Don't call me fat, it's a mental condition

When Churchill died 50 years ago, I don’t believe any of his obituaries included the word “fat”.

No one lamented that he had been snatched from us at a mere 90 years of age because of his cavalier disregard for healthy eating.

Instead his gargantuan appetite for food, whisky, Champagne, brandy and cigars was celebrated as a matter of national pride.

It remains so when any distinguished “person of size” hands in his or her XXL dinner pail. We learn that they were gourmets, never gluttons. People who “appreciated the finer things” and were always “larger than life.”

The "larger than life" Clarissa Dickson-Wright

Contrast this with our treatment of the obese working class, characterised as weak-willed, feckless chavs who need to have their benefits withdrawn to get them off their grotesquely oversized backsides, and be cajoled into gastric band surgery to stop them being “a drain on the NHS”.

I deduce from these inconsistent attitudes that it is not so much obesity we don’t like, as the native lower orders. But it is strictly non-PC to say as much, so we pick on certain characteristics – the dreadful names they pick for their children, say, or the sort of fast foods and ready meals they like to eat – and deride those instead.

As a fat person myself I thought I had a certain licence in the use of the word, in the same way as black and gay people are allowed to self-describe in terms that are strictly verboten for everyone else.
Nevertheless I received a stern ticking-off when I casually enquired of my wife “Who’s the fat kid?” when we were picking our son up from primary school the other day. There was only one of them in the playground, and it seemed the most natural way of describing him.

However, I was swiftly re-educated as to why this was as unacceptable as it would have been to highlight his skin colour or a disability.

Our elder son is already conscious of the importance of not getting fat, even though he is as slim as the fan mail folder in Lord Green’s inbox and has no interest in food whatsoever, regarding mealtimes as an inconvenient interruption to his busy schedule.

And, as already noted, he is entirely typical of his peer group.

Nevertheless we must apparently plough on with the crusade to remove sweets from supermarket checkouts, downsize chocolate bars and make drinking a can of fizzy pop as socially unacceptable as lighting up a Capstan Full Strength would be if they were still allowed to make such things.

I can tell you now what will stop this in its tracks, and it will be someone demonstrating a clear linkage between obesity and mental illness: “I eat because I’m depressed.”

I know this to be a fact of life because I’ve been a depressive and a bit on the large size for the last 40-odd years. I also know that I can alleviate my depression by cutting my calorie intake, sleeping less and exercising more, which also tends to reduce my avoirdupois.

But since every time I write on this subject at least one angry reader writes in to complain that you can no more cure yourself of depression than of cancer, I feel sure that my fellow fatties are aiming at an open goal if they can lumber far enough to get a foot on the ball.

As a child, I was always told not to mock the one monumentally fat girl on our street because it was not her fault: “It’s her glands.” And not, as I strongly suspected, too much time in Maynards and not enough on a skipping rope.

Now it will be the state of her mind.

As for the “saving the NHS money” argument, it’s cobblers. Because if the morbidly obese don’t die young of that, they will surely die old of something equally costly to treat.

Ultimately the only way to save real money on the NHS will be for us all to live in good health until we expire suddenly in our sleep. Perhaps helped on our way by a beneficent National Euthanasia Service.

Now there is a truly sinister thought to ponder. Meat pie, anyone?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The fat of the land

I recently watched a TV interview with a hungry man, ground down by the Tory benefits squeeze, who claimed he had to rely on food banks to keep body and soul together.

The odd thing about this supposedly starving individual was that he appeared to be, to put it kindly, rather stout.

I was tempted to make a supposedly witty post to that effect on Twitter, but then reflected that it would no doubt stir up a storm of abuse for being offensive about those less fortunate than myself. Added to which I am conscious of being on shaky ground in taking the mickey out of fatness. I am a statistical anomaly in being very well educated and reasonably well off, yet indisputably overweight.

In our topsy-turvy society, it seems that the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be obese.

None of the arguments advanced by the left to blame this on food manufacturers and retailers for peddling high fat, high sugar junk to the masses strikes me as particularly convincing.

It is always possible to eat more cheaply by cooking for yourself than by slamming a ready meal in the microwave. All that is required is the common sense to appreciate that, and perhaps a little elementary education in shopping and cooking skills.

