Fatheads

Apologies for turning this into a regional newspaper for a moment, but here goes. One of the lengthier rows rumbling about York has concerned the Barbican Centre. Originally this was a perfectly decent public baths. Then they put a god-awful 'leisure centre' around it, mainly a place for archaic rock bands to strut their creaking limbs. The process was like a pearl being created in reverse - the precious stone emerging first then the shit building up around it. The whole mess understandably went bust a few years ago. Now they've decided to revive the leisure centre but leave the baths closed. There are still two public baths left in York. But as one was poorly built in the 1960's and the other has been around since the 1900's, they may have to be closed at least temporarily to stop bits of their ceilings occasionally dropping into the pools.

There's one consequence to York having no public baths left. Children are going to get fatter. Swimming is wonderful for children because, unlike most forms of excercise, it's actually fun for them. You get to fart around and pretend to drown your friends. If you ever run out of ideas most pools have notices of prohibited actions - ducking, bombing etc. - to work through. And you lose calories at the same time.

There's a lot of fuss about fat kids at the moment. They're fatter than ever, apparently, and getting even fatter every second. The usual dire warnings about diabetes and heart disease are issued. And the usual culprits are found - junk food and computer games. Basically, the solutions are to stop children eating and doing things they enjoy. It's about controlling them even more. But children, unlike most adults, will actually do healthy - if not necessarily safe - things out of choice as long as they're enjoyable. They just need access to the opportunities, and those are vanishing more and more.

Football is another example. Not the creepy organised leagues where parents bawl their frustrations at their offspring but spontaneous, unsupervised games, a cross between sport, gang fight and shouting contest. Most school yards and fields in the country are, each morning, still taken over by our allegedly Gameboy-devoted generation kicking tennis balls at each other's heads. After school, though, they're a bit stuck. I used to play on the street a fair bit. It probably wasn't safe then and certainly isn't now, with even the quietest lane taken over by rat-runners. I used to break into waste ground too and it's hard to see any waste ground left any more. Playing fields are the only option left. And with councils and schools merrily selling them all off to balance their budgets and feed the housing boom, that's not really much of an option either. Near York's 1900's baths there's a scout hut. There used to be a playing field behind it. Now there's yet another housing estate. Called, in what must be a deliberate wind-up, 'Greenfields.' 'Greenfields' where there used to be a green field. Ha bloody ha.

Children rarely walk to school any more. Their parents, either paranoid about paedophiles or having enrolled them to a school on the other side of town because it has fractionally better grades, all drive them. They can't swim. They can't play football. And now the moral panic has decreed they can't engage in their only other pleasures - dicking about on the Nintendo, stuffing chips in their face and growing monumentally obese. It isn't much of a life.