A fat lot of good this bellyful of bans does!

SPORT was never my forte at school as I was three inches shorter, two stone lighter and a year younger than most of my classmates. I was more likely to have my nose in a book or a gatefold album sleeve (anyone under 30 may want to Google both of those) than have a ball at my feet.

And yet there’s a hill just outside Stranraer that’s still one of my favourite places in Scotland as I had plenty of time to admire it as I slogged round my school’s cross-country running route.

For although I wasn’t sporty and a goodly number of my year were the same – the nearest many mates got to football was bringing on half-time oranges for the First XI – we were not unfit.

It wasn’t that our diet was fabulous either. It was heavy on red meat, lathered in lard (remember it congealing in the frying pan as it cooled – just as it was doing in your arteries?) and with breakfast cereals so sugary you could feel your teeth dissolving. Exotic veg was the lone water chestnut in your rehydrated Vesta chow mein.

As a generation, we were no strangers to bar meals with our parents. Haggis and chips from Stranraer’s George Hotel was a favourite of mine.

Now the George is a decrepit eyesore and haggis will be first to face a Nanny State minimum calorie-pricing edict.

I wish I had a pound for every black pudding supper I scoffed by Girvan harbour of a Sunday evening and another for every time my father refused to switch the car radio from the toe-curling King’s Singers to the Top 40 on the run home.

Yet across the country, obesity was much rarer among the troupes of pupils streaming every lunchtime to shops and ice cream vans that supplied those key food groups of the Seventies and Eighties – fat, salt and sugar.

We were as lean as gipsy dogs because we walked or cycled everywhere.

All right, this was Wigtownshire and not the Yorkshire of that Monty Python sketch about ’ow tough we ’ad it, so I admit that there were wet days when we’d catch the bus or get a lift in the family car.

But evenings and weekends were free-range affairs courtesy of bikes and Shanks’s pony.

And that’s where we are going wrong today, as too many youngsters are as big as Zeppelins, moored to the couch by the cable from a phone or games machine.

Now Jamie Oliver can flip burgers and Nicola Sturgeon mistakes basking in reflected celebrity glory for policy. So their answer to our obesity crisis is to ban – yes, another one – two-for-one pizzas.

(Few eat one pizza and then start a second. The second is for the rest of the family or the freezer. This ban won’t improve waistlines but will slim household budgets.)

It’s lack of exercise that has made the current generation the least fit yet, so banning takeaways while councils struggle to keep sports facilities open? On yer bike, Nicola!