Since the lunatics in charge of the UK educational asylum are now punting the idea that children should be in school for ten hours a day, 45 weeks a year, perhaps they might just about find time for that.

They could also provide some useful guidance on the avoidance of waste. My own perspective is strongly influenced by having been born a month before food rationing finally ended in the UK in 1954, to parents who had lived through both World Wars and never had much money to spare. The Hanns, in consequence, do not chuck things away lightly.

Occasionally I try to persuade myself that it would be better for my health to scrape some food off my plate into the bin instead of shovelling it down my throat. Though better still, of course, to exercise tighter portion control in the first place.

But what of the bigger issue of food waste by the evil supermarkets, and those who would like to feed themselves from their bins?

I can tell you from direct experience that retailers loathe waste as much as I do. It is money down the drain.

However, a certain amount of it is inevitable. Picture yourself running a small bakery. You make everything fresh each day and you cannot sell it tomorrow because it will have gone stale.

The only way you can minimise waste is to start running down your stocks by the middle of the day. So in the afternoon you will have little in your window to tempt customers, and a diminishing range to offer those who do come into your shop.

As a result, you will lose sales. Keep stocks up and you will sell more, but will also have to throw more away each evening. It is a balancing act. You are in business to make a living, so you will adopt whichever course experience shows to be more profitable.

You’ll hate throwing your products away, and may arrange for them to be given to charity rather than dumped on a tip. But you are unlikely simply to give them away yourself just before the shop closes because you’d swiftly find that no one bought anything much during the afternoon, and a long queue began to build up as closing time approached.

Capitalism, like democracy, is a grossly imperfect system that has only one big thing going for it: it works better than anything else yet devised. Which is why I believe that market forces are much more likely to sort this out than any attempt at legislation, including the market force of consumers voting with their feet against shops that are needlessly profligate.

Then all we will need is for those in authority to apply a healthy dose of common sense in considering whether helping yourself to something that has been deliberately thrown away really constitutes a crime worth pursuing through the courts.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A 1950s childhood: starving Africans versus Captain Manners

Like every child of the 1950s, I simply loathe waste.

The Hann household is enlivened by regular inquisitions into why we cannot make greater efforts to close windows and doors, turn down thermostats and pull on more woolly jumpers and socks.

As for chucking out food, it is a dagger to my heart every time a black banana or a mouldy crust of bread heads into the bin.

So I was naturally depressed by yesterday’s revelation from Tesco that it has managed to waste nearly 30,000 tonnes of food in the first six months of this year – and that its customers have chucked away yet more.

Given the scale of the problem, Tesco’s bright idea of ending multi-buy promotions on large bags of salad sounds like a drop in the proverbial ocean.

For the customer one vital key to avoiding waste, in my experience, is never to go shopping – either in a store or online – when one is actually hungry. Things I fancy but am never going to get around to eating always seem to creep into my basket when I am feeling peckish (which is, to be fair, most of the time).

Leaving the children at home also helps, so long as they don’t ransack the fridge and / or burn the house down while you are out.

Then there is adopting a common sense approach to “use by” dates, and only binning stuff when it has actually gone off rather than when the packet tells you to. If God had intended us to rely on “best before” advice, he wouldn’t have equipped us with noses as well as eyes.

(Having said that, I face an ongoing uphill struggle to convince Mrs Hann that certain products such as sugar, honey and golden syrup do not carry “use by” dates for the apparently incredible reason that they never go off.)

Then there is the potential to make intelligent use of the freezer – and, no, this column isn’t an incompetently concealed advertisement for my clients at Iceland.

I lived for more than 20 years next door to a couple who adopted “The Good Life” long before anyone thought to make it into a TV series, and their entire lifestyle depended on the complex of chest freezers that accommodated their seasonal hauls of home-reared meat, local game, and fruit and vegetables from their garden.

Yes, the best-tasting produce is the stuff that you grow yourself and eat fresh out of the ground. But if you can’t manage that, quick-frozen vegetables are highly likely to contain more vitamins and other nutrients than “fresh” food that has been in the supermarket supply chain for days (and probably in the salad drawer of your fridge for even longer).

The middle class intelligentsia love to rubbish convenience food in general, and frozen convenience food in particular, but the clue to its appeal is in the name: it’s convenient.

