Of Gentle Giants and Passive Imps

If you’re fat and you die tomorrow, how would you feel about your peers posthumously describing you as a ‘gentle giant’?

Working in PR, I’ve always taken a slightly morbid interest in how deaths are portrayed in the media, so I often find myself reading through obituaries of people I’ve never heard of, but have depressingly achieved a lot more than I have.

Anyway, I ask because I've been reading through some of the articles following the recent death of the outspoken Lib Dem MP Cyril Smith, leading me to become increasingly narked off by the use of this terrible, denigrating and, frankly, meaningless phrase 'gentle giant'.

What is it to be a ‘Gentle Giant’? The implication here is that most fat people are violent club-swinging cave trolls, incapable of expressing basic human gentleness by their substantial girth and rampant appetites. Lock your fridges, hide your babies, save yourselves - there's a fatty about!

You see, former Lib Dem MP Cyril Smith has been dubbed ‘the gentle giant of Rochdale’ by the Guardian. What belittling nonsense. Was there a period in Rochdale's industrious history where the town suffered an epidemic of obese people smashing bus-shelters, raiding fridges and sitting on cats?

If a small person dies, we don’t label them a ‘Passive Imp’ on the assumption that the majority of vertically-challenged people are somehow socially-retarded mythical creatures – it’s pure madness, if not utterly patronising.

Admittedly there are more things one can be currently angry at, like the Coulson media blackout, the War in Iraq and Bono, but it does irk me so.

First Post - I'm an Uncle!

As this is my first post for my new blog, I thought I'd begin on a happy note - I'm happy to report that I'm now an uncle for the third time, which is going to make Christmas that much more expensive.

After some complications, my sister had her tiny 5lbs 2oz sprog and decided to call her Zofia, which is the Polish spelling of Sophia because her fella's family have Polish origins and, for whatever reason, they thought this would be a nice thing to do.

With our Scottish lineage, we were gunning for McSophia, but just missed out. My Jewish grandad was hoping for Sophia Steinberg. The local Imam wanted Sofomohammed and my Russian neighbour went for Olga.

Apparently to speak Polish, all you have to do is exchange the 's' for a 'z' and a 'ph' for an 'f' - phones becomes 'fonez', sphere becomes 'zfere' and sphincter becomes 'zfincter'... zimplez!