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The Glasgow diet

The Scots are known to have a prodigiously poor diet. We've all heard stories of the deep-fried Mars bars, the insane consumption of Irn Bru, and the life expectancy rates in some districts of Glasgow that rival much of the third world.

But until last week, I'd never really studied the issue at first hand. My first taste of what was to come was on the train north. A Scottish family got on at York. Before they'd got set, out came the family packs of M&Ms, wine gums and the variety selection known as Sports Mix. These treats were washed down with bottles of Coke, and Cherry Coke for mum.

Also on the train was a little boy with his grandma. During the train ride to Glasgow, nana plied the poor kid with three packs of French Fries and two cans of Coke. Just when the kid was begging for mercy, a friendly woman offered him a pack of Chewits, as she had 10 packs and couldn't eat them all.

When I rolled into Glasgow I noticed that the promotion with the local paper, the Evening Times, was a free sausage roll with each newspaper. As with all good local newpspapers, the Evening Times surely knows its audience.

Surveying Glasgow city centre, what becomes apparent is that the extremely heavy presence of Greggs. I know that Greggs is pretty prominent on just about every high street, but in Glasgow the situation has got totally out of hand. There must be six or more in the city centre, all doing a very brisk trade. When you add those on to the MacD's, the Burger Kings, the kebab shops and the restaurants offering quaint-sounding fish suppers, you've got a compelling recipe for heart disease.

This puts evident pressure on the health-conscious Glaswegians. I stopped in an Aulds bakers in the St Enoch's shopping centre. There was a counter full of pasties, sausage rolls and cakes. The only healthy option was a minestrone soup. The mum in front of me, who may or may not have read a scary healthy story in a mid-market tabloid that morning, ordered the soup...and then, with a pained expression on her face, a sausage roll as well. (For the record, I got a cheese roll, served with a side order of crisps.)

As a conscientious reporter, I was convinced healthy food was available - I just wasn't looking hard enough for it. And after a half-day trailing around the city centre, I found, deep in the faintly bourgeois Buchanan shopping centre, a cafe offering,

wait for it

wait for it

salad!!!

And I can say, having witnessed the businessmen and women enjoying their lunch, that salad - like jazz music and Proust - remains the preserve of intellectuals in Glasgow. Yes, it has its advocates, but don't expect it to catch on any time soon.

I'm sorry - you were wearing the wrong shoes

A brilliant moment on the bus this morning. A middle-aged lady trod on another, younger woman's toe (she was wearing open-toe sandals). The woman winced in agony.

The woman, quite posh, was profuse in her apologies, but then could not help being quite precise in what she was apologising for.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry...I'm a doctor and I always tell my patients to go on public transport in appropriate shoes. I always tell them that. I am sorry."

I can report that the woman felt very comforted by those soothing words, and will no doubt not go on a bus in inappropriate footwear again.

The fattest kids are in London

Some people up north and in Scotland might raise an eyebrow at the news, but the Office for National Statistics has declared London's kids the fattest in the UK. One in nine are obese by the time they join school - with no doubt many, many latestarters putting on the pounds when they get into the education system.

I don't know how the ONS compiled its stats, but my recent trip to McDonald's on the Walworth Road was all the evidence I needed. The place was choc-full of parents feeding their babies and toddlers french fries and McNuggets and Coke.

The place looked more like a creche than a restaurant - and for those parents it probably was. It didn't look like an occasional treat; this was daily life. I'm not judgemental about it, but you are going to get some porky kids into the bargain.

It's pretty much the case that being fat is the norm for kids in London. This isn't just down to a solid diet of fried chicken and MacD; it's also because they hardly ever move under their own volition. The mayor gives them all free bus passes, and so you find them using buses to go one stop, just like my arthritic grandmother used to do when she was in her late 80s.

In this sense, the London kid is at the vanguard of progress. Their Scottish and northern counterparts should demand the same rights to free transportation and then perhaps they'll have a chance to compete for the fat kid title on a level playing field. But I suspect the London kid will be the fattest in the UK for a long time to come.

