First posted 18 August 2011

I figure that fat kids were around long before Fatty Noble. In the comic strips of my childhood fat kids featured regularly. On any Saturday, in the cartoons that preceded the matinee movies, corpulent figures would be seen doing things apparently characteristic of what might, in today’s politically correct world, be described as the dietary challenged. Everyone laughed, even the fat kids, although I suspect the fat kids might have simultaneously retreated further into their seats in an effort to make themselves look smaller and avoid similar humiliation.

Outside of the picture theatre however there was nowhere to hide for kids like Fatty. All the other kids knew it and ruthlessly took advantage of it. There is something quite calculated about the ritual humiliation of fat people; it takes the pressure off everyone else. Once the target has been chosen, delivered upon fat kids, any manner of insult is considered acceptable. I always felt sympathy for the fat kids but, in truth, I never once went to the defense of any of them. At least I wasn’t the target.

What inspired me to think about Fatty Noble was reading recently about the war on obesity. I always thought wars were preceded by months, sometimes years, of fruitless and futile negotiation. Not this one. This one was just declared suddenly overnight without any discussion. Nobody even told me there was a problem. One day I was happily walking around carrying a little bit of extra belly and the next day I was harbouring the enemy under my comfortable triple XL shirt.

Overnight, without any forewarning, governments all around the western world declared war on the grossly overweight. They didn’t start with a little bit overweight; or several kilos over your best weight; they went straight for the throats, or more accurately the stomachs, of the really big ones. In an instant, a large section of the community was considered too large. They were ostracised; more than just the objects of ridicule, rather they were treated with contempt, as if they had purposely gained all those kilograms, deliberately bringing the world as we prefer it, into peril.

But why just the western world; does obesity not exist in the eastern world? Are all inhabitants of the eastern world the ideal body weight according to the ready reckoner of height and shape? I doubt it.

The Chinese guy who runs the supermarket down the road from me, the one that is open 24/7; his name is Kevin and his command of English is debatable. Kevin sits all day on a huge specially built stool behind the till. He just sits there, puts your stuff in a plastic bag, and takes your money. He never moves. If you want something and can’t find it, Kevin will wave vague instructions to you in the general direction of the missing item and quote, as far as I can gather, the philosophy of Mao in ancient Greek, rather than winch himself off that stool. Now Kevin weighs somewhere in the vicinity of 300kg but I don’t read where China has declared war on obesity. They haven’t joined the coalition of the willing to be thin. They have more pressing issues, like dictating the pace of the world’s economy. It seems the war on obesity is a western thing.

On reading of this latest conflict, my thoughts turned to Fatty Noble, or more accurately the complexity of life as a fat person. Fatty and I were never formally introduced but one day I got to know something about him while standing behind him in the school tuck shop, watching wretchedly as the supply of meat pies dwindled alarmingly at a rate manifestly in excess of the number of customers in front of me.

Fatty and I had something I common; other kids pushed us around. They pushed me around because I was rather small for my age and they could; they pushed Fatty around because he looked funny when they did. And we were both slow; me, because I was vague and easily distracted; and Fatty because his enormous bulk restricted him to a protracted and comical gait; like a wound spring pulling his body, first one way and then the other, in quarter circle steps. By that means Fatty was propelled across the playground. He was mono-paced.

To pass the time I cast a critical eye over the portly shape that stood between me and the remaining pies. There seemed something quite sad about those bulging thighs that pushed his feet so far apart; arms that pointed, rather than hung, obliquely out from his body making hands in pockets an improbable spectacle. Fatty Noble wasn’t real, he was a tragic caricature. A sad figure; perhaps a decent person trapped inside a ridiculous shape.

The war on obesity cares nothing for the feelings of fat people. Pictures of them adorn the pages of our newspapers and magazines. Current Affairs programs produce film, no doubt clandestinely taken, of outsized backsides bouncing ponderously away from the camera. Did anyone ask them? Has some poor innocent, casually licking the remains of their home delivery pizza from their pudgy fingers, suddenly been confronted with their own bum wobbling around on television? It’s outrageous. Call the lawyers!

