Another bad American habit has crossed the Atlantic: nutritionists

I blame Blair. I blame him for the cold weather. I blame him for the high incidence of obesity and street-talk among young people. I blame him for arresting the four men released from Guantanamo Bay, and then letting them go again. And I blame him for the humiliation to which, earlier this week, I was subjected. If Blair did less cosying up to George Bush, none of the above would have happened. We wouldn't have American-style climate extremes. We wouldn't have American fat dripping out of our schools. We wouldn't be arresting and releasing our citizens on America's say-so. And I wouldn't be in hiding, unable to show my face.

I blame Blair. I blame him for the cold weather. I blame him for the high incidence of obesity and street-talk among young people. I blame him for arresting the four men released from Guantanamo Bay, and then letting them go again. And I blame him for the humiliation to which, earlier this week, I was subjected. If Blair did less cosying up to George Bush, none of the above would have happened. We wouldn't have American-style climate extremes. We wouldn't have American fat dripping out of our schools. We wouldn't be arresting and releasing our citizens on America's say-so. And I wouldn't be in hiding, unable to show my face.

Who in this country, other than sportsmen - for whose bad behaviour I also blame Blair - ever visited a nutritionist? Nutritionists, like shrinks, are what Americans have. Once you are given a constitution telling you that you are under an obligation to be happy, it must follow that you will employ a happiness or personal satisfaction expert, such as a nutritionist. In this country we do not attach a high value to individual felicity. We have always understood that it is more fun being miserable, anticipating misery, and occasionally being pleasantly surprised. Or at least that was the case, pre-Blair and pre- his predilection for the philosophies of Benjamin Franklin and Carole Caplin. Now we have nutritionists. Or at least now I do.

Of course no nutritionist is going to admit that he or she is in the happiness business. But the implication of nutrition is surely that you will feel better disposed to yourself and to humanity in general if your diet is as it should be, else why do they get you to fill out forms stating whether you suffer from depression or anxiety, whether you are given to aggressiveness or irritability, whether wildly convivial pacific salmon make you laugh more heartily than the poisonously lugubrious stuff farmed in overcrowded Scottish lochs? That last question I made up for effect, but you take my point. Whereas the body was once the seat of melancholia, a rich ill-humoured source of bile and spleen, post-Blair we look to it for cheerfulness. How long before we start taking our bodies to court and suing them for making us disconsolate I do not know; but the compensation lawyers must be tucking into their chateaubriands and feeling optimistic about the prospect even as I write.

What I hadn't noticed while fixing an appointment with my nutritionist was that she was employed by a teaching hospital. Picture my alarm then when I turned up for my first consultation and found six student nutritionists sitting in a line with their clipboards out, waiting to see inside my body.

It is a personal thing, a body. Yes, we fill it communally. We make no secret of what we like to put in ourselves, and now that diet is all most of us care about anyway, we tell perfect strangers how much omega-3 we consume, how many glasses of water per day we drink, and whether we are on nothing but carbohydrates or everything except carbohydrates. According to the sages of the Talmud, the cavity of the mouth, which is the entrance to the body, is intimate and never to be exposed. Metaphorically, though, the cavity of our mouth has become public knowledge. So, no, not even in front of an alien nutritionist and her six apprentices was I reluctant to discuss my sardine and pilchard intake. If anything I enjoyed it. A row of students, all women, feeding as it were on my every word. It was like being an academic again. Had I known what to expect I'd have turned up in my gown.

But what goes into the body is not what comes out of it. And whereas I was prepared to discourse voluminously about the former, about the latter I was shy to the point of hysterical aphasia. Am I abnormal in this? I am told I am. In my defence I would argue that it is a Talmudic thing: if the body's entrance is inviolable, neither to be seen nor discussed, how much the more inviolable and therefore undiscussable its exit. But there are Jews, no less Talmudic than I in other matters, who have none of my squeamishness and will talk to you at length about the waste they manufacture, its appearance, its consistency, its colour even. Indeed, once they have your ear, they will take you through the same in relation to every member of their family.

That it all goes back to early childhood I do not doubt. In an unrefined household there are no secrets and therefore, you might argue, no neuroses. I grew up in a house that was all secrets about the body, and frankly I am glad of it. Sometimes one must stand up and express pride in one's mental disorders. All right, if it's mad to be disgusted by the final phase of the body's functions, then I am happy - nay, exultant - to be mad. To be sane in such a matter is to be, in my view, even madder.

None of which, however, was any help when it came to answering my nutritionist's charged questions. I looked down, looked away, felt my skin suffuse with blood and my eyes seal in sympathy with the rest of me. It is possible no one in the clinic had ever before encountered mortification on such a scale. After four or five minutes a chart was produced. In my confusion I was not sure where it came from, though I suspect a student. A doo-doo chart - for no other description will suffice - a business chart showing in raw colour and shocking detail the six stages of human waste, from soft to hard, and from disgusting to more disgusting still. And at this chart, reader, they expected me to point in excited recognition. Ecce guano! Rather than do which, and I make no apology for it, I fled the clinic.

Something tells me things will be different under Michael Howard.