And despite the complaints of the British Heart Foundation about increasing portion sizes fuelling the current obesity epidemic, I for one have found that my only successful diets were those based around a carefully controlled intake of calorie-counted ready meals.

Starting to cook from scratch, with the almost inevitable temptation of “seconds”, is for me the high road to disaster.

It will not have escaped the attention of anyone who watched the BBC2 documentary on Iceland last night that I am currently immensely fat.

N.B. The banana is an ironic tribute to David Miliband, NOT a gaffe. Though the spelling of "it's" (not by me) clearly is.

This is not a reflection on frozen food but on my own lack of self-control and one other legacy of my 1950s upbringing.

Faced with a straight choice between clearing my plate and tipping an unwanted surplus into the bin, I’m always going to go for forking it down. To do otherwise, my mother assured me, was to administer a kick in the teeth to the starving children of Africa.

I never did understand why.

I have also met exact contemporaries whose parents dispensed the directly contrary advice that you should “always leave something for Captain Manners”.

But I suspect that Captain Manners moved in more exalted social circles than ours around the Four Lane Ends. What’s more, I bet the cad never once pulled on an extra pullover or sorted out his newspapers for recycling.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The perfect birthday present I can never have: life in the past

In my experience, the people who live longest are those who relentlessly focus on living in the present and thinking about the future.

The only one of my grandparents I ever met was born in 1881. Her parents had taken her to North America as a child, and they crossed the continent by wagon train before deciding it wasn’t a patch on South Shields and coming home again.

Being keenly interested in history from an early age, I tried every way I knew to persuade her to talk about her experiences, but all to no avail. One sample conversation went:

“Grandma, do you remember going to see King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra when they came to Newcastle?”

“Yes. But - eeh! Have you seen the price of Daz these days?”

Always dressed in shabby black and bearing a striking resemblance to the granny in Giles’s cartoons, she lived in an upstairs Tyneside flat in a West End street that has long since disappeared to slum clearance.

Hers must have been one of the last dwellings in the toon still to have gas lighting. Because, with characteristic Hann optimism, she had dismissed her landlord’s offer to install “the electric” at the end of the war because she wasn’t planning to live long enough to make it worth the bother.

She died in 1973. Ironically after a stroke caused by repeatedly running up and down stairs to let in a thoroughly bemused man from the gas board.

Not too long before that she survived being run down on a zebra crossing on her way home from a whist drive. The General Hospital set her broken arm in plaster and tried to tackle her obesity with a crash diet. When denied the ice cream served to everyone else on the ward I am reliably informed that her cries of “I’m 90 years old, for God’s sake! What difference does it make?” could be heard on the other side of Westgate Road.

I started thinking about my grandmother because I entered my own 60th year yesterday, and I wondered whether I could identify the secret of how she came to be the only one of my ancestors to make old bones.

Her total lack of interest in the past creates a bit of a challenge because I feel an ever-increasing desire to go back and live in the Newcastle of the late 1950s or early 1960s. That fondly remembered time when Harold Macmillan was in office, a young and beautiful Queen was on the throne, and we had never had it so good.

When trolleybuses sailed along the main roads, electric trains clattered to the coast and steam locomotives shuttled up and down the East Coast main line, where the shunting of coal wagons at Little Benton sidings made a noise hard to distinguish from thunder.

At home, a good fire of Shilbottle coal warmed the one room we could afford to heat, and a small black and white television with a dodgy vertical hold commanded our attention from the corner. A selection of Dinky cars and a Hornby Dublo 3-rail train set provided fine indoor entertainment for the young, while a bicycle was squeezed alongside the Ford Consul in the garage for outdoor excursions. Yes, to savour all that again would be true bliss.

Mrs Hann, bless her, spent weeks Googling “1950s experiences” for my birthday present, but sadly drew a blank.

A blank, to be completely fair, apart from this

I naturally gloss over such less attractive features of the period as blunt hypodermic needles, evil-tasting medicines, the Windscale fire of 1957 or the Cuban missile crisis that nearly blew us all to kingdom come.

I am sure that my grandmother would never have made the schoolgirl error of taking up mental residence in the 1890s. But other shared features give me more encouragement. There is obviously our tendency to stoutness, for a start.

