The government is considering a scheme to pay hideously obese people to lose weight, offering them “vouchers and rewards” for shedding enough pounds to enable them to see their own genitals for the first time in 30 years. This is part of a programme which will cost the rest of us, those of us who are merely “chubby” or “fat”, some £327m. If you take the health advice at face value, almost the entire nation is overweight, encased in blubber, our poor arteries clogged like the straws of a McDonald’s vanilla milk shake when you get to the bottom of the carton. We are all afflicted and all to blame, etc.

For years we have been cautioned against stigmatising people for a whole array of unfortunate situations – teenage single mothers, divorcees, fat people. But, of course, stigma is the means by which society expresses its disapproval of people who choose lifestyles which, one way or another, cost the rest of society money. Remove the stigma and people think such behaviour is perfectly fine. As a result we have become a nation of obese, sexually incontinent lunatics.

Perhaps instead of offering fat people money, which they will only spend on pies, we should once again stigmatise them. School children could be encouraged to pelt fat classmates with cakes, exclude them from playground activities and subject them to cruel jibes. And pinch them on their horrible fleshy arms during assembly (if schools still have assemblies). Fat adults could be forced to pay for two seats on public transport, could be given the worst seats in restaurants and scolded over their choice of dessert.

“Have the fruit salad, you fat pig,” and so on. Most obesity is, after all, a consequence of stupidity and indolence and not of some genetic affliction. It is a lifestyle choice which people would be less inclined to adopt if they knew we all hated them for it.

There is another, better approach, of course, which is to leave people alone to live the lives they wish to lead. I was in Austria recently where everybody is truly, grotesquely fat. All of them are huge, flatulent, pasty-skinned spheres of compacted frankfurter sausage, fried potato, sour cream and stale beer, rolling around their pretty mountains belching and singing in a tuneless, guttural manner.

The average life expectancy in Austria is 79.21 years – one of the highest in the world and a good five or six months longer than we can expect to live – and increasing rapidly. In fact, much though the quacks and government ministers might hector us, there is very little correlation between obesity and early death, according to recent studies.

So you might conclude that this is a sort of fashionable meddling for the sake of it by a government which is never happier than when telling us how to conduct our lives.

Oxford’s Muslim leaders wish to broadcast the Adhan – an amplified, prerecorded call to prayer – across the dreaming spires of the city, five times a day. Many nonMuslims in Oxford are upset about this, but not the Bishop of Oxford, John Pritchard. He thinks it’s terrific.

The first line of the Adhan is: “I bear witness that there is no divinity but Allah”, which you might think would grate a little with a chap in Pritchard’s line of work. But it is possible he doesn’t know this and thinks the muezzin is simply saying something agreeably consensual and inclusive, the sort of thing Pritchard might shout out if suddenly hoisted upon the spire of his cathedral just before evensong. “Hello everybody! Not absolutely sure there’s a God at all, in a real sense, but why not drop in for a nice singsong?”

In any case, Pritchard says he sees himself, somewhat presumptuously, as a “community leader of all faiths”. I’m not absolutely certain that he would be accepted as such by Oxford’s Muslims (nor indeed, the city’s communities of Roman Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Scientologists and Satanists). If, however, Pritchard can do a sort of exchange deal and get the Saudis to allow church bells to ring out across Riyadh, say, then those who object might change their tune.

Don’t get fruity with the royals

A charming lady called Betty Hyde may find herself in a spot of bother for having presented the Queen with a pair of bananas when the monarch visited her in an old people’s home. Mrs Hyde thought it a nice gesture because she had been given two bananas by the Queen’s mother 65 years previously, in a hospital. Giving and receiving, though, are different things. You cannot go around handing out fresh fruit to the royals willy-nilly; it is a contravention of etiquette and, privately, they become unaccountably enraged. Prince Charles, I understand, once decapitated a flunky when handed a grapefruit by an adoring member of the public and the Duke of Edinburgh, famously, will lock himself in the nearest toilet and refuse to come out if he sees hoi polloi brandishing blackberries or other “fruits of the forest”.

The Queen disports herself with more self-control, of course, but it must still have been deeply upsetting for her. Debrett’s suggests that when accosted by a member of the royal family and you wish to show your pleasure but also send them on their way quickly, it is permissible to give them book vouchers or free Air Miles. Fruit of any kind, even tinned fruit salad in heavy syrup, is simply not on.

It’s the old codgers who’ve got life licked

The sad death of Heath Ledger has convinced me of something I’ve suspected for a long time: that our young celebrities – pop stars, actors, comedians and the like – have been subjected to some weird genetic experiment in which the DNA of a lemming is surreptitiously injected into their bodies while they sleep.

Upon waking they immediately consume every toxic substance they can lay their hands on and either expire or are conveyed to rehab clinics, then let out to do the same thing again. I suspect that if we somehow prohibited them from access to class-A drugs and prescription drugs, they would throw themselves out of a 10th-floor window or jump in front of a train.

Our older generation of celebrities by contrast, never seem to die. There was a cheering photograph of Norman Wisdom in the papers the other day: 257 years old and still pretending to be amusing. A slightly younger Bruce Forsyth, meanwhile, was at the palace collecting a gong. But what can explain the fact that Keith Richards is still alive?

Chimps are the new dolphins. A couple of decades ago it was fashionable to opine that dolphins were cleverer than humans, despite their failure to have worked out how to extricate themselves from tuna nets, or the fact that dolphinkind has produced even fewer works of great art than Denmark. It occurred to me then that dolphins were both irritating and overrated creatures, and quite stupid to boot – forever squeaking and grinning at us as they jumped through hoops.

Now we are told that, despite their incessant gibbering, chimps are better than us at both remembering stuff and solving maths problems. Being a bit cleverer than Peter Hain does not, to my mind, confer upon these beasts an exalted status. Let us keep things in perspective.

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