…Retiring to Spend More Time With Their Remaining Limbs…

It reads like a list of what’s leaving Netflix in November, the MPs who are standing down. There’s a lot of ’em, many more than usual, and a number are citing abuse or the toxic environment of politics at the moment. Hardly surprising when the man at the top has all the tolerance and openness of a blind alley with high walls where you can’t see over the top. I won’t list them all but one that caught my eye was our own MP Nicky Morgan, who also cited abuse and the toxic atmos in the Big Brother House as one of her reasons for going. I won’t miss her; her voting record was awful and her judgment seriously called into question when she joined Johnson’s cabinet and thereby aligned herself with a possible hard Brexit, something she said she’d never do. Nevertheless, nobody deserves abuse for doing their job and I took the time to send her a quick email saying I’d have wanted to beat her in the polls but I wouldn’t have chosen to do it like this.

Still, it gives Stuart Brady a good chance to win the seat for Labour.

Speaking of Big Brother, I watched a documentary/reality TV show last night called ‘Who Are You Calling Fat?’ It takes a group of obese people and puts them in a remote country house to exchange ideas and experiences. If that sounds a bit ‘Big Brother’ it is, in that some of the characters come with conflicts ready made, and each of them can talk to the camera about what they’re thinking. Most prominent member of the group – and also the least overweight, as far as I could tell – was the frankly unbearable Victoria, a self-confessed evangelist for the ‘body-positive’ movement. The dynamic between her and some of the other residents formed much of the conflict in the group, as she refused to accept that losing weight might be a good thing and saw the health issues associated with obesity as a ‘social construct’. Then there was Del, a 50-something Sikh who struck me as the most sensible of the group, and to whom Victoria reacted in horror on hearing of his bariatric surgery. I’m totally on board with a lot of the ‘body positive’ movement but when it comes to denying the medical facts and saying that losing weight is a bad thing, I part company with it. Anyway it’s an interesting programme even if some aspects did remind me of this sketch on ‘Not the Nine o’Clock News’.

Kirk out