Plus the key fact that she was, if I’m honest, a notably self-centred individual that nobody much liked. On that analogy, I should be a shoo-in for whatever they may send instead of telegrams from Buckingham Palace in 41 years’ time. Just so long as I steer well clear of whist drives and British Gas.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Fatties like me need a stronger warning than red lights

As the economy falters, Government cuts bite, libraries close and the shutters go up on yet more failing retailers, I feel an increasingly desperate urge to identify something that may cheer us up in 2013.

Last year at least we had the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics. Already the hysterical media overreaction to David Bowie’s new single has underlined how desperate we are for the smallest shred of non-bad news.

Searching the Internet for more of the same, I was reminded that this is to be the great year when we are at last blessed with a uniform system of traffic light labelling for foodstuffs. Hurrah!

Well, I say “uniform”, but in fact the system will only definitely apply to the own label products of supermarkets that have been bullied into voluntary compliance by the Government, with the aid of assorted no doubt well-intentioned pressure groups.

Because food labelling is one of the many areas on which our own Government has surrendered its competence to the EU, it cannot actually impose a system that would cover branded food manufacturers as well as retailers.

This raises the possibility that consumers may baulk at all the glowing red lights on a Tesco chocolate bar, and pick a warning-free Cadbury’s one instead.

This will only happen, of course, if we assume that shoppers are terminally thick. But then that does seem to be the principle on which the whole labelling system, like most Government advice, is predicated.

How many of us really need little coloured spots to tell us that an apple will do us more good than a packet of lard, or that a green salad is likely to prove healthier than a stuffed crust pepperoni pizza with extra mozzarella?

Can it really be sensible to plaster red warnings across natural products that have been part of the human diet for centuries, like red meat, cheese, cream and sugar, while green lighting artificially contrived and industrially produced “lite” alternatives?

I write this as an overweight man who has been enjoined by his doctor to eschew such small pleasures as cakes, and to eat bread with only “a scrape” of some ghastly yellow cholesterol-reducing spread.

I ignore this advice as I prepare my toast nearly every morning for the simple reason that butter is absolutely delicious, while the alternative has all the taste appeal of a dollop of lubricating oil.

If my doctor is reading this, I do at least have brown toast

The whole food industry has been working for years to meet assorted targets for the reduction of fat, salt and sugar. Where they have failed, it is almost invariably because the reformulated product doesn’t taste anything like as good as the original.

Admittedly time may help to resolve this. I have not added sugar to hot drinks or salt to pretty much anything for years, and consequently find many prepared foods far too sweet or salty for my taste.

I do appreciate the value of having all the facts about any product’s contents at my fingertips, particularly its calorie count. It came as a revelation when I finally grasped that the lunchtime sandwich I sometimes grabbed as a “light” alternative usually contained many more calories than a proper meal.

Four years ago I achieved a significant and undoubtedly beneficial weight loss that I would never have accomplished without this information. Now, like most dieters, I need to go through the whole rigmarole again. Not because I am inadequately informed, but because I am a greedy so-and-so who cannot consume treats in moderation.

I don’t need telling what is bad for me. I need something to discourage me from eating too much of it. Putting a series of red traffic lights on the front of the pack is not going to be of the slightest assistance.

What might help would be to take a leaf from the anti-smoking campaigners’ book and plaster packs with images of the awful consequences of over-indulgence. Food’s equivalent of a horrific tumour could be an image of the late Sir Cyril Smith.

In miniature, smiling and giving an encouraging thumbs-up on a salad; vastly enlarged and menacing on a meat pie.

Yes, that thought has made me revisit my plans for lunch already. Lettuce, anyone?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Counting my blessings in the best place on the planet

I have never been in any doubt that Northumberland is the finest county in the greatest country on the planet, and therefore the world’s best possible place to live.

Though when I formed that judgement the county stretched, as in my mind it still does, from Tweed to Tyne. One of the saddest acts of vandalism in the benighted 1970s was surely the removal of those white LNER signs in the middle of the King Edward Bridge that marked the boundary between Northumberland and Durham, following the creation of the bogus “Metropolitan County of Tyne and Wear”.

On the King Edward Bridge heading south: usually a mistake

People south of the river are different, as Gateshead proved again yesterday by snatching the uncoveted title of obesity capital of Britain. Perhaps a brave attempt to fall in with David Cameron’s enthusiasm for the big society, but hardly what he had in mind.

