This column will make you slim

When I was a boy my mother had a book with the title Eat and Grow Beautiful. As my mother was already beautiful I could not see the point of her having the book but supposed that it was because of the author’s splendid name: Gayelord Hauser. For myself, I was disappointed that however much I ate I did not grow beautiful. Perhaps it was because I ate all the wrong things, such as chocolate biscuits. If I hadn’t eaten so many I should have been a film star by now.

All flesh is grass, of course, but few of us are a well tended lawn. Just how many of us are dissatisfied with ourselves, …