fat children and obese ghosts Fat is a fortean issue
Our cover story this issue has an undeniably topical resonance: fat has been much in the news in recent months, with a sense that growing levels of obesity threaten a national crisis, sparking anxieties about health, nutrition, the food industry, social benefits, education and parenting. We are, apparently, the second fattest nation in Europe – Hungary leads the pack – and face a sort of obesity time bomb that will eventually do for us all as an explosion of blubber overwhelms the already hard-pressed NHS.
How should we deal with this crisis? On the one hand, the suggestion was made last year that being overweight should be classed as a disability; panicked employers had visions of being forced to install expensive cranes to get their wobbling workforce into their reinforced steel office chairs. Then, in recent weeks, obesity reared its jowly head again, but now, rather than a disability, it had become part of a discourse around the civic, rather than personal, good: the well-upholstered among us were not so much disabled as immoral, and if being prevented from doing a useful job by their mountainous girth they should have their benefits removed until they demonstrate the ability to step away from the trough.
Fat, it seems, is the latest moral panic to exercise the pencil-thin guardians of middle class morality and the advocates of restraint. What, one wonders, would they have made of Johnny Trunley, the Fat Boy of Peckham? As Jan Bondeson shows, Johnny was neither victim nor villain in his own remarkable story: he assiduously avoided the efforts of the moral improvers, dodged the outsized school desk they had made for him, and carved out a career for himself as a prodigy in the music halls and sideshows of the country, earning not opprobrium but admiration – not to mention hard cash – with his corpulent frame. He was not alone; fat boys and fat girls flourished across Europe and the US, at least until the moral tide turned and the ‘exploitation’ of such physical anomalies came to be viewed as somewhat dubious (although some of today’s reality TV shows suggest that such exploitation has returned, only with a lessthan-convincing gloss of ‘educational’ value). There can be many reasons for morbid obesity – more often psychological than physical in origin – but there’s a risk that, by stigmatising and categorising the overweight according to a cause-based schema, we’ll end up with a quasi-Victorian situation of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ fat. The evidence suggests Johnny Trunley would have fallen into the latter category, his moral failings literally made flesh as he tipped the scales at 33 stone (210kg), becoming the heaviest person in Britain. But rather than relying on hand-outs, Johnny monetised his mass; and when he finally slimmed down in later life he took a normal job and remained a well-liked member of the local community.
Perhaps our current obsession with obesity isn’t so new. For Salvador Dalí, it was ghosts that were putting on the pounds during the 1930s, much to the artist’s annoyance. Turn to page 36 as SD Tucker reveals the full, and very strange, story of Dalí and the overweight phantoms.
slender spectres
From fat ghosts to very thin ones. Cannock Chase in Staffordshire must now be the high strangeness hotspot of Britain if coverage in the tabloids is to be believed. First there was ‘Pig-man’ (see FT306:70-72), then an invasion of Black-Eyed Kids ( FT322:66-32), and now, according to the Metro (25 Jan 2015), the good folk of Cannock are being plagued by the skinny spectre of Slender Man. The descriptions offered by witnesses, though, are a bit of a mixed bag: accounts mention a “lean, shadowy spirit” with “blood-red eyes”; “completely dressed in black with a hat to match”; “a white face with razorsharp fangs”. Is Slender Man becoming a catchall term for all sorts of spooky entities?
And it’s not just Staffordshire. FT contributor Neil Arnold informs us that Slendy has also been spotted as far away as Kent in recent months; we’ll bring you a report in an upcoming issue.