to become huge yourself, because obesity is all you see and you think it normal. So, as I said above, it's all about context. That's why all the fatties on the ferry felt at home. But if they were to turn up at the Fringe ticket office, they'd feel alien among the stick insects in the queue.

The saddest note in all this yesterday was the use in the papers once again of a photie of that poor fat burd with the knapsack bobbing on her buttocks. Surely, it's time they picked on somebody else?

Megrahi should have his last months

NOT a lot of people can claim this, but I was at the trial in Holland of Adelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. I was there for the last day, sitting behind a bullet-proof screen. I remember little about the trial (well, really it was just the pronouncing of sentence), with the historically more significant aspects of the day blotted out by the memory of terrible problems filing my copy in these early electronic times.

I need hardly point out I was there in an earlier journalistic incarnation, and in what follows too I eschew satire, irony or whatever it is I'm supposed to do. I do not know if Megrahi was guilty. If he was, my view is he should have died in jail. I'm not into compassion for eviltons, and I'm as Scottish as they come.

However, I know the cancer of liberalism runs deep in our modern, emasculated country. The fact that both main churches support Megrahi's release puts me even more at odds with all the inhuman saintliness and alleged Scottish values (in this bigoted, ned-ridden nation? Give me a break). The liberalism of modern Christian institutions reached Situation Daft long ago.

That said, since it isn't totally clear Megrahi committed the outrage, my less than jurisprudential, but nonetheless commonsensical, view is that he might as well have his last three months, just in case. If proof emerges after he ups and dees that he definitely didn't do it, someone has some explaining to do.

Meanwhile, the fact that a total of two people at Megrahi's homecoming in Libya waved Saltires has caused a kind of iconic dissonance around the world. Succour has been given to the Craven Scotch, ever eager to knock their own country's ideals or pretensions. They've used the whole terrible business to revel in the alleged international embarrassment (really? what are the feelings in Scandinavia and Holland?).

As for the United States, while I feel for the relatives and largely agree with their sentiments, the posturing by politicians and that muttonhead from the FBI reeks of a big bully trying to put Wee Scotia in her place. No-one loves America – and, in particular, backward Texas – more than this columnist, but they're starting to get my dander up. And, in the words of Lord Smeato, if they persist, we might just have to set aboot them too.