Gateshead's "Slimmer of the Year" 2011

Meanwhile the ties between Newcastle and the rest of Northumberland are age-old and enduring. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to be rushed from the north of the county to the Wansbeck Hospital, or the proposed new emergency unit in Cramlington, when there are much better transport links to the RVI just down the road?

Particularly when the facilities and services on offer in Newcastle are so outstanding. Two weeks ago I kept an appointment at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Freeman Hospital. Up to then I had no idea that any such thing existed. Nuclear fission, bombs and power stations, yes. Medicine, no.

What struck me above all was the cleanliness and efficiency of the place. The equipment was clearly state-of-the-art, the staff charming, their timekeeping spot on. But the biggest difference from the hospitals in the North West, of which I have seen rather too much during my wife’s pregnancies, was the ready availability of clean and functioning lavatories.

Over there they have an abundance of “out of order” signs and the few working conveniences appear to have been recently visited by an orang utan after an exceptionally boisterous beer and curry night.

The only depressing thing was struggling to make it back to the car park past a trio of incredibly fat people, all drawing on fags as though their lives depended on it, despite the abundance of “no smoking on site” signs. Visitors from Gateshead, I now assume.

I filled the time by trying to remember what the Freeman reminded me of. And I realised: a private hospital, where those who have paid through the nose for health insurance can admire the quality of their surroundings and feel that they have got their money’s worth. As an NHS patient, I felt truly blessed.

I felt a similar glow of contentment on Thursday, when I stood with other donors on the stage of Newcastle’s Theatre Royal to see the curtain raised on its newly refurbished auditorium.

Looking good: the curtain rises

What a gem this is. And, having walked all the way up to the gods for the first time since the 1970s, I can report that there are some outstanding bargains to be had in its upper reaches, offering high levels of comfort and still splendid views of the stage.

The view from on high

A modest tribute in the Grand Circle

Still waiting for that booking for my one man show

Though I noticed that there were, amongst those shovelling down canapés on the stage, one or two who would never fit into one of the theatre’s comfortable new seats, or make it above stalls level without the assistance of a hydraulic crane.

More day trippers from Gateshead, I expect.

So let Newcastle and Northumberland advance hand in hand, marrying the greatest city and the finest countryside on Earth, and let all of us north of the Tyne reflect on how outstandingly fortunate we are to be living here.

And maybe join me in dusting off a diet sheet to maintain our point of difference from the folk across the water?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Risk and elitism in the firing line

All-out war continues, not just in Afghanistan, but against domestic enemies as diverse as risk, elitism, racism, sexism, obesity and drunkenness. Almost the complete range of my interests and enthusiasms, in fact.

I was powerfully reminded of the campaign to eliminate risk by a report on Saturday that no fewer than nine fire engines had raced to Newcastle’s Mansion House so that firefighters (not, God forbid, firemen) in gas-tight suits could deal with a deadly seepage of mercury from an antique clock.

Forty years ago, just across Osborne Road at the Royal Grammar School, my schoolmates and I regularly amused ourselves by shunting globules of mercury around the railway lines carved in the ancient desks of the science department by previous generations of bored youths. Clearly we are lucky to be alive.

I returned to the school on Friday, in response to a kind invitation to lunch from its governors, and found that the passage of time had not erased a feeling of mild foreboding on entering the premises.

I arrived on the dot of 12.30 to avoid the risk of being slammed in late detention, carefully checked that my tie and trousers were properly fastened, and felt vaguely guilty that I was not wearing a crested blue cap.

Perhaps it is because the place has undergone such a comprehensive physical transformation since I left in 1971 that I feel strongly tempted to send my own son there, when he reaches the appropriate age in around 2017. All I will need is a full-time job in the North East paying enough to cover the fees, with a minimum retirement age of 75. All offers gratefully received.

My own parents faced no comparable concerns, because I enjoyed a Northumberland County Council scholarship; one of those devices designed to promote social mobility (still very good, apparently) but abolished because they were also redolent of elitism (now thoroughly bad).

On Sunday, my wife and I found another front opened in the war against risk at the church where we were married, which had been transformed into a building site. Contractors were busily levelling the floor, which had served perfectly well for two or three hundred years, because Elfin Safety now deemed it to pose an unacceptable “trip hazard”.

