There's something unsettling about the way demographic charts use dark, nasty colours to indicate dark, nasty things. Who can forget the lugubrious school maps that illustrated the most densely populated and polluted areas of the world with irregular lumps of dark brown, while the open, clean spaces breathed a light pastel green? So no surprise that the graphic map of Britain chosen by most publications this week to instruct us on the latest findings on the health and life expectancy of its citizens, represented ill health and early death with a muddy dark purple. Equally, there was no surprise that this doom-laden black grape was, for the most part, concentrated on Scotland, spreading out from Glasgow like a malignant growth.
As informative as this latest data might be to the horrified middle classes in the south, to those who live in Scotland the revelation is on a par with a study suggesting the health of fish may be impaired by their permanent removal from water.
Who would be proud of the fact that we have the highest incidence of almost every self-inflicted modern ailment you can name, from heart disease, lung cancer and obesity to alcoholism? Nor would anyone be proud of how visible this predisposition to self-destruction is, not only in scientific study but also by the fact that even middle-class Scottish families abroad look as though they come from Odessa. Yet there is a shocking absence of shame. The reality of our plight is not up for debate, but the question, of course, is why?
A series of TV programmes last year did a decent job of exploring tentative scientific explanations of why alcoholism in particular was more prevalent in countries in the northern hemisphere than those in the southern hemisphere. You know the kind of thing; enzymes, evolutionary tolerance for calorific purposes, blah de blah. But all these factors should be negated by the modern lifestyle opportunities that even out early evolutionary differences. Put more simply, in modern Britain there is no biological imperative forcing a Scotsman, even subtly, to behave differently from his counterpart in the south-east of England. And yet self-evidently, he does.
Let's, therefore, be wildly unscientific about this for a second and suggest it's cultural. Here's a tiny example. BBC Scotland has been outstandingly successful recently with high-class drama and quality reality shows such as Castaway. When it wants to go upmarket it can do so with consummate ease. Now it has another hit show, one that features a fat man taking a taxi around Scottish towns being rude to anyone with an English accent, talking about sausages, fish suppers and sweeties to people in shops with absolutely nothing of interest to say, all delivered in an accent that is practically unintelligible even to the most rugged Scots ear. It's hugely popular. The singularly most depressing aspect of this is that its success so accurately demonstrates that we Scots like to celebrate how utterly crap we are.
We live in a country that has no summer, where an 80-foot high cloud cover blankets most of the country from July to May, where urban poverty remains on a scale comparable with that in eastern Europe, and which boasts a population that is decreasing. And are we all ashamed, trying to make the good things we have even better by admitting it's rubbish and reshaping how we live? Do we teach our children across all classes to expect more not just in terms of diet and health, but the whole essence of what is life affirming and what is not?
Don't be daft. It's not his fault, but the man in the taxi programme is there to remind us that it's our duty to admire the awful and mediocre and sneer at everything that is even vaguely aspirational. It's worth considering that it might be that cultural impediment that's a factor in killing us. Wha's like us? Hardly anyone, thank God.
