Hussain was originally introduced to the Marvel universe in 2008 by writer Paul Cornell and artist Leonard Kirk. Cornell, who is most famous for his work on Doctor Who, writing the episodes Father's Day, Human Nature and Family of Blood, was brought in to revamp Captain Britain, who had been languishing in obscurity for over a decade. In the process, he created a rich supporting cast for the dated hero, including Faiza, the viewpoint character for the series. (It also features a shapeshifting alien who thinks he's John Lennon, it's all-round good stuff.)

Speaking about her at the time, Cornell – who is himself a Christian, and is married to a vicar – said:

She's very into mainstream British young woman culture. She's on Facebook, she reads celebrity gossip magazines, but her biggest fan rush is for British superheroes, who also pop up in those magazines. She knows about them all, she had Knights of Pendragon wallpaper when she was a kid (Or insert apt reference for Marvel time)…

I have two aims here: to make her a real person and not someone who has to represent the entire British Muslim world all the time – I think superheroes are too prone to being standard bearers for whole communities – and to make her an everyday religious person who you won't hear anything religious from until it would naturally come up.

Although a critical success, the series was cancelled due to low sales after a little over a year. Captain Britain was used in an Avengers series, but there's been no room for Faiza until now.

Writing on Tumblr, where the issue has taken off since the Woolwich attack, Al Ewing adds:

This was a thing I thought up in the shower, just a thing that seemed really obvious. Captain Britain knows he’s going to die, who does he pass the torch to? Faiza. Duh. Honestly, who else would it be? In any circumstances?

 

She’s NHS. Come on.

Sadly, due to the contortions of comics continuity, the issue in which Faiza accepts the mantle of Captain Britain actually exists in an alternate timeline the effects of which have already been undone in the wider series. But don't let that stop you from reading the whole comic; the story of a Muslim woman of Pakistani heritage becoming the living embodiment of all that is British may not be a story which "matters" in the comic's world, but it's certainly one which matters in ours.

It’s impossible to pinpoint the precise moment when the movie sequel became degraded (Jaws 2? Superman III? Rocky IV?). A strong contender must be the release in 1982 of Trail of the Pink Panther, stitched together from out-takes of its star, Peter Sellers, who had died two years earlier. The atmosphere in the cinema where I saw it was so maudlin it would have been fitting if the concessions counter had laid out funeral meats instead of popcorn for the duration of its run.

None of the main participants of The Hangover Part III died before the film was in the can but it’s difficult to imagine that a grisly on-set fatality could have cast more of a pall over the experience of watching it. This is a franchise in its death throes – unless you happen to be a Warner Bros executive, that is, in which case it must resemble a chorus line of dollar signs high-kicking across the screen. There’s not even a hangover in The Hangover Part III, at least not until the final seconds, but it would take more than a detail such as that to impede the progress of a series that has grossed over $1bn to date.

With its then unknown cast and conspicuous lack of special effects, The Hangover was a surprise hit in 2009. It took off from the idea of a night of bacchanalian excess so severe that it was impossible for the protagonists to know how they came to find themselves the next morning in a wrecked Las Vegas hotel suite with a tiger in the bathroom and a baby in the wardrobe. The film touched on various genres –buddy movie, road movie, gross-out comedy, even action thriller – but its chief pleasure came from the gradual piecing together in flashback of the events that led to such a spectacle; if you were feeling generous, you might liken it to a frathouse Memento.

Even viewers resistant to the laddish larks of this series (guilty as charged) might still respond to the actor playing the reckless child-man Alan. Zach Galifianakis, a rampaging baby with a Brian Blessed beard, possesses a combination of mania and naivety that evokes the essence, if not the daredevil spark, of John Belushi. The childlike obliviousness he brings to the chaos Alan causes is amusing even when the situations (which include, in the new film, the accidental decapitation of a giraffe) manifestly are not. Alan’s faith in his propriety is as unshakable as it is deluded.

The first Hangover sequel used the popular tactic of dispatching the cast to a foreign country (Thailand, in that case) for some comedy xenophobia (see also: Sex and the City 2, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason). The Hangover Part III begins with Alan’s friends pledging to check him into rehab. Alan is touched that he will be accompanied on the journey by his pals – the uptight Stu (Ed Helms) and the slick, handsome Phil (Bradley Cooper).

“You’re coming, too, Phil?” exclaims Alan gratefully. We are as surprised as he is. After all, Cooper has progressed to great things since handcuffing himself to the Hangover films four years ago. He’s a dramatic performer now, with an Oscar nomination (for Silver Linings Playbook) and a genuinely sophisticated performance (in The Place Beyond the Pines) to his name. At best, Cooper’s participation here has “contractual obligation” stamped all over it. I imagine his co-stars huddling around him between takes for stories of what it’s like out there as a real actor, where they give you awards and flattery rather than drunkenly yelling your catchphrases at you when you’re sitting with your family at TGI Friday’s.        

The friends never make it as far as rehab. They are sidelined by a gangster (John Goodman) demanding that they track down their old criminal acquaintance Chow (Ken Jeong), who has stolen from him millions of dollars’ worth of gold bullion. Alan may be the capricious toddler of the Wolfpack, as the friends style themselves, but Chow out-ids him by some margin. Chemically frazzled and polymorphously perverse, Chow has a special fondness for men, which renders him a transgressive presence in a film that sees boundless merriment in the sight of Alan stroking Phil’s face or Stu dressed in lingerie.

It’s an odd thing about comedy that pretty much anything can be justified if it’s funny. None of the snickering at gay sex or the romanticising of prostitution or the general misanthropy of The Hangover Part III would register harshly if there were three or four distinctive laughs or a handful of scenes that felt written rather than muddled through. Some series achieve a level of success so incommensurate with quality that their very existence feels like an indictment of audiences. The Scary Movie spoofs (five abysmal films and counting) are the current frontrunners in that regard but the makers of the Hangover movies shouldn’t see any glory in being responsible for the second-unfunniest comedy franchise in town.

Laura Marling’s album titles have a certain ring: Alas, I Cannot Swim; I Speak Because I Can; A Creature I Don’t Know, and now, the meter-wrecking Once I Was An Eagle. Perhaps they represent her journey from introspective teenager to ruling pontiff of contemporary folk. Her new album starts with a 20-minute suite of acoustic jazz, miles from the kick-drum thrum of the folk that makes it into the UK top ten: this is a return to the dextrous sound of Bert Jansch or Davey Graham.

Marling’s aura of self-possession has allowed her to make a major change to her singing style in the past two years without anyone saying anything. Her voice, once so English, has turned into a slip-slidey American lilt, half-speech, half-jazz, frequently yoyoing to a deeper register. She has always done things you wouldn’t expect – a Vogue photoshoot for her last album, a relocation to Los Angeles. She’s smart and practical, recognising the potential in the US just like her former peers and boyfriends, Marcus Mumford and Charlie Fink (Noah and the Whale). Now, the boys of the “Notting Hill folk scene” are free to play music somewhere that neither knows nor cares they weren’t born working class, while the scale of the country keeps them in a constant state of touring triumph.

Marling – less commercial than Mumford, more advanced as a musician – hovers on the edge of celebrity but her appeal has always been the unadorned purity of her songs, which seem to come out of her automatically, amid downcast eyes and fingers in perpetual motion, like the strange, unconscious talent of a choirboy. It never appealed to me. I always found her persona too chilly to allow me to engage with the music – but suddenly I’m getting all nostalgic for the Marling of five years ago. Which just goes to show how developed – and developing – this artist must be.

