THE IPSWICH Primary Care Trust is no longer going to recommend fat people for hip and knee replacement operations. That’s all well and good — so long as alcoholics are not given new livers until they’ve sworn never to drink again, Aids victims are not given medication until they’ve vowed never to screw around again and Radiohead fans are not given antidepressants until they’ve promised to destroy every record they own by that toe-tapping beat combo. And as long as fat people are allowed to withhold the taxes they contribute to the NHS — after all, the money could so much more pleasurably be spent on cake!
It’s a slippery slope, sitting in judgment on people, and personally I’m not sure that doctors are equipped to act as judge and jury any more than journalists or taxi drivers. No matter how many years they may spend at med school — and let’s remember, vets do longer — it doesn’t make them any better morally. Indeed, if one looks at the high rate of drinking and smoking in the medical profession — doctors were also the first sizeable group of junkies in Britain — in the face of all the grisly first-hand experiences they’ve had, there may be a case for say- ing that they are less equipped than others to judge, refus- ing, as they have, to learn from experience.
Doctors are skilled, dedicated people who work the sort of hours that I become faint just thinking about. Yet they also score as high as other professions, if not higher, as sex pests and killers. Surely there must be, alongside the flame of compassion, a chip of ice in the soul of people who can choose to go into a job where they are guaranteed to witness so much misery during their lifetime, alongside the flame of compassion which seeks to put a stop to that pain. It is in part because doctors are only human — with all the good and bad that the very word implies — that I am against any weakening in the laws against euthanasia. And I’m afraid that this new determination of certain doctors to decide who will live in constant pain and who won’t — based on a body mass index of 30 or more, which, as other doctors have pointed out, is a strange place to draw the line, given that many people on the wrong side are as fit and active as their skinnier cousins — doesn’t do anything to increase my faith in the quality of their mercy.
There is also the fact that those who eat fattening foods are likely to be working class: that is, do jobs that do not bring them respect, satisfaction or financial reward. Doctors tend to score very high on all three; is it too much to ask that they do not judge people too harshly because they want to grab a bit of fleeting pleasure from life? This new rule smacks of the middle classes telling the oiks what’s good for them, and believing that they are moral guardians rather than servants of the public. But that fat bloke being refused a new hip is the one who kept the doctors in fags and booze for all the years they were at med school. It doesn’t behove doctors to begrudge him a few sweet treats at the end of another soul- destroying slog.
In Alan Bennett’s brilliant script for A Private Function, the appalling Dr Swaby, played by Denholm Elliott, displays a scorn for his patients that, backed up by the occasional sensation from Crippen to Shipman, we always fear lies beneath the benevolent bedside manner of our medics. It might be easier for us to share the fun of medical abbreviations — N(ormal) F(or) N(orfolk), F(unny) L(ooking) K(id), as well as the habit of calling elderly patients “crumblies” — if we weren’t aware that so many old people are neglected and that so many children have had their organs pointlessly harvested without the knowledge of their parents, in hospitals.
I don’t believe that the majority of doctors would sympathise in any way with the monstrous Dr Swaby: “Under this National Health Service, any poorly little pillock can come into my surgery and say, ‘I’m ill, treat me!’ ” But there has to be something wrong with a system that freely offers Viagra to lousy lovers and methadone to inept junkies but doesn’t give a tax-paying fat person a new hip. And I don’t say this purely out of self-interest.
Gentlemen shouldn't prefer blondes any more
I’M NOT the first person to point this out, but which joker at Estée Lauder decided that Gwyneth Paltrow was a better bet than Liz Hurley to advertise a perfume called Pleasures?
When Paltrow lists “the idea of being so small” as one of her lukewarm kicks, am I the only one who thinks that this refers to the sheer molten excitement of dropping yet another dress size in her apparently never-ending quest to disappear? Rice-cake orgy, here we come!
Of course, Liz is similarly miserly when it comes to counting the calories. But you get the impression that if she was minded to, she’d down a whole bottle of Bolly and to hell with the kcals. There is something gloriously vulgar about her, and you just know that she eats so carefully because of the way she wants to look, not because she wants to be fit enough to do three hours of exercise, à la Madonna.
Though Paltrow and Hurley may be sisters under the skin, they are complete opposites in terms of colouring: they are the latest round in the Blondes versus Brunettes debate, which is such a cushy old standby for the idler type of hack (me).
The case for gentlemen preferring blondes has been weakening for some time now — apparently more brunettes than blondes are specifically requested in personal ad columns, and the polls of the world’s most beautiful women have been getting darker.
Blondes carry their own spotlights, and a young blonde woman can often look like the perfect specimen of her type. But the operative word is “young”. The same built-in headlights that illuminate perfect skin and bright eyes can become cruel searchlights when the first bloom of youth is over, whereas the brunette simply draws her light- reflecting silk around her and smirks. How many photos have I seen of La Hurley smirking! By contrast, Paltrow is far more of a simperer, part of the assumed little-girl appeal of the blonde, and not one which improves with age.
I’ll take a smouldering, self-possessed Hurley brunette over an insipid, innocuous Paltrow blonde any day.
