Scanning through the news this morning, it was Sir David Attenborough who first caught my eye. Apparently he is saddened by today's health and safety culture that deters children from roaming the countryside and discovering nature, and it worries him that as a consequence Britain risks losing the next generation of naturalists. Naturists too, I guess, if you want the bare facts - and more and more those bare facts don't bear looking at these days. Yes, I know the bears are adding up confusingly now, but do bear with me a little longer because the next thing my eyes fell on, as a sign of things to come, was a report on the first of our adapted ambulances.
Hitting the roads of Oxfordshire yesterday, we are told this beast of a vehicle, capable of accommodating four ordinary patients, can bear the weight of one person weighing up to seventy stone - and for my US friends, forget Texas: that's over 1,000lbs! The adapted Iveco truck comes with a heavy-duty tail lift, allowing even the heaviest person to be raised into the ambulance without the need to call on the fire service with its winching gear. A spokesman for the South Central Ambulance Service revealed that in the past five years there has been a tenfold increase in the number of patients being admitted to hospital suffering from weight-related conditions, and he hoped this new heavy duty ambulance would address the rise in injuries being sustained by crews attempting to lift (and squeeze?) these overly obese patients into the ordinary vehicles.
Now, being the politically incorrect person that I am, I couldn't bear to picture in my mind's eye these back-ruined ambulance crews, some falling to the ground in acute agony, the firemen there frantically cranking away on their straining and groaning winches, all the attending emergency vehicles haphazardly strewn about blocking off the road, each with their blue lights flashing everywhere, and the multitude of cackling radios there would be, with perhaps the addition of several police cars turning up too, their men and women flustering around in the hope of managing the lengthening traffic queues, without me falling about uncontrollably and hysterically blubbering. What? What the hell is going on here? With apologies to William Ernest Henley: What have I done to you, England, my England?
To me the real problem here is so obvious. It is not with the inadequate ambulances; the problem is the fat people! They are the problem that should be addressed. We must stop making excuses for them, and being 'politically correct' by saying they are merely 'challenged'. Challenged by what - mass? In most cases, but I will accept: not all, the only true reason for their gross obesity is down to them failing to face up to a challenge: life - and it starts at a very young age!
Were these people, many of them quite young, to stop lazing around having a whale of a time watching television almost twenty-four seven, incessantly playing computer games or spending countless hours surfing social networks, unnecessarily moping about and never-endingly texting each other daft messages, whilst in their boredom unceasingly pigging themselves stupid on the ever-increasing range of crisps, burgers, and other unhealthy convenience foods, and instead they got up off their big fat backsides and did some natural exercise - it's called: living your life! - we wouldn't have this problem today. We never had a growing number of grossly obese people in the halcyon days that Sir David Attenborough and I can both remember so well, and quite honestly: we don't have to suffer it now!
This new type of ambulance may be capable of raising a whale up into the back of it, but that only addresses one problem. Tell me: how do we expect those poor overworked ambulance crews to wrench such a mass off of a bed in the home and onto a trolley? And how about, as the occasion must sometimes arise, manoeuvring it down flights of stairs? I say: it's time to get real! And I don