On the album’s overture (“Take The Night Off”/“I Was An Eagle”/“You Know”/ “Breathe”) acoustic guitar and double bass flit between simple and jazz-time signatures. Marling’s voice curls like a Solid Air-era John Martyn – a close-miked, intimate presence (there are only two other people playing on most of these songs). “Little Love Caster”, a Spanish guitar elegy, is a successful twist in her style. “Where Can I Go” may be her tenderest moment yet, with a rolling accompaniment just like Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game”, little wisps of Hammond organ and a sharply drawn picture of a girl who is utterly lost. Elsewhere, Marling writes with the selfawareness that often makes her sound aloof, life experiences merely ammunition for her songs: “Thank you, naivety, for failing me again – he was my next verse” (“Saved These Words”). Across the course of this 16-track album, there’s the sense of a dramatic role being played out and shrugged off. By the time you reach “Little Bird”, with its flutes and unusual melodic shifts, you’re struck by her exceptional lightness of touch.

Only “Master Hunter”, the single, is a total shocker. A turbulent tale of some folk femme fatale featuring Marling’s “new voice” at its most mannered, its accompanying video shows the singer performing to a woman throwing herself around in a leotard. There are plenty of tributes to Dylan in the song – in the line “it ain’t me, babe”, or complex chords that sound just like “Tangled Up in Blue” – but oh, how I wish she wouldn’t try to do Bob’s voice as well, sliding up and down the notes. You are too English, Laura, it will never work! “The Muse”, the first single from her previous album, was equally stagy – the rest of the stuff felt so much more natural.

In Marling, we’re watching an accelerated transition from youthful talent to artistic sophistication: whenever power emerges, there’s a sense of innocence lost. I interviewed her around the time of her first record, which came as a limited-edition box set – Marling, like many other artists around at that time, had designed various bits of ephemera to bring out the physical pleasures of a CD versus an invisible download: a snakes-andladders- style board game, some postcards, all of which she’d drawn herself. You’d never get Laura Marling for a quick phoner on handicrafts now. She was just like any other young singer, in love with her parents’ record collection, sad for the “good old days” of vinyl and a bit starry-eyed. But we wouldn’t be talking about her now if she’d stayed that way.

Patrick Flanery’s second novel, in which the dead hold sway over the living, is itself haunted by ancestors, two of which are united in the name of a character who starts out on the periphery and moves steadily to the centre, Nathaniel Noailles. The first name points in the direction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, from whose novel The House of the Seven Gables Flanery has taken his epigraph and much else besides. The other allusion – so recondite as to be a private joke – is to Bullet Park, John Cheever’s high-fevered portrait of violence in the suburbs, in which a man called Nailles becomes convinced that a man named Hammer is out to harm his vulnerable, bedridden son. Flanery wants his novel to tremor with the same Massachusetts indignation – Noailles is himself a Bostonian – but the result, sprawling, portentous and creaking with symbolism, has more in common with another work by yet another New Englander, Stephen King’s The Shining, in which, as here, an East Coast family disintegrates in the Midwest, and the only sane characters are a troubled young boy and the middle-aged black eccentric whom he befriends.

The boy is Nathaniel’s son Copley, an apparently affectless schoolchild who believes that a stranger is invading their house at night – accurately, though he has a hard time persuading his parents. The eccentric is the Noailles’s neighbour Louise Washington, a former schoolteacher who is passing a busy retirement as the keeper of secrets and flames. Louise knows that the Noailles’s newly purchased house is built on the site of an unmarked grave, where a liberal mayor and his black tenant – Louise’s grandfather – were lynched and dumped during the Red Summer of 1919.

Louise inherited the land, but sold it, after the death of her husband, to an ambitious architect, Paul Krovik, whose plan to build a large development – “a rational utopia where neighbors look after each other without recourse to the state” – was scuppered first by subsidence and then by the economy. Paul ended up losing everything: his family, his mind and, most painful of all, the prototype house he built from the ground up. The Noailles, who bought the house at a foreclosure auction, are the beneficiaries of his bad luck.

But land and luck aren’t the only things that people hand down or pass on; the burden of the past takes many forms – guilt, pain, genes – as Flanery is eager to acknowledge. Paul has disappointed his father by failing to go into the military; Louise has betrayed her forebears by selling the land. Nathaniel, the most beleaguered, is a victim of abuse twice over, the guinea pig for his mother’s psychology experiments and the subject of his father’s sexual attentions. There are times when he “wonders, noticing his wife’s occasional tendency towards compulsive behavior, whether Julia might have inherited some aspect of her mother’s mental illness”– suggesting that he hasn’t inherited his own mother’s command of diagnostic vocabulary.

As in Flanery’s slick first novel, Absolution, every character is given the chance to play protagonist. After a prologue – a fauxhistorical account of the events of the Red Summer – and a flash-forward that shows Paul in a high-security prison, the narrative unfolds chronologically. It’s an odd choice on Flanery’s part to deviate from the initial pattern (alternating between Paul and Nathaniel in third person, and Louise in first) whereby the story of Poplar Farm is told through its three most recent owners. The chapters about Copley and Julia, which do little to modify our sense of them, only increase the novel’s complement of dramatic irony; we spend much of the novel watching characters suspect each other and – in more psychologically fragile moments – themselves of doing things forwhich it’s clear that Paul is responsible.

It’s one of many ways in which Flanery’s tendencies run to excess. As Paul recalls his original scheme for Dolores Woods – or as Louise calls it, “the dolorous forest of infinite sorrow” – he thinks of the house as Gothic revival but “adapted to modern needs and materials”. The detail, together with the nearby reference to a “gable”, reinforces the Hawthorne connection; but the Gothicpastiche structure is merely a Trojan horse in which Flanery smuggles an improbable range of themes and modes. Like many an American novelist before him, he tries to keep the mixture under control by drawing connections – between sexual abuse and property developing, for example – but his efforts are strained, as when Louise compares the Bush-Murdoch axis to both medieval Catholicism and pathogenic fungi: “the language of the Crusades comes thrusting up into the talk of newsmen and politicians, soil-borne disease like Macrophomina phaesolina and its charcoal rot, turning language gray, spreading fungus in the drought of our time, through the dryness of speech, conditions inhospitable to growth, to the flourishing of debate”.

It’s as a portrait of the age that the novel feels most overdone. Flanery’s American city – Omaha, Nebraska, in all but name – is a grim, featureless place, and on the way to becoming fully privatised. Nathaniel, who works for an outsourcing company, aspires to move into the public sector: “if the state has not, at that point, ceded all responsibility to civic life and public wellbeing to private corporations”. We are being invited to scoff at Paul’s naivety when, having realised that malls, “with their private security guards”, are not a safe place to linger, he reflects gratefully that “a street is a place where anyone can stand”.

Towards the end, Flanery adopts a longer view and tries to mount an attack on not just the American but the human taste for ownership. In weighing the pleasures of hand-wringing against the costs, he might have remembered the example of Haw - thorne, who, in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, said that though he chose to give his story a moral (“the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones”) he refrained no less consciously from impaling the story with the moral, an approach that could only deprive it of life or cause it to stiffen in “an ungainly and unnatural attitude”.

Pot plants punctuate the ledge above them. Someone has stuffed sodden blankets into a sports bag on the floor. It’s a familiar sight, accompanied by the familiar smell of soap powder and the familiar sound of “True” by Spandau Ballet emanating from a TV in the corner, tuned to the blue screen of a digital radio station. All the songs seem to be from 1983.

