There’s an American doctor, (they’re ALWAYS American and everyone there who passes their 11-plus becomes a ‘doctor’), who has come up with a nutritional plan to end what she calls ‘addictive eating’ or ‘cravings’. But what I call ‘perfectly normal desire to give your body what it is naturally wanting to redress an energy imbalance’. Or, in short: ‘chocolate’. Possibly ‘cake’… ‘biscuits’… ‘hamburgerS’… yeah, whatever. It’s just ‘nature’ instructing you unconsciously as to precisely what your body requires. When a pregnant woman suddenly starts munching sticks of chalk, you don’t send her to the Priory, you know her body needs increased calcium. Ok, a glass of milk would probably do it, but you don’t argue with a pregnant woman. If she’s already pregnant, the arguing’s done. When Mel sent me out for pickled yams at 3 o’clock in the morning when she was ‘with child’, I didn’t argue.

Well men don’t get pregnant. But suffer those same symptoms and desires their whole life to fill the gap which pregnancy would have provided. Which is why so many get big bellies later in life. It’s science, innit? So when I ‘crave’ chocolate (every day after lunch, without fail, in vast quantities, as long as its Cadbury’s and then just before bed), I don’t go rushing to some trumped up, highly polished, whip-thin American(!!!) nutritionist for advice. I go to Mr Shah in the sweet shop to buy stock. And I’ve surveyed 2,467 fat English bastards and they all agree: chocolate is no more an addiction than coffee… beer… cigarettes… crack… football…

And now the ‘sensitivity readers’ have started on Roald Dahl. And they have a massive amount of work on their hands as he was never the most flattering of writers. Loving his baddies to always be fat, ugly, spotty, grotesque, some exotic and colourful nationality; basically: anything offensive. Which is why his books are so absolutely wonderful, and so loved by kids. But they’ll be better. And considerably shorter. New Matilda is now 14 pages. The Big Friendly Giant now down to 7 and the Twits will be just half a page after the editing.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx