Tipping over forwards

By Laurie Taylor

Any encounter with a health professional can be distressing particularly when you're told you have an old balloon for a stomach.

I found my new osteopath on the internet. Somewhere, tucked away in my diary was the number of the last osteopath I'd visited when my back had suddenly gone out of joint but I didn't have very fond memories of the man.

In fact all I could remember clearly about him was that he'd told me that my problem arose because my right leg was longer than my left.

There were thousands of alternatives on the computer screen. Almost every street in my area seemed to have an osteopathic clinic with some such name as the Sports Health Centre or the Bad Back Clinic.

Eventually I selected the one with an animated picture in the corner of the screen showing a man lying face down on a bed being massaged by one of the resident practitioners.

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It was not a good choice. Even though I was almost bent double with pain when I arrived at the Tip Top Health Clinic, I had to sit on an uncomfortable chair for over 20 minutes before my man appeared and escorted me to a tiny internal room where he asked me to undress, lie down on the trolley, and try to relax.

After no more than 10 minutes of general probing he arrived at a diagnosis.

"I'll tell you what your trouble is," he said decisively. I waited to be told about the relative length of my legs. But no. He'd found a quite different cause.

"Your problem lies here," he said stabbing a finger into the middle of my belly.

"All this accumulated fat. It's tipping you over as though you were wearing a heavy rucksack on the front of your body. Your back can't cope with all that weight pulling it forward. Mr Taylor, you have to face the fact - you are a fat man."

"If there's no way I can make my balloon any smaller, then why not regularly top it up to normal size with pints of bitter and that lovely yoghurt with the honey in the separate compartment?"

It was, in its way, rather worse news than I'd had from my previous osteopath. Having imbalanced legs is more or less tolerable compared to the news that one is fat. Yes, fat.

Why hadn't my friends mentioned it? Was it because only my belly was fat while my arms and legs and chest and ears remained a reasonable size?

"I'll have to eat less," I told my osteopath helpfully. "Won't make much difference really," he said.

"You see at your age the belly resembles a very old balloon which has been repeatedly blown up and now lacks all elasticity. It no longer springs back into shape after exercise or dieting. It displays a permanent droop."

I'm becoming mildly reconciled to my condition. If there's no way I can make my balloon any smaller then why not regularly top it up to normal size with pints of bitter and that lovely yoghurt with the honey in the separate compartment?

Friends have not been particularly considerate. When I explained my condition to Dave, told him about the inevitability of my abdominal swelling, he suggested that I might have a future in a remake of the Victor Hugo story.

"You could be the Hunch Front of Notre Dame," he suggested before doubling up with laughter. I didn't join in. Laughter still hurts my back.

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