I come here once a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with my partner, Zoë, carrying cumbersome sacks of wet socks, shirts, trousers, pants, bras (hers, not mine) and all the other bits and pieces to spin-dry that would otherwise have to be draped on the radiator in our bedroom or hung from the shower rail, damp for days.

The trip should be a chore but I look forward to it. The basic functionality of washing or drying clothes, the reality that there’s little option but to wait till it’s done, frees this hour from any other obligation; just sitting here is making good use of my time, even if I am half in a doze, lulled by the methodical rhythms of the machines.

The 18th-century Scottish doctor William Cullen prescribed travel as a cure for melancholics, since a journey has “the effect of interrupting all train of thought”. Cullen’s observation rings true in the admittedly more mundane context of the laundry trip – it, too, provides an interruption, a pause in the bustle of day-to-day life in the city.

Launderettes are also social spaces: it’s no coincidence that so much of EastEnders, a soap about an imaginary London community, has taken place in one, despite the steep decline in the service’s popularity over the past 30 years. In the mid-1980s, there were roughly 13,000 launderettes in Britain. Today, there are just 3,000.

The artist Clare Qualmann, whose 2008 project Spinning Stories documented what launderettes mean to those who use them, tells me she “found them intimidating at first”. However: “In the more sociable ones, I soon began to enjoy the enforced hour of small-talk and gossip, mostly about things and people I knew nothing of.”

It is this aspect that gives Michael Fox, the owner of my local launderette, the most satisfaction. “I meet people and help people,” he says. “And I see their children grow up and get married. I’ve got local people who’ve been coming here 15 years or more.” Fox has been in the business since 1985. Reflecting on the changes he has seen in that time, he uses an apt turn of phrase: “It revolves.”

Yo Zushi's zine and album of songs "Smalltime" is available now. The video to "Something New", partly filmed at the launderette described above, is on YouTube here.

As I swerved round him several thoughts ran through my head, all unedifying, in retrospect. He could do with a bit more cycling and a lot less junk. I wonder if he gets bullied because of his size? Probably not – loads of kids are fat these days, aren’t they? So I bet he’s fine. Until he gets diabetes, of course, then we’ll all be paying for it.

And so, judgement done, I went on my merry way. (Ironically, I think I was heading to the cheesemonger’s in search of a nice piece of Brie for an al fresco lunch.)

Now, I’m a liberal – I’d fondly believe I’m against all forms of discrimination. Yet here I was, blithely indulging in perhaps the last socially acceptable form of prejudice: fattism (yes, even the name is faintly risible). What’s worse, the object of my criticism was a child, who could hardly be said to be to blame for anything, let alone his weight.

Shocked or not, many of you, whatever your background, must have had similar thoughts at one time or another. Almost half of the people surveyed for a Mintel special report in 2009 blamed the rising tide of obesity on “laziness” and a fifth attributed it to greed. Even Tam Fry, the spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, has described the obese as “eating [themselves] silly”.

Indeed, hardly a month goes by without some hysteria in the tabloids about “fat Britain”. Whatever the story, the sentiment is the same – it’s all their own fault.

The government, hardly more understanding, seems to view fat people purely as a selfish drain on scarce national resources. “At a time when our country needs to rebuild our economy,” the former health secretary Andrew Lansley wrote in the introduction to the government’s 2011 Healthy Lives, Healthy People policy paper, “overweight and obesity impair the productivity of individuals and increase absenteeism.” Apparently it’s up to all of us “to be honest” about what we eat and drink. The subtext? If only fat people would lay off the junk, they’d save the economy £7bn a year. Simple as that.

The writer and professional campaigner Emma Burnell, who produces the Labour grass-roots Scarlet Standard blog and has struggled with her weight since she was a teenager, has written movingly about the painful realities of being morbidly obese in Britain, “the pointing, tutting . . . and judging” of strangers on the bus which, she tells me, happens “daily, hourly – every single day there’s something”, as well as the suspicion that her weight has held her back in her career. Sadly, she is probably not being paranoid: a survey of human resources professionals by the HR website Personnel Today found that, asked to choose between two identically qualified candidates for a job, one of whom was of average weight and one of whom was obese, 93 per cent would choose the former, solely because the person was slimmer.

Emma acknowledges that she alone is responsible for her size – “this is something I’ve done to myself” – but feels society treats her with less compassion than it would a smoker or an alcoholic. “I have to delete several comments a week from my blog relating to my weight. I’m constantly hearing people on the left wing making comments about Eric Pickles’s size. I mean, come on, there’s so much to criticise and you can only think of that?”

Even medical professionals, the very people who are supposed to encourage weight loss, aren’t immune to such prejudice. Research by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, found that the fatter the patient, the less respect they got from their doctor.

Although Emma says that her local primary care trust in south London has given her excellent service following her decision to join the waiting list for gastric bypass she agrees that she finds visiting her GP difficult. “I don’t like to go to the doctor’s because, for a start, I’m constantly being told I’m a drain on the NHS and I don’t want to be,” she says. “And secondly I know that, whatever’s wrong with me, they’ll just assume it’s to do with my weight.”   

Such attitudes only make the problem worse: the biomedical scientists Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson claim in their recent book Fat, Fate and Disease that the stress of stigmatisation can lead to “greater weight gain as rising stress hormone levels can induce both more eating and greater fat deposition”.

But then if you’re obese there’s quite a lot to be stressed about. A body mass index of 32 or over – the borderline between overweight and obese – doubles your risk of mortality straight off the bat. Get to that point, and not looking good on the beach is the least of your worries. Excess fat has major health repercussions, significantly raising the risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, asthma and some forms of cancer. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, obesity and depression are reciprocal risk factors; people who are obese are more likely to be depressed, and vice versa.

The plethora of related conditions has led the World Health Organisation to rank obesity alongside climate change and the global financial meltdown as a threat to human society as we know it. So, if excess weight is so dangerous, why do people find it so hard to ditch the chips?

And it is usually chips, isn’t it? You rarely hear that we should all be cutting down on the cassoulet, or the risotto, or the pains au chocolat, because obesity is, for the first time in history, largely a disease of the poor – in this country, at least.

When Anna Soubry, the minister for public health, made ill-judged comments in January about almost being able to tell a person’s background by their weight, there was public outcry but, unfortunately, she had a point. The 2010 Marmot review found that income and social deprivation have an important effect on the likelihood of being obese, and even the Guardian was forced to concede that there was a “notable correlation”.

So why are the least well-off members of our society “choosing” to be fat? One could argue, up to a point, that it’s the fat that’s making them poor. Adult obesity is linked to lower wages, both because of reduced productivity and because of the kind of workplace discrimination that Emma Burnell has experienced higher up the ladder. But diets differ, too. According to the Mintel report in 2009, manual, casual and low-grade workers, state pensioners and the unemployed are more likely not to pay much attention to what they eat, to snack between meals and to eat fast food more often than managerial or professional workers, more of whom avoid sugar and fatty foods – such as chips.

Partly this is a matter of education, but economics comes into it, too. Data from the US shows that when the price of energy-dense food falls, people buy more of it – and with food prices increasing by 17 per cent in the past five years, more consumers are turning to special offers to fill their cupboards.

You don’t often get buy-one-get-one-free promotions on fresh fruit and vegetables, but even if you did, the poorest people in our society are unlikely to come into contact with them. Most wealthier areas have more, and better, food available: supermarkets and restaurants, rather than convenience stores and fast-food vendors.

As Diane Abbott, the shadow minister for public health and MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, observes: “There are parts of the inner city which are like food deserts – streets in Hackney where there might be three or four bookmakers, three or four chicken and chip shops, but nowhere where you can go and get fresh fruit and vegetables.”

If you live in an urban area you can probably take public transport to the supermarket (but you’ll have to have the time to go there regularly, because you won’t be able to carry much home) or you can drive to one in a richer area – if you have a car. If not, you will be stuck more often than not with the kind of selection offered by my local “convenience store” in Finsbury Park, north London, which devotes twice as much space to crisps as to vegetables, and which at the moment is stocking a choice of sad-looking lettuces, frozen peas or tinned sweetcorn next to the Doritos and cheesy Wotsits.

It’s not a particularly small place, but if I had to shop there exclusively I wouldn’t be able to make a single one of the healthy “evening meal” recipes promoted on the Department of Health’s Change4Life website. With a little imagination, I could probably create something fairly balanced from the Best-One’s stock – a tuna and sweetcorn salad springs depressingly to mind – but then I should be able to; I write recipes for a living. Most people have neither the time nor the training.

To be honest, it’s almost impossible for me, coming from a home in which my parents cooked every single night, to imagine a situation where I had never been taught to make so much as an omelette. I suspect many people are similarly naive about the realities of life for the poorest in society. Take this comment beneath a piece on recession shopping habits published on the Guardian website: “I don’t understand this claim that lack of money forces people to buy processed food . . . we had a free-range chicken from a farm shop which was only £8, and it fed us for a roast dinner, for three dinners’ worth of chicken soup, a few days of sandwiches, and it went in with a pasta sauce too.”

Where to begin with such high-minded ignorance? It’s not easy to get to a farm shop without a car, even if you happen to live near one in the first place, and £8 is one-sixth of the £49 weekly food budget for the poorest of families. As for keeping the power-hungry oven on long enough to roast a chicken, or knowing how to make a chicken soup, both are beyond many people.

Despite their meagre selection most innercity shops are more expensive than the big supermarkets, so, all things considered, it’s easy to see why many people choose 99p instant noodles or a box from the local takeaway instead. My closest example (and Hackney is not alone in boasting more fast-food joints than shops) is the offer of a burger or fried chicken with chips and a fizzy drink for £2.50. Quicker, cheaper, and almost certainly a lot more tempting than a wilted tuna salad when you’re hungry.

The recession has made an already bad situation worse; consumption of fat, sugar and saturated fats has soared since 2010, parti - cularly among the poorest households. At the same time, fruit and vegetable intake has dropped among all but the richest, suggesting that when times are hard, healthy eating isn’t most people’s first priority. In a study for Barnardo’s published last month, many families echoed the sentiment that “fruit is expensive – it’s difficult to afford the five-a-day the government says you should eat”.

It’s a similar story with exercise: the most recent Active People survey from Sport England found that people in managerial or professional roles are one and a half times more likely to take regular exercise than those in the lowest social group. Those of us with expensive gym memberships can preach all we want about the virtues of walking around in the rain, but the fact is that most exercise costs money.

So, perhaps the government’s simple healthy choices are simply easier for some people to make than others – and the group with the least freedom of choice is children, the very individuals I was so quick to blame for eating ice creams in the park. Studies consistently show that many children are being fed food that is far too high in calories and fat; and even the least sympathetic commenters would have to agree that there is little your average two-year-old can do about a diet of sugary yoghurts and chicken nuggets.

That said, most parents want to do the best for their child, so again this is primarily a failure of education. Abbott talks of a generation of young women whose idea of motherhood “is what they glean from television and advertising – and advertising tells you, ‘Give your child follow-on milk . . .’ They can’t promote milk for newborns now, but they promote this follow-on, which is completely unnecessary [a claim echoed by the National Health Service], and they promote cheese spreads and crisps and McDonald’s, and of course some young women think, ‘Well, that’s being a good mother.’”

Indeed, a 2009 report by the Children’s Food Campaign found that significant numbers of popular products – innocuous-looking things such as rusks and bear-shaped biscuits, aimed specifically at babies and infants –were high in both sugar and saturated fats. Several of them exceeded the levels found in adult junk foods. Greater regulation and clearer labelling of foods marketed for children are obvious ways of countering this threat and they can’t come too soon for today’s kids. Research by the EarlyBird Diabetes Trust found that obesity is largely determined by the age of five, with girls gaining 90 per cent of their excess weight before they start school.

In fact, by this point, nearly a quarter of all are already overweight or obese, rising to a third by the age of 11. Abbott, who has been working on the Labour Party’s policy review of public health, tells me that, in a way, once a child has started secondary school, it’s already too late. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t support teenagers and adults with their weight issues but the key to a cost-effective intervention is young children.” And sadly, with a problem this large, cost-effectiveness has to be taken into account.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of us still cherish the idea that a fat baby is a healthy baby, an old wives’ tale Abbott is keen to dismiss. “There’s this notion that if a child is chubby they’ll grow out of it. Well, the stats show they don’t . . . and what’s charming chubbiness in a six-year-old isn’t so charming in a 16-year-old. I think attitudes need to be changed.”

Mark* from Lancashire would be the first to agree. He started to worry about his nine-year-old daughter’s weight after separating from her mother six years ago. At the time, his former partner had problems with alcohol. He had the impression, he tells me, that his daughter, Katie, was being dragged from pub to pub “and they were throwing a bag of crisps or a sausage roll [at her] to keep her quiet. She was no more than chubby at first. Puppy fat, maybe, as people would say.”

Her mother did not share his concern, but after he gained custody of his daughter her weight stabilised for a while, even though, Mark says, “She was never a skinny girl.” More recently, they have shared custody and he’s noticed Katie’s weight creeping up again to its current high of 9st 12lb – “about three stone overweight, in my estimation, but it’s really difficult to find out exactly what weight she should be”.

Katie’s first GP was “pretty dismissive”, but a new doctor recognised the problem and arranged for her to see a dietician, who Mark describes very favourably. Without the support of her mother, however, there was only a brief improvement.

As a father, Mark holds himself partly responsible for Katie’s size. “I could have pushed her harder, I’m sure. It’s very difficult, though, always to be the bad guy – ‘You can’t have this or that’ or ‘Do more exercise’, nag, nag.” He also feels, however, that his daughter’s school could encourage her to become more active. “One teacher she had for a year was just lazy and they didn’t have a single proper PE lesson,” he says. “I think sport needs to be pushed more in school but there seems to be a fear of upsetting kids if they come last. Everybody wins and nobody loses, so what’s the point of trying?”

Although Mark acknowledges that the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has made a great effort to change attitudes to food in schools, “I don’t think he’s succeeded. There are healthy options on the menu but then there is still pizza.” And if you’re nine and you haven’t been taught much about nutrition, why wouldn’t you reach for the deep pan?

Education is critically important if we’re to resolve the obesity crisis – almost two-thirds of adults, and a third of children, are obese. The government has made a start by reintroducing cookery into the National Curriculum from September 2014, promising to teach all pupils to produce “healthy, wholesome dishes” for themselves from the age of eight.

This applies only to comprehensive schools, however. Michael Gove’s beloved state academies will not have to offer cookery, just as they don’t have to meet the same nutritional standards as local authority school food – standards that the Children’s Food Trust has called “the quickest, cheapest and most successful public health intervention to address children’s intake of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt”.

