DOES size matter? It’s what you are inside that counts. That’s the biggest lie ever told. They say that, inside every fat person, several thin people are screaming to get out. I cannot vouch for the veracity of this. Besides, I believe the risible adage refers to one’s soul or personality, facets of human existence with no bearing on the driving need to reproduce.

Atavistically, that’s about men protecting the territory and women nurturing children. Rightly or wrongly, these are no longer considered important gender attributes, hence all the confusion today.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t protect territory to save myself (or anyone else), but have always got on well with children, partly, I think, because I like teaching them things and, indeed, nurturing them.

I point at bald people or cyclists and say: “Bad.” However, confronted by a fat person today, I wouldn’t know what to say. “Normal,” probably.

I witter thus following the latest intelligence suggesting that one in four persons is now obese, and 70 per cent of the constables in one police force are overweight or obese.

Unimportant clarifications: the one in four figure applies to England, and the police force under advisement is in Hampshire. Newspapers in England referred to “blobbies on the beat” and “the fat blue line”. Disgraceful.

Public Health England also found 3.2 per cent of adults (1.4 million) were morbidly obese, which sounds as if they were both fat and took a grim view of life. In better times, fat people were always jolly. It was part of the job description. Now, with equality legislation, they’re forced to be as miserable as the rest of us.

Some fat people do make me laugh, though. I like the ones that you frequently see in the supermarket throwing something – a family bag of crisps or some such – back onto the shelves with marked contempt. It’s as if they were disgusted that the crisps didn’t come with a free pie.

That said, I don’t want to make light of weighty matters or to appear heavy-handed. I’m no Lard Haw-Haw. Obesity is no laughing matter. It’s not just political correctness forbidding it. Obesity is a serious risk to the health, though you could probably still play for Scotland at football.

In Scotland, we’re constantly told nowadays that we do everything better than England, so – despite the figures above – I’m sure we have more obese people than they do.

All that said, I thought these really obese people you sometimes saw at the supermarket had largely, as it were, disappeared. True, nearly everybody you see is fat, but the really obese ones seem to have gone.

It’s like these really tall, nearly 7ft, young people that were suddenly all over the place a few years ago: nearly all gone now. The only plausible theory is that, as with the really obese people, they were aliens visiting this planet who had gotten the measurements wrong when morphing into human form.

There are still many tall (though not humungously so) young men around, and I hate them all. It all happened so suddenly. One minute, at 5ft 9 and a half, you’re considered average to tall-ish, the next you’re average to small-ish. Comes with age, I suppose, and change of diet. Today’s tall young people are the products of fruit and burgers. We only got these at Christmas.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Dutch were the smallest people in Europe. Now they’re the tallest. The phenomenon has been attributed to cheese. But every woman I’ve ever known ate cheese by the barrowload, and most of them were wee, or at least wee-er than wee me. It’s complicated.

And it’s a shame. I hope that really obese individuals don’t feel they have to stay in the house now. We’re all accidents of nature, dietary disinformation, greed in some cases I guess, and even cultural expectation.

Once, I saw quite a pretty girl with an obese friend. The pretty one was also starting to get fat, and you could tell by the shared trolley piled high with crisps (the real killer), that this is what she was aiming at because it was expected on the estate where they lived. Fat meant fitting in, if not into your old clothes.

Perhaps I’m talking tripe. I do talk such a lot of it in the hope that, among it, will be a pearl of wisdom. Readers: “Nope!” “Can’t find any!” “Never encountered such a thing!” “Ooh, you are offal!”

Oh, well. Never mind. Shurrup and eat your tripe.

Talk of the town

ONE feels for the Renfrew lady who developed an Edinburgh accent following a head accident. I have one of these – an Edinburgh accent, not a head accident (so you can shut up at the back) – and consider it one of the greatest of my many handicaps.

Actually, I’m guessing my accent is more “educated Leith”. It sounds like I am someone who has tried to get on in life by pretending I’m something that I’m not.

Actual Edinburgh accents are quite funny: very refained, don’t you know? My mother, bless her, used to say “aiye” as a posh attempt at “aye”. Never came out right.

One awaits with interest to see how the Renfrew lady passes the litmus test of Edinburgh citizenship: broon sauce or vinegar with her fish supper.

The degrading duds of death

I’LL be candid here and confess that I’m not looking forward to biodegrading. That said, as I’ve reported exclusively before, I’d rather that than being burnt, which sounds stingy.

I am talking, of course, about what I’m planning to do after I die: to wit, decompose. Preferably, I’d like it to happen under a tree, though I’ll probably end up in the municipal dump.

Needless to say, I haven’t made arrangements, as I don’t have any money and hate committing myself to anything, even death.

I haven’t even given any thought to what I’d wear, and so was interested to read about Francesca Rea’s Return To Earth project, which suggests burial garments that biodegrade.

This would be the environmentally sound way to go but, more importantly, would save you turning into a skeleton still clothed in your surviving duds. Imagine you died in the 1970s and, thousands of years later, archaeologists unearth your body clothed in green flares and a purple shirt with a huge floppy collar. The shame!

Mind you, never mind death. Some of the pants I wear while still arguably alive started biodegrading ages ago.

Ears for fears

I TAKE with a pinch of salt and a dollop of broon sauce the idea that the Government or Big Tech listen to us through our telephones, Alexa gadgets or Google speakers.

Why would they do that? I suppose commercial companies might do it in order to tailor advertising towards products we might mention. But the Government surely cannot be interested.

My life is a model of dullness. If anyone wants to spy on that, good luck to them. Bring strong coffee when you come on shift.

This week, two celebrities, Scarlett Moffatt and Joe Swash, joined in the paranoid hullabaloo. Though I’d never heard of either, my researchers say both won I’m A Celebrity, and that Miss Moffatt also starred in Gogglebox, a television show about television. I see.

Miss Moffatt further believes that the Government is using pigeons to spy on us. “I’m not saying all pigeons,” she clarifies. No, that would be ridiculous.

But some, she claims, are actually Government-controlled bots. That sounds plausible enough. Miss Moffatt emphatically denies being paranoid. If the Government has any sense, therefore, it will put her under 24-hour surveillance.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.