It appears, according to friends of mine recently, over a sumptuous meal offered up to us on the occasion of our regular monthly gourmet club meeting and washed down with generous quantities of wine, that the current medical view suggests our children will be the first generation not to live longer than their parents. Apparently, informed opinion at the moment predicts that the next generation will die earlier than us. This is not to be confused with dying before us (before the parents have shuffled off) simply they will not live to a ripe old age as we, hopefully, will. The reason for this, according to my friends, is the quantity of unhealthy fatty fast food that goes to make up the regular diet of the average child today.

I question such statistical nonsense and generalisation. What makes our generation think we ate better than the current one? Sure, in our day, Red Rooster woke us up in the morning rather than the middle of the night; KFC was an acronym for soldiers on patrol to bunch up; not a take-away diner in every suburb; Old McDonald had a farm; not a venue, in jest, for an anniversary dinner. Quite incidentally, that jest doesn’t work in the critical days leading up to any anniversary … and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Fatty and I were moving closer towards the counter. The stack of pies, although considerably lessened by their appeal, was still quantifiable. Several sausage rolls bolstered the other side. There was a palpable sense of anticipation building in Fatty. A sausage roll is like second prize. They didn’t have any appeal for me then and they don’t now. For a start it isn’t a roll; and it certainly doesn’t taste like sausage. I think they were filled with dripping and bread crumbs back then and I doubt any regulation since has encouraged the manufacturer to improve upon that recipe.My mum used to keep a tin of dripping under the sink. It had a lid and a tray at the top to catch the larger black bits from the baking dish and it was a treat for us kids to pick the black bits off the tray and nibble away at them. The contents of this tin were regularly topped up with the residue from the latest baked rabbit (chicken on the special occasions) and used and re-used and re-used again until the whole lot started to smell, at which point it was discarded with some regret and the entire process resumed. That dripping was in reality a compilation of almost every minute portion of fat that my mother could scrounge out of the remains of the Sunday baked meal, together with anything else that resembled fat scraped together from weekday meals. The fast food of today would have been considered quality fare compared to that lot.

The front line soldiers in the war on obesity are the parents. Mothers, whose eating habits were never scutinised in their youth, now watch over the dietary intake of their own kids like religious zealots. Fathers, who insist that a beer or two after work or play is a right, apply an appalling double standard to the intake of their kids. Water, something fathers never drink, is the only thing on offer to the chubby wretch already struggling with the bewildering array of greenery on his plate. What hypocrisy!

I was always under strict instructions to eat all that was before me. What I left uneaten could apparently feed several generations of Chinese peasants, and more essentially their offspring, seemingly unfortunate enough to be hungrier than me. It left me with an enduring melancholy for all Asians. I have quizzed numerous Chinese immigrants since about their past … none of them got my peas.

Get serious, parents; and government bodies, kids prefer junk food. Here’s a news flash … junk food has more appeal than salad … Doh! Nevertheless, by contrast with previous generations, the young people of today have a wide variety of healthy foods from which to choose. And not only do they consider it; they embrace it rigorously. Organic vegetables, fruit salad in a tub, skinny Cappuccinos and low fat yoghurt …The closest our generation came to Yoghurt were the creamy globules floating on top of the milk, freshly extracted from Daisy the cow … lumpy, warm, nauseously sweet and undeniably repulsive for any five year old. I’d rather be fat.

We were finally at the counter … just Fatty Noble and me. Four pies and one sausage roll lay before me. For the briefest of moments I was saved but Fatty ordered the lot. He lingered momentarily over the sausage roll and in an almost self-righteous gesture of restraint, he handed it back. From that moment on, any notion of sympathy for fat people was lost on me. Four pies, indeed.

J Raymond Long