Unlike their state counterparts, academies may also sell sweets, crisps and sugary drinks on the premises – presumably to help fund their task of “unleashing greatness”, as a recent Academies Commission report put it. (One teacher at a high-profile academy in south London tells me the children are fed slushies and muffins before coming back into class mid-afternoon, despite the claims about balanced meals on the school’s website. “Unsurprisingly, they go completely wild.”)

Healthy school meals produce the desired effect only if children eat them, and they are by no means the only thing competing for their custom – there are 23 junk-food outlets to every secondary school in England. Ninety per cent of parents claim they support “stay-on-site” policies at lunchtime, yet only 61 per cent of local authorities implement such policies at secondary level, despite evidence that eating away from the premises is likely to be significantly less healthy than the alternative.

Diane Abbott believes we should look at incorporating public health into our planning criteria, in part to help local authorities stop the proliferation of junk-food vendors around schools and other places where children congregate. “I haven’t got anything against chicken and chips,” she says, somewhat unconvincingly, “but I think it’s a problem when they’re deliberately opening around schools and encouraging children to eat something that’s deliberately unhealthy. You even get some sectors of the community where children eat chicken and chips on the way home from school, and then go home and eat dinner.”

Keeping children away from junk food, at least during school hours, will certainly help matters, but usually by the time they’re old enough to buy their own lunch it’s a matter of cure, rather than prevention. Far better to stop them getting fat in the first place.

This is especially true because, as a species, we are biologically programmed to maintain a fairly constant weight and consequently, once you’ve put on those pounds, it’s very difficult to shift them. Even if somehow, in the face of millions of years of evolution, you manage to succeed, your hormones and brain will be fighting to regain the missing fat reserves for the rest of your life, which is why it’s so hard to sustain significant weight loss long term. As Gluckman and Hanson put it, “Metabolic processes which were useful 10,000 years ago are one reason why we are in trouble now.”

With that in mind, it’s never too early to get children eating healthily. There’s growing evidence that to make the most difference, we should start before birth. The Southampton Women’s Survey found that respondents with the least education were far more likely to report an unbalanced diet during pregnancy, high in crisps, sugar, white bread and red meat and low in fruit and vegetables. Even if these women remained relatively thin, they gave birth to babies with elevated levels of body fat, a difference still evident at the age of four. (The survey also noted that the offspring of heavier mothers across all levels of income and education had a similar prop ensity towards childhood obesity – but of course, as we know, wealthier women are less likely to get fat in the first place.)

To help meet the self-evident need for work to promote healthy eating in the first years of life, Abbott believes health visitors should offer guidance on the subject. “I think they’re often reluctant to talk about diet because they don’t want to be judgemental,” she says, “but with training they could offer more support to young mothers.” Last year the Children’s Food Trust published nutritional guidelines for nurseries, childminders and pre-schools. Unlike the food guidelines for older children, however, these remain purely voluntary.

A balanced diet from day one is of vital importance, yet it is easy to forget that weight problems often have a mental element, too. Children born into deprived families are far more likely to have deficiencies in the maturation of non-cognitive skills such as self-control . . . the kind of self-control that, you know, might help you when confronted with, say, a packet of biscuits.

But biscuits, and fizzy drinks, and ice cream, are things with which all children are going to be confronted a great deal in the course of their lifetime. The fact is, we live in an obesogenic environment, stuffed with the kind of energy-dense food that Homo sapiens didn’t evolve to cope with, leading lifestyles that are increasingly sedentary. Why, as Gluckman and Hanson ask, did we think we could change our biology so quickly?

Many on the right argue that obesity is a personal problem and that the state has no duty to help. But our world has changed so quickly that parents are no longer equipped to counter the bombardment from the advertising and junk-food industries, and if the government wants to get the health costs under control, it needs to take action, rather than relying on “individual responsibility” among those who have very little choice.

Abbott argues that the coalition’s collaboration with the food industry, inviting firms to sign up to health pledges in a voluntary “responsibility deal” (to which, so far, only 11 per cent of UK businesses have committed), is “a nonsense . . . The food industry just wants to do a minimal amount from a corporate social responsibility point of view, but fundamentally it makes its money peddling unhealthy food to children and families – it doesn’t make money out of healthy, unprocessed food.”

Although she doesn’t rule out working with the industry, Abbott argues that it needs to know that, “if it comes to it”, the government will be prepared to legislate on matters such as advertising, calorie content and food labelling.

“I get it from even Labour MPs,” she says – “‘Oh, freedom of choice, freedom of choice.’ But as a society there are some things we don’t give children the freedom of choice to do – we don’t let them drink all the alcohol they want or smoke all the cigarettes they want; we have restrictions. I think when it comes to the food that’s fuelling the obesity epidemic, we have to have restrictions on advertising and access. It’s one thing for adults, but certainly as far as children are concerned, society as a whole should protect them, because society as a whole will pay the cost if they grow up obese.”

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which describes obesity as “the greatest public health crisis facing the UK”, recently published a ten-point plan to break the cycle of “generation after generation falling victim to obesity-related illnesses and death”. Its recommendations include an experimental softdrinks tax and £300m investment in NHS weight-management programmes, together with measures also backed by Labour, such as nutritional standards for all schools and hospitals as well as council planning restrictions for junk-food vendors.

The Royal College of Physicians has demanded more training for health-service professionals and greater investment in obesity research, and Emma Burnell brings up the need for increased funding for mental health support. “The mental health aspect of obesity is often overlooked. Everyone thinks solving it is all about diet and exercise, but, to be honest, most people know about diet and exercise by now yet we still have an obesity epidemic. Why is that?”

Their focus may differ, but the support for a more interventionist approach to the obesity epidemic is near universal. What is clear, whoever you speak to, is that the current approach isn’t working and we are in danger of failing not just a generation, but every future generation. Suddenly fat doesn’t seem so funny after all.

*Some names have been changed to protect identities

The band’s early success came on the back of very little promotion. They met whilst studying at Leeds University and eschewed the conventional route into live performance. Where most new bands try their hand playing in dirty little venues in and around city centres, Alt-J opened the doors of their student house to as many of their friends as they could, playing live in their own front room to a captive audience of like-minded young people. It got people talking, and proved that they were serious about their craft. To this day, those early gigs are some of the band’s most treasured live memories.

Their first single, Tessellate, received radio play when the band were still pretty much unknown nationally, bringing some authenticity back the word "indie". They avoided the usual PR activities that new bands are desperate to explore, yet found themselves gaining momentum. Now, with their audience growing rapidly, they’ve become one of the best known bands in the country. Their cautious approach has worked very nicely indeed.

They recently played Manchester Academy to a packed and eclectic audience; further proof of their growing appeal. It was the latest in a long line of great live performances, demonstrating the depth of their debut album and the potential of their sound in a live format. Beforehand, I spoke to keyboard player Gus Unger-Hamilton to get his thoughts on life as a member of one the finest bands around.

The Mercury Music Prize is an award that still carries weight. How has winning it changed things for the band?

It’s hard to say because stuff was going well before that, and it’s carried on like that after the award. It’s not like we were sitting around not having any touring to do, and then we won the Mercury and everything went amazingly. Stuff was good before that. It’s not turned us into a huge band, it’s just been a nice asset that’s probably given us a bit more momentum to carry on touring, which we are doing now. It’s been good but it hasn’t been crazy.

You’re playing for Now Wave this evening, who are generally considered the finest music promoters in Manchester. They rescued an ailing scene, changing live music in this city for the better. Do you enjoy playing for them?