Essex boys storm Wembley

Essex men are not great travellers. They are not great frontiersmen. An Essex man would, nine times out of ten, rather be at home, enjoying a beer, than going off to some unknown district.

But sometimes he gets driven, by a sense of duty, off his patch. And so it was on Sunday, when Dagenham & Redbridge found themselves, to the incredulity of everyone, in a Division Two play-off final against Rotherham United.

I'm an East saxon exile, living in south London and so my first sight of Daggers fans was at Green Park when I got on the Jubilee line. Two hefty lads in replica shirts were nervously checking tube maps, disbelieving the automated voice saying the train was bound for Wembley Park.

This was obviously a rare foray outside the county boundaries and the two teenagers, who were both comfortably over 15 stone, engaged in some worldly chat, which amounted to declaring far-flung places they had been.

One suggested he'd been to Manchester. The other had been to Birmingham, and said that was further. There ensued a massive dispute about whether Manchester of Birmingham was further away (from Essex, that is), cleared up only by the iPhone.

Yes, it was new territory for most of us, and the fans peeling out of Wembley Park tube station had an air of people who were there if not to believe it was true, then just to enjoy the dream. There was a bit of milling about with the Rotherham and Daggers fans eyeing each other with a mixture of friendliness and suspicion, all polite enough.

Getting into the stadium with my dad and his genial fellow season ticket-holder it was a remarkable sight seeing thousands of Dagenham fans making a decent fist of being a big team for a day.

We got into the stadium and the fans were trying to rid themselves of pre-match tension through drinking several pints of Carlsberg. Going for a piss, I noticed a few chaps queuing up for the toilet, trying, for all they were worth, to look like they needed a shit rather than a line of marching powder.

Getting into the stand behind the goal, the fans were warming up with a few songs.
"Digger!!! Dagger!!! Digger!!! Dagger" was the main one, followed up with "We're just a pub team from Essex" although that wasn't fully endorsed - it didn't seem right on this day.

Eventually the match got going and the Daggers lads looked a bit startled by their surroundings and were hoofing the ball around, afraid to make a mistake. I settled back to listening to the Essex man's banter, which never fails to amuse through the sheer volume of swear-words employed.

A grizzled old grandad behind me was saying, repeatedly, "He's a cunt." And then, to fully make his point, added, "Des's uncle - he's a cunt."
The calls to the pitch were of a similar nature. "Referee - cahnt!" said one, to much merriment.

Even my dad, who is not native Essex, but tries to fit in, joined in with, "Get up you tart!"

And then the match broke into life, with Benson swivelling in the box and slotting the opener home. This brought celebrations from the stand and absolute pandemonium on the pitch. The Daggers were amazed to be in front, and so set about getting the thing back on level terms. They started running around like headless chickens, kicking the ball blindly, and before you knew it, the Yorkshire men had equalised.

Daggers manager John Still must have made one of his Churchillian addresses to the lads at half-time because they came out playing with energy and belief and style. This style mostly involved getting the ball out to Danny Green on the right flank and letting him terrorise the full-back. After a while this paid off with him cutting inside and drilling one home.

2-1. But the Daggers repeated the previous half's action and gave it away as soon as they had got it. But this time they redoubled their efforts and with about 20 to go they got ahead 3-2. And then all that was left was for the fans to sit nervously and wait while the boys, paralysed by fear of losing the lead a third time, hacked the ball away time and again, before the ref gave us mercy and the thing was won.

Cue the glitzy celebrations: fireworks, flares, lots of Coca Cola branding. Then the lads picked up their trophy and an old man next to me said quietly: "We'll be playing Charlton next season."

Getting back off at Green Park, I saw another exile, in replica shirt and shorts, heading southbound on the Victoria line. I collared him for a chat.

"Marvellous, wasn't it?"
"That was better than when my kids were born," he said. "I shouldn't say that, but it's true."

Blair and Cardinal Manning

I have been reading Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. Its first subject is Cardinal Manning, the archdeacon who converted to the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-nineteenth century, and went on to become Archbishop of Westminster.

