Everything gives you cancer.

Friday was Smoky-Drinky night. It was snow-free when I came home from work but snow-covered when I went to Smoky-Drinky. Well, I had another bottle of Ben Bracken to take along and this time it was fresh snow, not the melt-freeze stuff that damaged me last time. So I went.

It was quiet at first, we had just about finished the booze and were about to go for smoky-coffee when another arrived, utterly pissed and carrying a litre of Whyte and MacKay. So it turned into a very very late evening. I made it home undamaged but beyond the ability to type or even stay awake very long. All I could do was marvel at how children’s programming has developed. We never had shows like that when I was a kid. Incidentally, the radio is always on at work and I’ve noticed that every other song seems to be about death. Fine with me, but I’m wondering if it has anything to do with reducing the pensions bill…

Anyway, the idea of scaring us all off smoking and boozing by telling us we’re all going to get The Lumps is now well established and has worked so well that it is only natural to find it applied to everything else.

Chips make your willy gland all lumpy.

Yes, deep-fried food will now give you cancer of the prostate. Girls, you’re fine here, you don’t have a willy gland so you can deep-fry everything but every man in Scotland must, by now, have a bulge just below belt height and above where we’d all prefer to have a bulge.

Everything gets deep-fried here. I have had deep-fried pies and even pizza. I have not tried a deep-fried chocolate bar, somehow it doesn’t quite appeal to me, but deep-fried black pudding in batter is wonderful. Deep-fried haggis too. There are also things called ‘red pudding’ and ‘white pudding’ that I have never tried because I still have no idea what they are. White pudding looks like a sausage made of lard, covered in batter and deep-fried. I would not put it past the Scots, you know. They would. They bloody well would.

Ever had a deep-fried buttery? A buttery looks like a flat bread roll but it’s mostly made of butter and lard. If you grill it, it melts. If you deep-fry it, it becomes a calorie explosion that would take an Olympic sprinter a week of intense training to burn off.

I don’t get fat from these things because I only eat them occasionally and because I have a physical job now, so I burn the calories. Most Scots used to have physical jobs. Eating lots of those things when you sit at a desk all day is guaranteed to turn you into Jabba the McHutt. Unless you’re in Glasgow, where it’s Jimmy the McHutt, ya wee bawbag.

There is a big difference between buying bigger pants and having the contents of those pants grow lumps. Being overweight isn’t, in itself, necessarily deadly. One of my grandmothers was short and shaped like a beach ball and she lasted to a fine old age. One of my many aunties died of cancer at a young age. The rest are fine, as are all the uncles. All the smoking ones are fine. All the fat ones are fine. All the drunks (well, that’s all of them) are fine.

So telling people that the old fish’n’chips will fatten them isn’t scary enough. it has to give them cancer of something. Trouble is, most of the cancers have been claimed by the antismoke and antidrink crews so we’re getting into the rare ones now. Quite how eating a deep-fried mutton pie will result in cancer of the prostate isn’t explained, but it doesn’t need to be. It just has to give you cancer of something and the drones will believe it. Soon, salt will cause elbow cancer and sugar will cause lumpiness of the spleen (have they used that one already?).

It’s the template again. The drones never see it. They never notice that people aren’t dropping around them in the street. When secondary deep-frying arrives (it will) then I’ll have a hell of a lot of fun on a public bench with a smoke, a beer and a bag of chips. Incredible levels of entertainment can be had for very little money nowadays.

But there is hope. The cure for everything was found, and declared to the world, in 1957.

I used to have a copy of this but wore it out. Nice to see a downloadable copy available 😉