The bigger picture

Take my word for it, fatties are getting militant. Evidence? Last Friday, browsing in a teeny gift shop for a mate’s birthday present, I was swept sideways by the plate glass door and squidged, face first, into a shelf full of treacherously fragile porcelain trinkets by two female chubbies barging in side by side and opening the door to its full extent in order to get through.

A couple of weeks earlier, out running, I took my life into my hands jogging into a rush hour A-road to avoid a BBW who, not content with taking up most of the pavement, added insult to injury by munching on a bag of Walkers, and smoking a fag.

This theory stands up to investigation. Take a trip on public transport (if you can afford the life insurance) and watch your overweight fellow passengers defiantly consuming greasy takeaways. Alight at the nearest stop to a supermarket and observe them shopping.

Not so long ago, any self-respecting fat-clubber would use strategically placed bottles of Diet Coke and healthy looking bags of apples to conceal the two-litre soft scoop tubs and family bags of Doritos they actually went in for. (Soft scoop and Doritos: fine for families - but not if you’re single and intend to eat them in one sitting. In your motor before you even leave the supermarket car park.) Say it loud. They’re big and proud.

Think this is all about fatty-bashing? A rant about how the obese cost the NHS £9billion a year in blood pressure medication, extra-large beds and reinforced toilets?

No way. Because tubbies are taking over Bond Street too. You can see them every day of the week, waddling out of YSL, D&G and Prada, designer shopping bags dangling daintily from their sausage fingers and distorted-looking labels stretched across their lardy arses. This season – and for the foreseeable future by the looks of them - ladies (and blokes) who lunch now look like they actually do lunch. And breakfast. And dinner. And gorge themselves stupid on Fortnum & Mason gateau during those dull, between-meal downtimes.

Now, if designers, the biggest body fascists going, are suddenly having to make clothes that flatter their super-sized paymasters, there’s hope they might start sketching clobber that suits the normal-sized population too. Imagine that.

So fat people, I, for one, suit you. Now buy yourselves a Mars bar as a reward.

Sarah Maybank