Fat Brat

I'm not particularly well acquainted with the Fat Brats issue; it crops up from time to time with bored journalists and low ranking politicians on the make collude to bring the issue into the harsh light of day. It crops up here, it crops up back home, it crops up usually in the context of coming a distant second to the US of A in the Fat Stakes.

It even crops up in France but there usually in the context of Imperial America's malign influence and specifically the spread of Macdonalds, the rise of the anglo-saxon work 'ethic', the invention of the microwave oven and the appearance of ready 'meals' on the shelves of expedient supermarkets. There fat is only a side dish at a banquet of cultural collapse accompanied by wailing, hand wringing and the gnashing of teeth. Then they turn around and elect Sarko, which just proves that there's absolutely no point whatsoever in attempting to understand the French.

We've got her to almost ten years of age without having even the slightest reason to be concerned about her weight. She's neither an anaemic-looking stick insect nor plausible double for a beached whale but rather something balanced well between those two extremes.

In fact, I can only think of one truly and clearly damagingly obese child at her school. He's so grotesquely overweight he cannot walk properly. Such is the quantity of blubber in which his short thighs are enveloped he can only propel himself forward by swinging each leg round. This gait is often characterise as a waddle, but I suspect it is physiologically more destructive than that.

He has a younger sibling, but that child is yet to emerge from the push chair and it isn't yet possible to tell whether this child is going the way of its brother. I've never seen a man with the mother or the children and they lives in social housing. I have seen her in the convenience store late at night (and by that I mean at 10pm or later) being dragged about the place by her older child. I've seen them in the morning making their way to school on foot. I've seen her walking him home at night.

I almost never see him without food in his mouth and that food is inevitably highly processes, full of chemicals and lacking almost entirely nutritional value. I'm trying to think how many years now I've been watching them, and I'm guesstimating four. In those years he has bloated and become increasingly bullying towards his mother who is quite sweet-faced if manifestly inept. He lumbers along beside her, intermittently wheezing and demanding. Before he's ten he'll be a veritable monster unless someone intervenes to detoxify him, educate his mother and possibly pshyco-analyse her out of whatever is driving her to kill her child.

Why should we support the state intervening? Because the state already does. The state intervened the minute it allowed this young woman to leave formal education without any life skills, when it allowed her to believe she could procreate without any responsibility for that act, when it provided her with money and goods in kind to support her in that belief, when it provided medical care for life on demand and free of all obvious cost to the end user.

When the state creates monsters by creating an environment in which they can emerge and thrive then it is reasonble to expect the state to clean up its mess. So why do I want to rip the entire edifice of welfare down and leave people like this to drown?

Freedom's just another word for sharing; your...

fingerprints, DNA, credit rating, tax records, innoculation history, sexual health and so forth are every other fucker's affair.

Every poor bastard crossing the path of a government agency ceases to be an individual with any meaningful degree of self-determination and becomes a line of elements in a database. Like the inmates of that hotel you can be found to be not guilty and fully compliant and still they'll keep you on their books - for the rest of your life.

You touch something and They will know about it; you sneeze and leave a snot trail sometime in the future, They will put your name to it unerringly.

Don't ask to opt out, that's no longer an option. You will conform.

Refrigeration

This didn't happen to me. It happened to a colleague.

She took a call one morning this week from a lady with a question about our a product from within our ice-cream range. Had we changed the product, she wanted to know, only it didn't seem to freeze hard.

"No", my colleague patiently explained, "the product should freeze to a really very firm consistency".

"Ah", said the would be customer, "yes I have some Hovis bread in the freezer and that isn't hard, either".

"Perhaps there's a problem with your freezer?"

"Oh no. The peas are hard."

"The peas that are naturally hard?"

"Oh I see. Then you think that there might be a problem with my freezer?"

"Yes, I think that is a possibility."

Princess Fiona

Thieves ("shoplifters") come in all shapes and sizes.

One of ours is a squat, square faced blonde nicknamed Princess Fiona (pace). Any hoo, she's a familiar face to most staff even if only as That Blond Kid Who's Been Banned. She's the thief formerly known as That Blond Kid Who Is Only Allowed Into the Store Accompanied By Her Mother.

Then she was caught once too often and had her status upgraded. She couldn't have been more chuffed if we ourselves had slung her in the nick for a good long stretch.

I can with a slightly indecent degree of glee report that Princess Fiona's mother Scarface cornered His Lordship and a couple of mates beneath the canopy at their favoured drinking hole this evening. Much to His Lordship's consternation.

He had a hard job explaining to his mates the fawning attention of Scarface, though one of his mates did already know who she is as the mother of "that short fat blonde hooker who hangs outside the store".

Princess Fiona is thirteen years old. Her mother is a drunk who's been through 12 boyfriends (by her own admission) this year.

Where do your sympathies lie?