We have been going through a sharp learning curve over the pandemic. Personally, I have become much better at navigating the internet, for instance. Also, much as I like people, I have had assiduously to practise physical/social distancing. Further, with the lockdown, my wife/partner and I have been growing old together, and it is turning out to be a very pleasant exercise.
However, one of the down sides of the pandemic is that people are easily bored and when they are bored, they eat. When they eat mindlessly, they become overweight if not obese. This plays into the hands of the Covid-19 virus, for if there is one thing the virus loves it is overweight people.
A victim has been Prime Minister Boris Johnson who had a wake-up call when he was felled by the virus and rescued by the medics at St Thomas’s Hospital who placed him in intensive care.
“I’ve changed my mind on this,” said Johnson when referring to the issue of obesity, in a conversation with some of his most senior ministers and advisers towards the end of July 2020. “We need to be much more interventionist. He is now leading the country in the Battle of the Bulge, which is antithetical to the stance he had been taking not so long ago when he objected to “nanny state” interventions. We can recall the time when at David Cameron’s first conference as Tory leader, Johnson was supporting mothers who pushed pies through school railings while protesting about the promotion of healthy lunches.