We love Now Wave, they’re our favourite promoters in the whole country, and Manchester was the city in the UK that first really adopted us as a band even before Leeds. We used to come to Manchester and get great receptions, so it’s awesome to be back now, and reminds me how much I really like it here.

Now Wave are awesome. The first night they booked us, we were supporting a band called Fiction at a little pub called The Castle, and ever since then they’ve showed huge faith in us. We played some really bad gigs for them and they’ve never said: ‘go on, fuck off’. Like, one gig we did, one of the keyboards wasn’t working and it was generally not a good gig, but Wes was like: ‘you know what, don’t worry about it, let’s just carry on with this relationship,’ and they’ve always been fantastic to us, really great.

Is there any word on a follow-up Alt-J album?

We are going into the studio for sort of odd clumps of days here and there over the summer in between festivals to try and hammer out some demos and get the second album going, but we’re not saying too much about it right now. Touring is taking up most of our time but it’s difficult because, on the one hand, our fans want a new album but they also want to see us live, but you can’t really have both [laughs]. You can have one or the other. It’s not that easy to write a new album when you’re touring all the time.

Because the first album was so unique, it’s going to be really interesting to see where you take the sound. Is there a plan?

There’s not a plan for the sound. It’s basically going to be the same formula, which is don’t limit ourselves to one type of sound and see what happens. We’re never gonna put an album out unless we’re happy with it, obviously, and I think it will be recognisable as Alt-J. We’re just gonna see what happens.

Which festivals are you doing this summer?

Reading and Leeds, Glastonbury, Latitude, Tea in the Park, so the big UK ones, and then we’re going to America to play Sasquatch and Lollapalooza. We’re also doing Summer Sonic in Japan, we’re doing European festivals, Russian festivals, Canadian festivals. Yeah, we’re doing a lot of festivals.

How does being booked for festivals work? Do you have input in which ones you want to do, or do you get what you’re given?

You have your booking agent who essentially decides. The offers will come in and we’ll say: ‘we want to do this one; we don’t want to do this one.’ Occasionally, you might get a small festival which is just starting and you might say: ‘you know what, if they make an offer, and it’s not enough money, don’t say no because we’ll make it work because we really want to do it’. For us, we’re happy for our agent to sort it out, quite frankly.

Latitude is a special festival, you must be looking forward to that.

Yeah, it’s gonna be great. We played a small stage last year and we’re headlining a big stage this year, so that’s fantastic, we can’t wait.

Things are going so well for Alt-J right now. It’s just been an upward trajectory for some time. How does it feel to be in a band like that?

It’s just busy. You don’t get time to sit back and think about how successful you are, you just get on with the job. You see a lot of dressing rooms, and you spend a lot of time on the tour bus, and it’s good. I think it’ll be nice when we finish touring and we can have pats on the back all round and then get some time off to go on holiday and feel a bit more like you’ve earned something. But for now we’re just concentrating on staying sane and honouring our touring commitments.

Do you make plans?

No, we don’t make plans. We could be completely out of fashion by next year, so you just have to take advantage of the opportunities while they’re being offered to you and just take it like that, really.

Margaret Thatcher’s death caused a media frenzy. It seemed to many of us that the press tried to rewrite history with the way they airbrushed out certain aspects of her premiership. What did you make of all that?

I think it’s unprofessional that she was elevated above other Prime Ministers in terms of her funeral and stuff that like. Equally, holding "celebrate Maggie’s death" parties was tasteless, and almost a bit stupid. Let’s face it, she was not really doing very much during the last years of her life. It wasn’t as though right up until she died she was snatching milk, or closing down hospitals. I wouldn’t want to celebrate anybody’s death in that kind of way. I didn’t watch the funeral, so I don’t really know what went down, but I think almost all our newspapers are right-wing these days, so it’s to be expected. When the BBC is full of former Young Conservatives, what do you expect?

It’s interesting you think there’s a right-wing bias in the media because many people believe the opposite.

I think it’s fine because we have a free press, so whatever. I’m glad I live in a country where newspapers are allowed a political bent, but it’s kind of sad that almost every paper could be called right-wing.

What’s the future relationship between Britain and the EU?

I don’t know what’s gonna happen, I really don’t. I think people will often say one thing in a poll and do another thing when it comes to the day of a vote. I think the UKIP thing is a flash in the pan; it’s a protest vote and a way of people airing their disgruntlement at the government, and so on. It does worry me that the Conservatives are going to lurch to the right in order to win back these voters that they think they’re losing, which they’re probably not actually losing. I think in the age of Twitter and instant media, stuff’s getting far too reactionary. There’s a lot of two-week flavour of the month stories that the government shouldn’t be changing policies drastically because of.

So, for you, the UKIP surge will come to nothing, and at a General Election the country will just ignore them?

Yeah, I don’t think people are gonna vote for them in a General Election. It doesn’t worry me too much because they’re not going to win, and hopefully it just means the Conservatives get fewer votes and Labour get more. Or if not more, then not fewer.

How would you sum up the coalition thus far?

Nothing in England ever gets that bad, does it? I certainly don’t agree with their policies on employment and Disability Living Allowance, I think it’s awful. I voted Lib Dem at the election and wouldn’t vote for them again. It’s hard to say, and I don’t know if Labour would be doing a much better job, to be honest.

There were quite a few people who got swept up by Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats in 2010.

Yeah, I did. I think Greg Mulholland, the Lib Dem MP for Leeds North-West, voted against the tuition fee rise, he was one of the very few who rebelled, so in a sense I’m glad I voted for Mulholland, I think he’s a good guy. I now live in Hackney, so I’ll probably vote Labour at the next election because Diane Abbott is a complete legend.

Do you like Ed Miliband?

I don’t dislike him, but I don’t think he’s gonna be Prime Minister if I’m completely honest, but we shall see. I’m not one of those who likes to bash him, but equally I can’t get that excited about him.

How does it feel when people cover your songs?

It’s lovely. Mumford & Sons did a nice cover of Tessellate, Paramore covered Matilda, both for Radio 1, so that was cool. It’s also great fun to watch covers on YouTube because they can often be very interesting.

It was interesting that when you were just starting out, you didn’t plunge into the usual gigging scene, you kind of did it more on your own terms. Is that the advice you’d give to new bands starting out?

We just didn’t really like playing gigs; if you like playing gigs, then play gigs. Also, it probably makes you a better band if you play lots of gigs. We had to really catch up big time to bring the live show up to scratch with the recordings when we started because, really, we hadn’t had a lot of practice playing live. So I would say play as many gigs as you can, but equally do things on your own terms, don’t publicise yourself too much, don’t start a band and then make a Twitter account immediately because you can, that’s just stupid in my opinion.

Any films or art exhibitions you recommend seeing?

I just managed to catch the Light Show at the Hayward, which was really good, I loved that. I saw The Place Beyond the Pines, Ryan Gosling’s new film, which was pretty good. But no, I think the Hayward is the only really culture type thing I’ve done in the last couple of weeks. I could get out of the venues we’re playing at in the afternoon and go to galleries if I could be bothered, and sometimes I do, but more often than not I just watch Breaking Bad!

Do you think your next album will push Alt-J on and sell more records, or are you happy with the size of the band at the moment?

I’m very happy with the size of the band. I don’t want to become hugely enormous, playing big stadiums. I’d love to stay where we are right now for ten years, that’d be really, really nice. I think, inevitably, we’ll be able to keep on doing this for a few more years now because we have a decent fan base to at least justify carrying on touring for the next few years.

