Breakfast on a shovel

LOOK around you at the state of modern Britons and you'll understand why we have an epidemic of strokes, as revealed this week. We have become an obese nation, a society of lardarses who expect the health service to patch us up whenever our own greed and lack of self-discipline make us ill. How much easier it is to blame politicians for the state of the NHS than to say no to yet another cake.

THE first casualty of war is truth. The first casualty of this General Election is a sense of proportion. Ken Livingstone, who is old enough to know better, predicts "five more years of pure evil" while demonstrators who are little more than children scream about "vile Tory scum."

SO let's please have a reality check. All that's happened is that a Government of the centre-right has been elected. Yet to judge from the torrents of Leftist bile, you would think Whitehall had fallen under the power of the Dark Lord and the orcs were already gassing the poor. A generation of activists has grown up brainwashed into believing Tories are no better than Nazis and that poll tax was a crime against humanity. A few weeks ago Radio 4 played a poem, God Moves in Mysterious Ways, which lists the world's evils including cancer, Hiroshima, Belsen, cot death, multiple sclerosis – and Thatcherism. When Thatcher died we had the revolting spectacle of her body being burned in effigy, a ritual almost unseen in Britain since the burning of Hitler effigies in 1945. One reader, in all seriousness, emailed me a few days ago to rage against the Coalition: "This government has the blood of millions on its hands." Columnist Polly Toynbee, stunned by the Tory election victory, snarls: "The press will be rewarded for their filthy North Korean election coverage." One excitable academic uses his blog to inform his students that "shy Tories" are actually "selfish racists." A Guardian reader thunders of the Tories: "These ****ers would privatise their own mothers!"

DO we all get the message from the hate-filled Left? There is no middle ground, no shades of grey. If you're with us, you are good. If you don't share our politics then you are vile, filthy, selfish, racist, evil and no better than the Nazis, the North Koreans or the Ku Klux Klan. What is it about Left-wing politics that attracts hysterics, drama queens and really, really bad losers?

A TWITTER campaign, We Want Plates, has been founded to fight the modern trend of fashionable gastro pubs serving meals on anything from bricks and flat caps to shovels. I am reminded of my misspent youth on the building sites when an old labourer showed me how to cook the traditional navvy's breakfast on a hot shovel. The important thing, he stressed, was to get every last grain of sand off the shovel. He washed, wiped and polished that shovel until you could see your face in it. Then, satisfied not a grain of sand remained, he stuck it in the brazier, dropped in a lump of dripping and slipped two eggs and two rashers of bacon into the hot fat. I can still taste the sand.

I ASKED what happened to the bug-smeared windscreens of yore and whether pesticides had wiped out the insects that once caked our vehicles. One reader suggests it's because we no longer have proper summers. Another attributes it to modern, steeply-raked windscreens. He's a biker and assures me a vertical visor still catches millions of the little blighters.