A peaceful retreat... from bonkers Britian

TIRED of the election, it was a welcome relief to step back into a bygone era with a visit to the most marvellous museum. Tucked away, to the very unassuming side of a holiday park just outside Filey, the belated Father’s Day outing provided a peaceful retreat away from bonkers Britain.

We spent over three hours looking around the Scarborough Fair Collection & Vintage Transport Museum. The backstory of its founder from the young boy sitting on a tractor on his family’s farm, to building up the holiday park and accumulating one of Europe’s largest line-ups of bygone vehicles was really interesting.

My farmer father could remember the overpowering heat from where he stood as a little lad on the back of the tractors, along with snippets about the lorries on display that would trundle down the farm lane to make deliveries.

The cars, like the type of Austin Seven we have all seen James Herriot drive around in television incarnations of All Creatures Great and Small over the years, made this correspondent think one thing. It struck how much bigger the human race is these days. The car that would have easily carried young vet James – of course in real-life Alf White – on his rounds around Thirsk, perhaps with wife Helen in the passenger seat, would be hard pressed to squeeze one person from today’s world behind the wheel.

Wandering around the seafront later it was hard not to ponder that the world’s population has expanded outwards as well as upwards.

Of course, it’s something none of the politicians – not even Farage – has dared mention.

But our supersized nation must surely be just as worthy of debate as issues such as tax rises. If the NHS is remembered sometime between now and July 4, surely any discussion about our country’s health needs to address the elephant (forgive the double meaning) in the room.

More than a quarter of the UK’s adult population, 26 per cent, are currently classified as obese. The childhood statistics are 10 per cent of four to five-year-old children and just short of a quarter, at 23.4 per cent, of ten to 11-year-olds tipping the scales in the obese category.

We now live in a funny old world where people spill over onto second seats in aeroplanes and don’t see a problem with it. Our obsession with people’s mental health – the scales have tipped too far in that direction – results in so much pussyfooting around and not actually doing anything to tackle the problem.

The high regard the late Dr Michael Mosley was held in has already been mentioned in this column. But the way he could talk to people about their overeating deserves mentioning again. He didn’t patronise them or preach, he just rolled up his sleeves and produced a plan.

It’s hard not to wonder whether education – or more specifically various government’s obsession with ticking boxes and sticking to a tight curriculum – - has fed the problem. Health and safety mean playtimes aren’t the running around they used to be. Sports sessions have been cut to next to nothing and as for life skills such as cookery and budgeting...

Talking of which, the last week has seen families with large families featured on news clips saying the twochild benefits cap is pushing them into poverty, calling on any new government to reverse them. Now this is a tricky one, like the country’s everexpanding waistlines.

For those of us who had a modest number of children so we could do our best to bring them up enjoying a decent standard of living, it sticks in the throat to see people surrounded by numerous offspring complaining that they want more of our money – from taxes – to pay for them.

Now that’s not to say that somebody who falls on tough times after having a larger family, maybe through losing a job, bereavement or being left a single parent shouldn’t have the shoulder of benefits to lean on to help them through.

Same, of course, for anybody who has a disabled child – and all the extra costs that brings – - or a family member battling illness.

But that element of society that sits back and expects a handout shouldn’t be brushed under the carpet. Shaking the marvellous money tree isn’t doing them – or the rest of us – any good. It’s yet another example of a real, but difficult, issue that has been ignored too long.

Child-related benefits can be worth well over £3,000 a youngster. Somebody who rules a small percentage of that should be being diverted into a regular savings account in the child’s name would get this constituent’s vote. Children’s futures need hope, guidance and grown-up thinking.