I’m still really surprised at how Radio 1 adopted Alt-J. When I first heard your songs, I just imagined you to be a 6 Music sort of band, but Radio 1 have really plugged you hard. Did that surprise you?

It’s very surprising, yeah. The late night Radio 1 new music DJ, Huw Stephens, was an early supporter, and it just never stopped growing. It was like, Huw Stephens will play you, and then we’ll put you on the New Music We Trust playlist, and then we’ll put you on the C List, and people liked it so we were on the B List, and before you know it we were on the A List, and it was, like, "shit, how did that happen?" There’s was nothing that magical about it, it just kind of happened in a nice, progressive way.

What’s the best part of being in a band for you? Is it live performance, writing songs, or the recording process?

I think it’s recording, because that’s the most magically, alchemical bit of being in a band. You go in the studio and come out thinking "wow, we just did that," so that’s really nice.

When we’ve spoken in the past, you’ve praised the songwriting skills of Joe [Newman, Alt-J singer and guitarist]. Do you think he can consistently deliver at the level he has done so far?

We’re just trying to make sure he doesn’t get a girlfriend so he’s miserable, then he’ll write an amazing second album. I’m not worried about it. The new songs we’re working on right now are sounding really good, so it’s exciting.

Then again, there has never been a console as over-engineered as Xbox One. You operate it using a voice recognition system devised by Mircosoft's top aural engineers. You can scan menus using a new sign language developed by Microsoft's ergonomic technicians.

Microsoft is the sort of company that probably hires TV ethnographers and viewing psychologists. In the wildly chaotic living room of the Watsons, though, the will of dad still prospers. Without control of the "remote", order does not exist. With Xbox One the TV watching quacks have won the design war. The patriarchy has been deposed as we move into the new era of Microsoftocracy.

Well Microsoft, my vision of your future is a group of wildly gesticulating children and screeching voices aimed at the beautiful black box that can switch between CBeebies and CBBC in one barked order from a five year old.

Worryingly, particularly for the middle aged grumpy gamer, is that Microsoft's user experience experts have, in their words "refreshed" the "class-leading" Xbox controller with more than "40 technical and design innovations". I don't want the controller to be "refreshed". I'm used to it. It's perfect in every way. I spend more time using the old unrefreshed controller than I do driving my car. We've been on many adventures together and I don't want to trade it in for an upgraded and refreshed version. Microsoft should hire some political philosophers alongside the audience ethnographers. Edmund Burke could have told them that "change always brings certain loss and only possible gain".

Yesterday's global screencast of the launch event carried it's own pre-launch hashtag: #xboxreveal. One thing that was not revealed was the price of the new system. I'm pretty sure that we'll all want one but can we all afford it? The company has spent a lot of time bringing people closer together with the integration of Skype and improvements to the use of Xbox live for multi-player online gaming. It looks impressive and I certainly want to play with one as quickly as I can.

But the price of the "liquid black" console will be the real game changer. Microsoft has sheepishly admitted to Wired that games discs will have to be installed onto the hard drive. This strongly suggests they will create a fee regime for second hand disc purchasers. If true, it will significantly reduce games ownership in my constituency and I'm sure will create a consumer resistance to the new device that Microsoft's team of market researchers may have underestimated.

We are told to expect more news about the repertoire of available games during the E3 conference next month. Yesterday's list of games was limited, only using the unsurprising Call of Duty franchise to showcase the new kit. Microsoft promise early and new franchises. They're going to have to deliver on this if they want early sales.

Xbox One looks like the next generation of big telly gaming and viewing. Yet without knowing its' price or games catalogue, how can one judge its' value? It was conceived in a time of ever growing prosperity and no-one, not even the Microsoft pointy heads will know whether Xbox One will triumph in tough economic times.

Ai Wei Wei was detained for eighty-one days in 2011. He says that "Dumbass" represents an precise reconstruction of the events that occured while he was in jail. The set, costumes and scenarios were constructed to his specification. "When I was detained," Ai said, "I memorised every single detail of the room because I had nothing else to do, and I really believed that the story should be told because it was so incredible. The song and this video and the best forms to represent that experience. Everyone who's been through similar trauma has been hurt, the anger and feelings are difficult to release, and I am using imagery and sound to overcome the fear. As an artist, it is my job to find a way for that."

Ai Wei Wei guest-edited the New Statesman in October 2012. The issue was published in English and Chinese and uploaded to bit torrent sites so as to evade "The Great Firewall" in China. Three features from the issue were recently shortlisted for an Amnesty International Media Award: “Fact have blood as evidence”, an interview Ai conducted with blind civil activist Chen Guangcheng; the “The Virus of Censorship”, in which newspaper editor Cheng Yizhong reveals how journalists in China are kept in a state of fear and endemic self-censorship through government manipulation and policing; and “Meet the 50 Cent Party”, which saw Ai Weiwei expose the underworld of state-sponsored commentators by interviewing an unnamed twenty six year old graduate who explained the process by which he is hired to influence the thoughts of ‘netizens’.

A lady, renowned in her small circle for the accuracy of her stop-press information of literature, complains to me of a growing pococurantism. “Since the Russians came in I can read nothing else. I have finished Dostoevski, and I do not know what to do.” I suggested that the great Russian was an admirer of Dickens, and that she also might find that author readable. “But Dickens is a sentimentalist; Dostoevski is a realist.” I reflected on the amours of Sonia and Ras - kolnikov, but forbore to press the point, and I proposed It Is Never Too Late To Mend. “But one cannot read the Victorians at all!” While I was extracting the virtues of the proposition that Dostoevski is a Christian, while Charles Reade is merely pious, she added that she could no longer read any verse but vers libre.

It is assumed that vers libre exists. It is assumed that vers libre is a school; that it consists of certain theories; that its group or groups of theorists will either revolutionise or demoralise poetry if their attack upon the iambic pentameter meets with any success. Vers libre does not exist, and it is time that this preposterous fiction followed the élan vital and the 80,000 Russians into oblivion.

When a theory of art passes it is usually found that a groat’s worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement. The theory which sold the wares may be quite false, or it may be confused and incapable of elucidation, or it may never have existed. A mythical revolution will have taken place and produced a few works of art which perhaps would be even better if still less of the revolutionary theories clung to them. In modern society such revolutions are almost inevitable. An artist happens upon a method, perhaps quite unreflectingly, which is new in the sense that it is essentially different from that of the secondrate people about him, and different in everything but essentials from that of any of his great predecessors. The novelty meets with neglect; neglect provokes attack; and attack demands a theory. In an ideal state of society one might imagine the good New growing naturally out of the good Old, without the need for polemic and theory; this would be a society with a living tradition. In a sluggish society, as actual societies are, tradition is ever lapsing into superstition, and the violent stimulus of novelty is required. This is bad for the artist and his school, who may become circumscribed by their theory and narrowed by their polemic; but the artist can always console himself for his errors in his old age by considering that if he had not fought nothing would have been accomplished.

Vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so called vers libre which is good is anything but “free”, it can better be defended under some other label. Particular types of vers libre may be supported on the choice of content, or on the method of handling the content. I am aware that many writers of vers libre have introduced such innovations, and that the novelty of their choice and manipulation of material is confused—if not in their own minds, in the minds of many of their readers—with the novelty of the form. But I am not here concerned with imagism, which is a theory about the use of material; I am only concerned with the theory of the verse-form in which imagism is cast. If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.

