My grandmother, who loved food, was briefly thin — and very mad, apparently — in the Seventies due to amphetamines, which her doctor prescribed for her weight. It was the wonder drug of the age until it transpired that you did get thin, but you also got psychosis. So, she stopped taking it, and got fatter again, and did less housework because another symptom of amphetamines is that housework — and chain-smoking, which may have been related to the aggressive marketing of amphetamines — become fun. The drug was called Benzedrine: speed.
I tell this story because there is a new wonder weight-loss drug called Ozempic, which a newspaper asked me to take for a feature, to which I said I would rather eat my own hands because I don’t trust miracle cures and I have been fat, to one degree or another, all my adult life. Perhaps this is my subconscious speaking, and I want to stay fat, for reasons I am not prepared to tell you, but I don’t think so.
