It seems that we are all grotesquely overweight, torpid, indolent and idle and we’re going to die early, gasping for breath as the mountains of fat engulf our poor choking hearts. Not only that but we’re riddled with gonorrhoea, cystitis, chlamydia, thrush and even syphilis — and being feckless as well as bone idle, we don’t seem to care. In fact it would seem that these days we are possessed of sufficient energy only to prise ourselves off the sofa for a brief, joyless and unhygienic copulation with some slapper, male or female, we met ten minutes before and who is, of course, no less horribly obese than ourselves. The ensuing act of love is, presumably, a very brief co-mingling of folds of sweating, quivering, pasty flesh — like a Sumo wrestling bout except without the polite preliminaries.

And then, having partaken of these sinful pleasures our only other form of exercise is to waddle painfully towards the clap clinic, holding in one hand a Burger King Mushroom Double Swiss with Bacon and Extra Fries and in the other our latterly acquired partner who awoke this morning with a nasty itch somewhere down below, we can’t be sure where exactly because her entire thorax is like one of those melted candles in a bottle you get in old Italian restaurants.

This supposedly depressing picture of Britain has been painted not by Goya, or Francis Bacon, but by a vast rash of recent social surveys which are almost always then taken up and loudly bemoaned by our government ministers. One in five of us is seriously overweight, we were lectured the other day. As opposed to being merely a shade on the porky side. And almost all of us shirk exercise — and, worse than shirking exercise, we also shirk the redemptive cleansing of a bloody good cold shower — because the rate of sexually transmitted disease has increased exponentially in the past five years, too. Shagging and eating, that’s all we do. Some of us simultaneously. (I can usually handle a mid-coital fish finger or eggs mayonnaise, for example. It is important, though, to find a partner with a compatible taste in food. Applications to the usual address.)

The Government hates us for it, although I’m not sure why. Ministers seem to be spending more and more of their time lecturing us about the parlous state of our health. Their tones, on these occasions, are those of a kindly but impatient special-needs teacher faced with a child they know for sure will be strung out on smack within five years, or just dead. We, the population, have become such a crushing disappointment to them. They get themselves quite worked up, government ministers, both on the sex stuff and the over-eating. Is it because they have loused up the trains, the roads, the schools and the health service, that they feel the need to retreat into the realm of the personal? Or is it because they are all psychologically warped?

I reckon that if the Government was seriously concerned about the health of the nation it wouldn’t get us involved in fatuous and unnecessary wars, rather than shrieking at us to cut down on the burgers a bit. But call me cynical.

I’ve been trying to work out what sort of person the Government wants us all to be. I’ve attempted to discern a pattern in their increasingly frequent pronouncements about our personal predilections and penchants. In the past five or six years they have told us off for:

1 Eating too much.

2 Eating the wrong food.

3 Not taking exercise.

4 Smoking.

5 Drinking.

6 Having sex with too many people.

7 Listening to rap music.