Irrelevant to the modern age, you might say. And it's true, I did not pick up the book looking for insights into politics. But, idly reading away I was, and suddenly I could think only of the Chilcot Enquiry and Tony Blair's appearance there last week.

I would now contend that if you want to find insight into Blair's sheer chutzpah in talking about 'calculus of risk' and other such nonsense, you should look no farther than the Strachey text on Manning.

They have a few things in common. They both converted to become Catholics; they were both ruthlessly self-serving and blithely ignored facts if they did not serve them.

Here is a passage about Manning's conversion:

"The Church of England is a very commodious institution; she is very anxious to please; but, somehow or other, she has never been able to supply a happy home to superstitious egotists."

One can see, from this sentence, how Blair is a natural Catholic and bedfellow of Bush, or Clinton, or whomever happens to be President of the US.

The opening paragraph also lays bare Blair's approach to the Chilcot enquiry:

"Undoubtedly, what is most striking in the history of Manning's (or Blair's) career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet."

Looking at this masterly text, it is obvious how Blair could look at the 45-minute claim, realise it referred not to long-range strategic weapons, but battlefield munitions, and then say: "I didn't focus on it a lot at the time."

End of the Brixton Woolworth

It's gone. Totally gone. Even though the company went bankrupt a year ago, I never thought the large red letters atop the Woolworth store in Brixton would be taken down. But they've gone.

The shop had a brief flourishing last year, going back to its roots as selling cheap plastic products, sunglasses for a pound, posters of Bob Marley, pikey fake brass beds, very very cheap women's fashions, all run by Asian traders who know more about the Woolworths five and dime tradition than anyone.

But that got closed down. Someone more upmarket, someone with a brand must have bought. Now Woolworth is closed down and boarded up. We await a boring high street store. Further gentrification. A loss of the essence.

Picture says it all.

No mercy on the bus

X68 bus this morning. Same routine. Nonstop, express, from West Norwood to Waterloo.

As opposed to the 68, which stops. This morning there was no announcement of the X-status of our bus. The notification, for the unaware, came when the bus turns towards Brixton instead of towards Camberwell.

A middle-aged Asian woman was unaware. At Tulse Hill she made enquiries to the chap reading his paper opposite.

‘Doesn’t this stop?’ she asked.
‘Not until Waterloo,’ he said, with a touch of severity. No one likes a novice. He advised her, with a generosity of spirit which eludes me on a morning, to speak with the driver.

She did so, and came back empty handed, and the bus continued to make smooth progress towards Brixton. This was the same driver who let a punter off earlier in the week. When mercy is in your hands, it is not easy to be even-handed. Perhaps the driver was an aesthete and didn’t like a middle-aged woman wearing Nike Air trainers with her winter coat.

The woman tried for information from a couple sat near the exit. ‘Does the bus stop?’
‘At Waterloo.’ At which point she muttered something to herself and gave it up.

I have to report that I was glad at this woman’s misfortune. I objected to the trainer and smart clothes combo, even for commuting on a wintry day. I objected to her not knowing. And I enjoyed the schadenfreude. As I suspect did a few other passengers on our happy, elite, bus service.

Trouble on the x68

Standard incident on the x68 this morning. We get on the bus and start our nonstop journey from West Norwood to Waterloo. After going down Tulse Hill, it becomes clear that one of the passengers realises something is terribly wrong. The 68 doesn’t go this way, it goes down towards Herne Hill.

As we descend into Brixton the man starts dinging the bell. A woman looks up from her and says, brutally, ‘it won’t stop.’ The man, a young foreigner on his way to work, in overalls, becomes anxious, and dings furiously. Everyone ignores him.

He goes to speak to the bus driver. Remonstrates with him. The driver explains: this don’t stop until Waterloo. The man dings the bell again, urgently, thinking the irritation will work better than verbal appeals.

We stop at the Brixton Water Lane lights and the driver shows mercy, and lets the labourer out. There are mutterings, glances. We don’t like that on the x68. We don’t like people being let off before Waterloo. Sets a bad example, and lets the cold air in, besides.

Still, at least the driver didn’t do the unthinkable. He didn’t let someone on. There would have been uproar if that had happened.