Linda de Caestecker has missed her vocation. At best I imagine her as one of those prissy, spinster schoolmarm-types lecturing and hectoring through a mist of chalk dust, bile and thwarted dreams.
Linda de Caestecker has missed her vocation. At best I imagine her as one of those prissy, spinster schoolmarm-types lecturing and hectoring through a mist of chalk dust, bile and thwarted dreams.
Then I remember grainy 1930s newsreel footage of brown shirts marching through the streets of Berlin.
But, of course, Dr de Caestecker is neither of these, despite her outrageous views.
She is Glasgow's director of public health whose comments are as extreme as they are ill-considered.
Having been unable to convince people to give up their fries and pints she now demands legislation to enforce her opinion.
To curb the city's health problems, Dr de Caestecker wants to bar shops whose customers might include young people from selling tobacco.
In her world, a cheerless place of polite conversation, sugar-less drinks, green veg, and Omega-3 enriched mackerel, all drinks advertising would be banned - be they fizzy or foaming.
Chips and fatty foods would be off menus in all public buildings and only thin people allowed out in daylight. Okay, sorry, I made the last one up.
Nonetheless, taking her comments at face value, Dr de Caestaker is to the health movement what Osama bin Laden is to world peace and understanding: a dead loss.
She cannot accept Scotland is the sick man of Europe and the fattest outside of the US for the good reason that we choose to be.
By now even the blind, deaf and stupid in this benighted little country must be aware of the benefits of eating a balanced, nutritionally satisfying diet.
We don't because a thick, juicy fatburger tastes better than brussels sprouts.
The evidence is, quite literally, all round, from podgy bare-bellies, most of which should be skewered instead of merely pierced, to backsides so large it looks like the ink has run on their tattoos.
If that is the way people want to be, what right has Dr de Caestecker and her ilk to interfere?
Even Glasgow City Council, a body not averse to interference, is sticking by its chips, albeit in a weasily way claiming that no single food should be blamed.
A few weeks ago Dr Hamish Meldrum upset campaigners by suggesting the true cause of obesity was greed, not exactly what campaigners wanted to hear.
He questioned the over-medicalising' of obesity, operations, pills and potions and suggested eating less.
This did not go down as well as expected. Yet both doctors ignore the obvious. Poor diet, boozing and smoking are self-solving problems.
If death-by-diet is their choice, then no-one has the right to argue, let alone interfere. Least of all a busy-body medic with the law at her back. Ban? Ban? ... No thank you. Ma'am.
