Schoolchild or business traveller, excess baggage around the midriff will make you pay

BACK in the Stone Age, when I was growing up in Joburg, I was an ordinary boy. I preferred reading and listening to the radio to doing sports, and I was on the edge of being chubby.

Then puberty clobbered me, and as my body underwent a radical change I started to pack on the weight. That’s where my endless battle with fat began.

Going to school played havoc with me, not because I was a bad pupil but because I was chubby, wore round “Billy Bunter” spectacles, and was a greedy reader of books. I assumed that some malicious angel placed me in the line of fire and when I was being bullied at school my weight just expanded. I have been battling that excess for many years.

During school holidays I was in a good space, with strong support from my family, and the weight quickly came down. But once I returned to school, I simply gained all the weight again from panic eating.

Then in 1960, I saw a lurid, trashy film based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which had a strong influence on my life. It suggested to me that I did not always have to look like other people, be like them and do the same things as them. There was that other dormant part of yourself that allowed you to choose your own path, for good or ill.

The result is that I have three outfits of “test” clothes. There is one which fits me perfectly. The second is tight, and warns me to eat less and double up my gym visits. If the third test outfit is too loose, I know that I can have a brief splurge on Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream and slap chips with mayonnaise sauce.

Recently, I read that some airlines are planning to impose a “fat tax” — an extra fee for passengers over a certain weight. One of them is Samoa Air. It’s a well-known fact that Samoans are some of the heaviest people on the planet, hence the introduction of the airline’s “pay by weight” system. Prospective passengers will have to weigh their baggage, and then the owners of the baggage must be weighed as well. US-based Southwest Airlines is also contemplating a “customers of size” policy. If a passenger cannot fit between the armrests of a standard economyclass seat, an extra seat is allocated. Anyone who has ever been on a long-haul flight will understand the discomfort, indeed the misery, of being squeezed between two hefty passengers. At some point in the flight you will have to use the loo, with the resulting upheaval of getting the plussize passengers out of their seats, and a similar fuss when you return. The discomfort is immense for everyone involved.

At the moment, most airlines have three classes: first, business and economy (which I have seen called “poverty class”). Taking a leaf from Samoa’s book, there is some chatter about creating a fourth class which would have rows designed to comfortably seat passengers who weigh more than 130kg.

These rows would give larger passengers an extra 35cm of space, alleviating — at a price, of course — the discomfort they often face when sitting in small airline seats.

Samoa Air CEO Chris Langton said: “That’s where the XL class would come in. We do this with shirts and clothing and other things where we have different standard sizes.”

So if you want to take an international trip in moderate comfort, head for the gym to get rid of a few kilos. Take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror to assess the excess you carry, because a long flight will test your endurance and your blood pressure.