Our physical selves are much in the news these days. By 2050 the majority of UK citizens will be clinically obese. At the same time the current epidemic of binge drinking has been augmented by middle class quaffing. And it, too, is projected to get worse. As a sometime resident of a village near Guildford, it comes as a thrill to realise that when I shop at the weekend I am eye to watery eye with the nation’s heaviest every day tipplers. They are downing wine by the carafe-load most evenings without thought to their significance as British role models. At the same time I am slaloming past the expanding girths of the town’s citizens.The species is undergoing a metamorphosis that points towards Lamarck rather than Darwin. Even as I speak, people are changing. Children are inheriting the evolutionarily dead-end, dominant genes of their parents. If all the statistics are true they are fatter, more depressed, work-shy, indolent, drunken and thick. And all this is happening in my one lifetime.

Since the majority determine what kind of government we have and the laws that that government pass, it is easy to forecast that by 2050 the thin, fit, hard-working, emotionally stable, intelligent teetotaller will become a squashed, second class citizen, hardly able to breathe beneath the soft underbelly of the new ruling class.