Later that day, I found myself in a restaurant opposite a man who shockingly observed of the passers-by “There are a lot of foreigners around here.” Ordinarily this would have been the cue for a visit from the diversity awareness police, but it merely raised a slightly puzzled laugh because the speaker was my Iranian father-in-law. A man so comprehensively assimilated that he answers the question of whether he prefers to be known as Iranian or Persian with “Actually, I prefer to be called British.”

I did not dare to ask how he felt about the news that the BNP was now prepared to admit (“welcome” might be pushing it, I guess) ethnic minority members. But I was interested to find that my wife’s uncle thoroughly approved of some distinctly non-PC remarks I had posted on my blog about that Iranian “criminal in uniform” Ali Dizaei, who rose almost to the top of the Metropolitan Police by relentlessly playing the “racism” card against anyone who stood in his way, and somehow became president of the Black Police Association despite what many might have seen as the fatal handicap of not being the least bit black.

This Persian feast was not quite the romantic meal à deux I had envisaged for my first Valentine’s Day as a married man, but it certainly beat the previous 40 years of moodily chewing a TV dinner for one, and regretting the lack of mawkish greetings cards on my mantelpiece.

Yes, even I am prepared to concede that, once in while, some things do change for the better.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Bring on the sabre-toothed tigers

It is amazing how swiftly things can move. One minute Obama is being hailed as the shining hope of all humanity. Then he makes a dubious crack about the Special Olympics and half the commentariat spot that he was a flawed Blair clone all along.

I hesitate to point out that I told you so.

Then there are Messrs Corden & Horne, the new Morecambe & Wise, basking in unadulterated critical acclaim until they released their new film about lesbian vampires. Overnight their double act is universally acknowledged to be rather less hilarious than Brown & Darling.

Compared with these and other cataclysmic changes of fortune in recent months, my own turnaround has been positively glacial: a figure of speech that may well need revisiting in the light of recent predictions about the swift disappearance of the ice caps. Like climate change, mine is by no means all bad news. I have finally found the perfect partner I long despaired of ever tracking down, while nasty skiing accidents will become a thing of the past when there is no more snow.

But there is a downside. For the planet, the death of perhaps seven billion people in circumstances that will make every previous war, famine, plague and natural disaster look like a vicarage tea party. And for me, a hideous reversal of the weight loss about which I was crowing a year ago as I coasted to an easy victory over Tom Gutteridge in the great columnar weight loss challenge.

Recalling how difficult it was to shed the 21lb I lost then, I am appalled that I have allowed 12lb of it to regroup around my waistline. With hindsight, I made two fatal mistakes. One was not to consign my old, “fat” clothes to the bin as soon as they became too loose for me, thinking that I would postpone the acquisition of a new wardrobe until I had lost the further 21lb that was my no doubt unrealistic target.

The other was to acquire the same enviable handicap as Tom: a beautiful woman who expects to share an evening meal with me. Bang went my days of enjoying the classic PR man or journalist’s large and boozy lunch, and compensating with just a piece of fruit and a nice glass of water in the evening. Incidentally, when I started working in the City 30 years ago, every banker I knew was happily sozzled by 2p.m. and spent the afternoon snoozing at his desk. Keep them sober, send them to the gym instead of the pub and they come up with sub-prime lending and the credit crunch. There must surely be a lesson there somewhere.

Apparently one of the hot fads of the moment is the Paleolithic or Caveman Diet. Cut out grains, beans, potatoes, dairy products and sugar, and focus on the meat and fruits our ancient forebears hunted and gathered. Ideally, in the Warrior variant, guzzle the lot in just one big evening meal a day, as Stone Age man did after killing his prey.

The proponents of the plan argue that primitive man enjoyed perfect health, overlooking the fact that he was considered a bit of a wonder if he made it past the age of 30.

Nevertheless, I think I shall give it a go. But to create the ideal conditions for success, we surely also require the splendid incentives for exercise enjoyed in the distant past. Which means introducing more and fiercer species of predator to the British Isles. Why stop at bringing back wolves? With the massive progress now being made in DNA recovery and cloning techniques, surely we could really put the North East on the map by setting sabre-toothed tigers and velociraptors loose in the Cheviots? It will be amazing how swiftly I can move with one of those behind me.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.