The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [71]
A life might be summed up within such short compass, thought Stuart. He saw actuaries do it in their assessments, in which we were all so reduced, to become, for instance, a single female, aged 32, non-smoker, resident of the Central Belt – so truncated a description of what that person probably was, about her life and its saliences; but useful for the purposes for which they made these abridgements. Such a person had an allotted span, which the actuaries might reel off in much the same way as a fairground fortune-teller might do from the lines of the hand or on the turn of the Tarot card. You have thirty years before the environmental risk of living in the Central Belt becomes significant. The fortune-teller was not so direct, and certainly less clinical, but it amounted to the same advice: beware.
It had been a long-drawn-out meeting, and a frustrating one, in which Stuart, together with four other colleagues and a couple of parliamentarians, had been looking at health statistics. The news from Scotland was bad, and the Executive was looking for ways of making it sound just a little bit better. Nobody liked to pick on Glasgow, a vigorous and entertaining city, but the inescapable fact was that everybody knew that it had the worst diet in Western Europe, and the highest rate of heart disease. Was there any way in which this information might be presented to the world in a slightly more positive way? ‘Such as?’ Stuart had asked.
This question had not gone down well. The politicians had looked at one another, and then at Stuart. Did one have to restrict the area in question to Western Europe? Could one not compare the Glaswegian diet with, say, diets in countries where there was a similar penchant for high-fat, high-sodium, high-risk food? Such as parts of the United States, particularly those parts with the highest obesity rates? Yes, but although the United States has a similar fondness for pizza, they don’t actually fry it, as they do in Scotland. There’s a difference there.
Very well, but what exactly was Western Europe anyway? If one took Turkey into account, and Turkey was almost in Western Europe– particularly if one overlooked the fact that most of it was in Asia and perhaps somewhat far to the east – did it change the picture? Might Glasgow not be compared with Istanbul, and, if one did that, how did the comparison look? Still bad, alas: the Turks did not eat so many fats and sweet things, and they were really rather good about consuming their greens. So were there not other places somewhere, anywhere, where everybody smoked like chimneys, drank to excess and fried everything . . . ? No, not really.
Stuart smiled as he negotiated the corner at the end of Waterloo Place and began to walk towards Picardy Place. As a statistician, he thought, I’m a messenger; that’s what I do. And, like all messengers, some people would prefer to shoot me.
He looked down the street at the people walking towards him, young, old, in-between. After that day’s meeting, it was taking some time for him to move back from the professional to the personal. Here, approaching him, was a sixty-year-old woman, with two point four children, twenty-three years to go, with a weekly income of . . . and so on. Now there were carbon footprints to consider, too, and that was fun. This woman was walking, but had probably taken a bus. She did not go on holiday to distant destinations, Spain at the most, and so she used little aviation fuel. Her carbon footprint was probably not too bad, particularly by comparison with . . . with those who went to international conferences on carbon footprints. The thought amused him, and he smiled again.
‘You laughing at me, son?’
The woman had stopped in front of him.
Stuart was startled. ‘What? Laughing at you? No, not at all.’
‘Because I dinnae like being laughed at,’ said the woman, shaking a finger at him.
‘Of course not.’
She gave him a scowl and then moved on. Chastened, Stuart continued