Fat, friendless and banished to a convent school

IT'S NOT what we eat so much as how we eat it that makes us fat, I reckon. We are now officially the fattest nation in Europe and, according to an even more depressing report from the Institute of Child Care at Bristol, one in five toddlers is overweight and one in 13 is obese. Things will not improve unless we take drastic measures.

Let's start with dining-tables. Have you got one? I only ask because according to yet another report (it's been a week of reports) fewer than 20 per cent of the British population sit round a table to eat at home, for the simple reason that they haven't got one. They have a breakfast bar in the kitchen with high stools on which they perch while they gulp down honey-toasted chocolate-flavoured cereal, and a low coffee-table in the sitting-room on which to put their pizza boxes, their videos and their feet, and that's about it. If we reverted to the good old-fashioned tradition of a home-cooked family supper every night, our children would eschew junk food between meals. I realise, of course, that my theory has as many holes as a Tetley's teabag, so don't all shout at once. Working mothers don't have time to cook, and you can't stop children buying junk food on the way to school. Remember the hue and cry when that campaigning headteacher in the Midlands banned junk food at school in favour of fresh fruit, and a lobby of outraged parents reported her to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that every child has an axiomatic right to consume crisps and fizzy drinks? I've seen mothers passing Mars bars to their treasures at break time over the fence, at the primary school down the road.

If I'm beginning to sound like Mr Gradgrind, I don't care. If schools still had refectories instead of self-service canteens, with a fork-eyed teacher at the top of every table, children would learn basic eating skills. They could start with the Victorian tradition of chewing every mouthful 30 times. I know what the high master of Manchester Grammar is going to say to that. I was talking to him about the possibility of reinstating domestic science into the school curriculum. Well, why not? TV celebrity chefs earn a lot more than university lecturers.

Dr Stephen sighed hugely and said, "Here we go again; yet another instance of parents wanting schools to teach children what they should be teaching them themselves."

I was a fat child, less because I was greedy than because I was unhappy. At seven years old, when my father got a job abroad, I was sent to a convent boarding school and for some reason left there for two years. When I asked my mother about it afterwards, she said vaguely that it must have been a clerical oversight. Every month a large, battered parcel from Sarawak arrived at the convent for me, containing 36 bars of Cadbury's milk chocolate and a large tin of Quality Street which, said the letter from my mother, I was to share with my best friend. Not having a best friend, or indeed any friends at all - I was an unattractive child, fat, with National Health spectacles; and an inveterate bedwetter - I took the parcel into a corner of the dormitory and scoffed the lot myself.

This didn't help the weight problem and, when at last the clerical oversight was rectified and my mother came to collect me two years later, I looked like a barrel. I remember the shock on her face when she first sighted me, skulking behind Reverend Mother's skirt - none of the dresses that she had bought for me fitted.

That, I recall, was the worst thing about being a fat child - not being able to wear trendy clothes, as my peers did.

What saved me from ending up like the 22-stone student in Wales, who has just sued his parents for feeding him exclusively on chips as a child, was home cooking. My mother was a terrible cook; you could easily expend 500 calories per meal just struggling to get the food down. As I said before, it's not what you eat, it's how you eat it.