Paunching Above Our Weight

Although the National Haystack has repeatedly ordered Britain's fatties to slim down to his own svelte dimensions, mere facts have once more intervened to spoil things with their unnecessary and un-British complications. Research, of all things, has led insidiously to the Stakhanovite conclusion that conquering obesity is not simply a matter of abstaining from food, after the fashion of the famous Conservative Party hero Bobby Sands. Rather, it depends on all manner of tedious things like public transport, green spaces, safe streets, mental health and, if you please, more money for the plebs to blow on drugs, tattoos and microwave foie gras. As usual when reality is so undisciplined as to fall out of step with Her Majesty's Government, a spokesbeing was extruded to proclaim that the Haystack's admonitory burbles constituted a world-leading strategy, and that more talk was on the way. Presumably next month's expected lorry tailbacks and the resulting empty shelves in supermarkets were considered too obvious a blessing to mention.