Well-rounded children but the wrong kind

We were at Scotch Corner services and I was parked between his family’s cars. His grandparents were very overweight, wheezing and walking with sticks – though, to be fair, I don’t know which was cause and effect here. His parents were each at least 20 stone, I’d guess. Massive, anyway.

As for his brother and sister, about eight and ten years old, you could have drawn them entirely in circles. Great wobbly mounds of fat so that their features had all but disappeared and their legs rubbed together as they walked.

These were not normal chubby children storing up fat to transform it into long strong limbs. They were just overwhelmed by it.

Being no skinny slip of a thing myself, I’m reluctant to criticise anyone’s size. But there was something incredibly sad about the whole family. Especially when Mother dished out the picnic – doughnuts, pasties and bumper bags of sweets. And fizzy pop, of course, including in the baby’s bottle. Just the thing when you’re going to be sitting in the back of a car for a few hours.

Last week Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS called for a campaign to tackle obesity. Parents, he said, are doing something terribly wrong in the way they are bringing up the next generation. One child in ten is obese when starting primary school and one in five is too fat when they leave.

He called for the food industry to do more to limit the sugar in foods. Yes that would help.

But these children aren’t doing the family shopping or cooking. They must realise that cola in a baby’s bottle is not very clever, mustn’t they? Especially when accompanied by doughnuts, pasties and dinosaur chews.

Can they not look at their children and see how miserable they’re going to make them, how unnecessarily difficult their lives are going to be under the weight of all that flesh?

Never mind the much greater risk of disease and ill health.

On the same day, a study from Harvard University showed that very fat children also do less well in school – partly because of a lack of confidence and partly because teachers have lower expectations of overweight children. Maybe they shouldn’t but teachers are only human.

None of us is a perfect parent – my boys certainly shovelled in their share of junk food – and maybe that family is particularly close and loving and the children will thrive.

But I keep thinking of that baby with his doughnut and his fizzy pop. And I wonder.

MEANWHILE, Manchester United is now selling a shirt in size XXXXL. Why is it that the least sporty people are the most likely to wear football shirts and joggers?

SO Kate Moss was led away after her flight, having called the pilot a “basic b****. Frankly, I’d quite like my pilot to be basic and ordinary and sensible.

Anyway, the real surprise was not that Kate Moss was behaving, shall we say, exuberantly, but she was flying on cheapo Easy Jet.

Any minor inconvenience for the rest of the passengers, must be worth it for a story to tell for weeks…

BLESSED are the administrators – for they shall save us from chaos…

Until then, we’re drowning in a sea of incompetence. Just in the past week or so we’ve heard about more than 3,000 claimants waiting more than a year for their Personal Independence Payments; there’s been total confusion over new pension arrangements and this week the new rules of driving licences sent the DVLA into meltdown.

Had no one thought what was going to happen, let alone actually prepared for it?

No one – in public or private sector – takes responsibility. No one seems to know anything. Every time you ring (“Thank you for waiting. Your call is very important to us.”) you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN.

Incompetence rules at every level. It starts with the people at the top who had the Big Idea without any clue of how it was going to work. It ends with the people at the bottom who are all too often agency staff on the minimum wage with no sense of connection or responsibility to anyone. Those in the middle are just overwhelmed.

Even in this computer age, we still need an army of plodders who pay attention to detail that everyone else thinks they’re too grand to bother with. The sort of people who make you fill out forms in triplicate so there ‘s always one as backup, who ensure that when they make an appointment, the person you’re meant to see is actually working that day and your file is in their tray, that your messages are logged so someone else can find them and act on them.

It’s easy to dismiss such people as nit-pickers. But we need them, desperately – before there’s another meltdown.

LOVE the pictures taken by the Duchess of Cambridge of the Prince George and his new baby sister.

I just wonder how she bribed to look so angelic….how many shots it took to get those four perfect pics… and how soon afterwards Prince George whopped his little sister with a giant plastic brick…

BACKCHAT

Dear Sharon,

All my family suffer from hay fever and this year does seem to have been particularly bad. I’ve always thought it was because of the oil seed rape as we are surrounded by yellow fields. Last year someone told me to eat a little local honey every day. It must be really local – not just “Yorkshire”. I’ve been having a spoonful every day for months now and although I’m still runny-eyed, it’s not as bad as it was last year and nowhere near as bad as the rest of the family, who have now started on the honey regime too.

I would advise any mother of teenagers with hay fever to try them with honey. It’s so unfair that they have to do exams when they’re suffering so badly.

Liz Metcalfe (by e mail)