Sorry, darling, you’re too fat for a pony
What on earth would Norman Thelwell say to the news that a trekking centre on Dartmoor is closing because modern children are too heavy for the horses?
My generation grew up with Thelwell’s brilliant cartoons of little girls incongruously astride enormously fat ponies. His sharp observations of horsey types and their singular mounts brought him millions of fans in Britain and worldwide, before his death in 2004, aged 80.
He must surely be turning in his grave at the distinctly unfunny image of enormously fat children astride struggling little ponies.
The centre, at Babeny Farm, Poundsgate, Devon, is shutting up shop after 35 years because the owner felt it wasn’t fair to place overweight riders on its animals.
Recent customers who were turned away included a 16st woman, and a 13-year-old who weighed in at 12 stone.
I’m sure the ubiquitous cry of “fat-shaming!” will go up, but better that than animal cruelty. At what point will we stop feeding our faces long enough to face facts? Obesity levels in this country have galloped from extreme to obscene. We already have school uniforms that come in sizes XL and XXL, secondary kids that are too fat to run and primary peers too big for their chairs.
As Britain, the gorge of Europe, eats itself into an early grave, we are being accommodated in plus-sized coffins that are only movable by crane and widened crematoria furnaces to cope with said coffins.
What next? Must riding schools start providing us with draught horses? Winch us and our children on to chargers, like a gout-ridden Henry VIII?
The tragedy about our obesity crisis is not just that it limits lives in length, but in breadth of experience.
Pony trekking used to be a simple hop-on, hop-off pleasure, not a logistical nightmare of size, weight and girth (of the rider, not the mount).
Were Thelwell alive today, I hesitate to imagine in what sort of trouble his satirical eye and deft pen would land him.