Like Too Many Custard Slices, email Makes You Fat

It comes as no great surprise to discover, less than 24 hours after being inducted into the ways of the Internut, that I am endangering my health. According to a news report in The Observer newspaper, "experts" - whatever they are - have decreed that the reason the country has run to fat is the email. Instead of walking around their offices in order to have inane conversations, people are sending emails to their colleagues. A Dr Dorian Dugmore, a health adviser to something called Sport England, says "we are losing millions of hours of exercise through the explosion of email".
It is, of course, an interesting thesis, and one trusts that Dr Dugmore - whose name has a satisfyingly Dickensian twang to it - has been well-compensated for his perspicacity. But I think, like much vogueish thinking, it misses the point. Email does not make you fat. Pies make you fat. Fizzy juice makes you fat. Beer makes you fat. Fly cemeteries make you fat. In short, fat makes you fat, and in taking 43 seconds to type that sentiment, I have grown no fatter. If anything, I have lost weight on account of my rage.
Still, the suggestion did prompt me to recall an item I saw in the Observer magazine several decades ago, in an informative cartoon strip called The Rudiments of Wisdom. This was a serious cartoon on the subject of science. It may have been aimed at children, but if it was, I failed to notice.
In one strip, the question was: why do women live for longer than men? It is, I think, an intriguing enquiry, and my immediate inclination would have been to suggest that the longevity of the ladies was due to the fact that it was men, on the whole, who went off and died in wars, and worked in jobs which wore them out by virtue of their physicality (mining, say, or farming) or their sheer, exasperating tedium (all manner of white collar jobs). I might also have added that the ladies lived longer just to spite their husbands by getting the last word.
But, no. Apparently not. Ladies lived longer because of a quirk of biology to which I am almost shamefaced to refer. Why? Because they sat down when they went to the lavatory, while men - on at least half of their visits - remained erect.
It seems no more implausible than the suggestion that emails are fattening, and I believed it for several years. Indeed, for a while I took to sitting down on all my visits to the Gentlemen's Excuse-Me, until the strain of thinking about it made me worry that I wouldn't be able to stand up again.

The Drug-Fuelled Myopia of the Conservative Party, pt 56

It is not my habit to intrude on private grief, but the suicidal instincts of the Conservative Party would give pause to a depressed lemming on the clifftops of Beachy Head. It is already hard to recall, but there was a moment, not more than a fortnight ago, when it seemed as if that once great institution - now a fraying coalition of estate agents, pro-celebrity golfers and blunted colonels - had come to its senses. In Mr David Cameron, a young man with the complexion of a well-skelped orphan, it had produced a leadership candidate with the credentials to do well in British politics.
This does not mean that he had anything interesting to say on matters of policy. Indeed, as the wily Fettesian Mr Blair has demonstrated, insight into policy is almost irrelevant to the modern politician: more important is the ability to exude empathy, to ham it up in moments of national crisis, and to - forgive me, Dr Freud - "feel the pain" of the electorate. As has been noted in biographies of the Prime Minister, Mr Blair is a failed thespian. (Personally, I would hesitate to cast him in a production of The Mousetrap, for fear that he would feel the need to inform the audience that the murder was actually "collateral damage", and was executed in the interests of national security.) But the fact that he always looks as if he is acting, especially when he is trying to evince sincerity, seems to strike a chord with the electorate, possibly because the voters acquire their emotional intelligence from unending exposure to the dramatic grime of soap operas and the choreographed unreality of reality television, in which the vain and the desperate are allowed to become famous by being ill-mannered and unremarkable in everything except their banality.
So, while it is true that the views of Mr Cameron on everything except his own ambition remained opaque, he was, at least, personable. In this regard he had an advantage over Mr David Davis, who has the look of a man who would sneak into your hotel room to borrow the trouser press. Mr Kenneth Clarke, on the other hand, is the (ample) embodiment of a man who has supped too long in The Last Chance Saloon.
I have never, praise the Lord, had the misfortune to be in close proximity to Mr Clarke, but his appearance brings to mind a Public Information Film from the 1970s, in which those bell-bottomed buffoons, the Bay City Rollers, employed their glottal-stops to inform their pubescent followers that intimacy with a cigarette smoker was - I quote from memory - "like kissing an ashtray". If Mr Clarke were to become leader, there is, I think, a strong possibility that he would be banned under forthcoming legislation to outlaw passive smoking. By a rough calculation, inhaling the aura of his fabled Barbour jacket would be the equivalent of ingesting 20 Lambert and Butler. Mr Clarke could, therefore, look forward to being the first Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition to conduct his business from a huddled doorway on the pavements of Whitehall.
Does it matter that Mr Cameron has been turned from a politician with a future to a deer in the headlamps by the question of whether, in the past, he experimented with drugs other than Junior Aspro? Certainly it does. By evading the question, he has kept it alive, and the forward motion of the Tories has stalled in the mud of innuendo. But what if he had answered? Perhaps if he had "confessed", in the manner of the late Ms Mo Mowlam, to some youthful indiscretions, the matter could have been laid to rest. The fact that he didn't leads one to suppose that the closet houses livelier skeletons.
On the other hand, Mr Cameron could have behaved as Tories are expected to, and denied - as the fan club of the bloated balladeer, Mr Elvis Presley used to - any illegal drug use of any kind. Would that have worked? Probably not. The drug question has become the Baby Boom equivalent of "and when did you stop beating your wife?"

The White Heat of Rhodesian tobacco

As I take my first steps from the lay-by to the hard shoulder of the "information superhighway", I am filled with the kind of excitement and dread I have not encountered since I last visited Haddington. There is an element of disorientation: this is a place I should not be. And yet, I cannot deny that there is an electrical charge to the enterprise. At last, I am experiencing the white heat of Mr Wilson's technological revolution; forty years too late. The sage of Huddersfield, our last pipe-smoking Prime Minister, the late Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, made his speech about technology in 1963, which is also the year in which sexual intercourse was invented by Mr Philip Larkin. I trust my belated introduction to the 1960s will not be too abrupt. There is only so much excitement a man can take. My threshold is dangerously low.
Nevertheless, here I am, typing in rubber-soled shoes on a borrowed computer. I was enrolled in the Silver Surfers' Club after my attempts to give blood went awry, and I ended up unconscious and in need of an emergency application of hot tea and Chocolate Hob-nobs. As I waited for my fragile sense of wellbeing to return, the matronly commissar, Mrs Bella Wetherspoon, mistook me for a computer enthusiast and frogmarched me to the annexe - more of a hut, really - where she gave me rudimentary instructions in mouse control. I had not felt so dominated since I was given an "MOT" by the District Nurse at the age of 13. I still shudder at the thought of it every time I cough.
But, like Ronnie Corbett, trapped in the baby-seat of a wonky trolley at Fine Fare, I digress.

Mr Elder; in happier times. Portrait by Steve Carroll (www.stevecarroll.co.uk)