Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on William's smile, a kind word for Coke and lying your way to a new life

Lean as whippets

Published
Ruth Wilson in Mrs Wilson

IF you are burgled and know there's not a cat in hell's chance of getting police to take any interest, let alone attend, here's a tip following a recent break-in in London which police speedily attended. You simply dial 999 and say: "Hello, my name's Paul McCartney."

I AM a wee bit surprised at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's choice of official Xmas card. That is not a friendly, festive grin, William. It is the forced smile of somebody not enjoying himself.

MRS Wilson (BBC1) told the true story of a wartime spy (or was he?) who was a model father (or was he?) and married a number of women (or did he?). The snag is that the spy, Alec Wilson was such a fluent liar that to this day, nobody knows exactly who he was or what he did. Today we may be shocked but I suspect a couple of generations ago plenty of folk, under social pressure, avoiding the authorities or in the tumult of war, either lied about their past or simply reinvented themselves. If you moved a few hundred miles from your home town, wore a tweed jacket and a Guards tie and called yourself "Major Grunge," who would ever know you'd been Private Grunge in the Catering Corps? Checks that we do in a few seconds on the internet today were quite impossible then. I heard of a major some years ago who, on emigrating to Australia, promoted himself to Colonel, and almost got away with it.

ONE of the weekend tabloids had a right old rant at Coca-Cola's traditional Christmas promotion as "just one of the ploys junk food and drinks giants use to entice a new generation of children." Steady on. Nobody pretends that Coke is a health drink. But obesity and its health risks are not only a matter of what you eat and drink but also how active you are.

IN my early teens, every morning break featured two big, iced thruppenny buns and a bottle of Coca-Cola for sixpence (2.5p) from the Coke machine. Every day, hundreds of us kids gorged on this dietary affront. And with few exceptions, we were as lean as whippets.

THAT was because we walked to school, ran around the playground, ran up and down the stairs and got chased the length of the rugby pitch by homicidal scrum-halfs. We simply never stopped moving. Adrian Mole would have been proud of the personal statistics I kept all those years ago. Consulting my ancient diary I see that at Christmas 1966, aged 15 years and 230 days, I stood five feet seven inches and weighed nine stone - in modern terms an enviable body-mass index (BMI) of 19.7. And my diary tells no lies. It's the real thing.

BUMF you can safely ignore. My latest electricity bill includes the "E.ON Modern Slavery Statement." I'm assuming they are against it.