The third of these qualities is easily disposed of. What sort of a line that would be which would not scan at all I cannot say. Even in the popular American magazines, whose verse columns are now largely given over to vers libre, the lines are usually explicable in terms of prosody. Any line can be divided into feet and accents. The simpler metres are a repetition of one combination, perhaps a long and a short, or a short and a long syllable, five times repeated. There is, however, no reason why, within the single line, there should be any repetition; why there should not be lines (as there are) divisible only into feet of different types. How can the grammatical exercise of scansion make a line of this sort more intelligible? Only by isolating elements which occur in other lines, and the sole purpose of doing this is the production of a similar effect elsewhere. But repetition of effect is a question of pattern.

Scansion tells us very little. It is probable that there is not much to be gained by an elaborate system of prosody, by the erudite complexities of Swinburnian metre. With Swinburne, once the trick is perceived, the effect is diminished. When the unexpectedness wears off, one ceases to look for what one does not find in Swinburne; the inexplicable line with the music which can never be recaptured in other words. Swinburne mastered his technique, which is a great deal, but he did not master it to the extent of being able to take liberties with it, which is everything. If anything promising for English poetry is hidden in the metres of Swinburne, it lies far beyond the point to which Swinburne has developed them.

The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.

Tragedy is a great equaliser, uniting opera’s paupers and princes and levelling the class divide in a volley of blood and betrayal. At the Royal Opera House this week Verdi’s Don Carlo – a drama of kings and empire – has hoisted the black flag high, while English National Opera have hustled their audience into crack-dens and council-houses for Berg’s bitter gutter-parable Wozzeck. A classic revival and a new production, a lavish visual spectacle and a brutalist bit of social realism – Don Carlo and Wozzeck share nothing except a core of violence whose ferocity still shocks.

Carrie Cracknell is a natural fit for Berg’s opera – a director with an instinctive grasp of emotional nuance, as the charged restraint of her recent A Doll’s House at the Young Vic so vividly demonstrated. Making her opera-directing debut here she avoids so many of the classic first-time pitfalls simply by placing the score at the centre of her thinking. Too often to theatre or film directors (of whom we’ve seen an endless parade at ENO of late) the music is an irritating incidental rather than an organic part of their drama, and the results can be oddly discordant or just plain wilful.

Her Wozzeck comes dressed in cheap lycra and poached in the stench of yesterday’s half-empty beer cans and half-smoked fags. Nothing remains of the glamour of soldiering Instead we’re confronted with the bleak array of options facing the squaddie returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. Death, and a flag-draped coffin, is the best of a short list that also includes paranoid amputee and rapist.

In a brilliant dramatic transposition the doctor becomes a drug-dealer; his “beans” are pills, forced upon the hapless Wozzeck who is at once drug-mule, guinea-pig and customer. If James Morris doesn’t quite achieve the malevolence of Clive Bayley’s Doctor in the recent Welsh National Opera production, then his bonhomous, everyday demeanour is possibly all the more disturbing for its rejection of the trappings of an opera-villain. His efficiently-sung, calm delivery also provides a necessary dramatic anchor for Leigh Melrose’s Wozzeck.

Lost in the phantasmagoric visions that over-take his reality, Melrose finds – and more impressively sustains – an edgy place for Berg’s demanding vocal writing that chafes thrillingly against the orchestral richness from Ed Gardner’s pit. Sara Jukubiak makes an impressive ENO debut as Marie, her Act III song all the more horrific for its vocal beauty, and strong support also comes from Adrian Dwyer as a wheelchair-bound Andres.

In so complete a reworking some sacrifices are inevitably made. Religion is the elephant in the room, lingering in the translated libretto but excised rather awkwardly from the drama, and by compressing Buchner’s social strata into a single miserable slice of exiles and misfits Cracknell also loses a crucial angle on Wozzeck’s misfortunes. Her canny adaptation – nasty, brutish, and mercifully short – is however a serious and thoughtful one. It certainly made me think, yet what it couldn’t quite do in the crucial, final moments was make me feel.

Feeling isn’t an issue in Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 Don Carlo, revived on this occasion by Paul Higgins. Bob Crowley’s stylised, insistently red, black and gold designs frame the action with symbolic emphasis, adding to the monumental quality of Verdi’s epic. And if they teeter on the edge of excess in the violently gilded auto da fe, or threaten to tip over into baroque self-congratulations in the marbled splendour of Carlos V’s tomb then it only serves to raise the stakes on the emotions which must equal these visual for sheer volume.

Don Carlo lives and dies with its cast, and what a cast this current iteration has on offer. Even the absence of soprano Anja Harteros (who pulled out after opening night) doesn’t diminish its attractions, with Lianna Haroutounian bringing a girlishness, a dramatic vulnerability to Elisabetta that Harteros, in her vocal peerlessness, could never quite achieve. Acts IV and V put Haroutounian to a test no less daunting than that the heretics faced a few scenes earlier, and she rises with unobtrusive skill to the occasion, never losing the role among its technical demands.

It helps that she is partnered with Jonas Kaufmann’s Don Carlos, perhaps the best singing-actor of his generation, and a tenor who opts for vocal colour over force every time – crucial in this slow-burn tragedy where the minutiae of emotion need to be felt to keep the screw turning act after act. Eric Halfvarson’s Grand Inquisitor is a glorious grotesque, waddling and oozing his way across the stage to Verdi’s vivid musical accompaniment, and bringing the horror to balance Mariusz Kwiecien’s gallant Rodrigo. Only Dusica Bijelic’s page Tebaldo blots the elegant vocal patterning of this cast, blurting rather shrill at the top, and never quite settling into a happy relationship with Pappano’s orchestra.

Don Carlo is an opera of extremes that must all be kept in balance if it is not to topple under the weight of its own excesses. Pappano is a master of controlled-impetuosity, ordered chaos, and is his instinctive, paradoxical feel for Verdi’s score that coheres this revival. You’ll be harrowed and hurt by an evening spent with this Don Carlo, but wonderfully so. Terror – eye-opening and mind-expanding – is the order of the day at both ENO and the Royal Opera this week, but what a way to face those Gothic ghosts.

Played with perfect froideur by January Jones, Betty had previously had the svelte figure appropriate for an ex-model. But after just one series waddling about, “Slim Betty” is back. As a narrative device, the sudden appearance of a double chin had signified many things, not least that the character had relinquished her obsessive, controlling tendencies and, surrendering to her misery, had finally “let herself go”.

In a recent interview, Jones described how the audience had responded to the character’s weight gain: “When Betty was bigger, audiences were more sympathetic to her,” she said. We’ve read enough interviews with villains from Coronation Street to know that television viewers often conflate the character with the actor who portrays them. But in this age of Supersize v Superskinny, when you’re either “celebrating your curves” or showing off your “tight little body”, this observation is particularly interesting. Just what is it about a skinny woman that so gets people’s backs up? And how does putting on weight somehow make you a nicer person?

In the size-zero years of the early Nought - ies, everyone seemed to be worshipping at the altar of skinny. The Hollywood stylist Rachel Zoe pioneered a look that seemed mostly to involve huge handbags on twiglike arms while sporting equally huge, bugeyed glasses, which gave the wearer the look of a light-averse stick insect. Inevitably the fashion changed again and in the resulting backlash those who’d previously been congratulated on their trim figure were widely condemned and denigrated as “bony”, “unfeminine” and “anorexic”. Thanks partly to the buxom Christina Hendricks, another Mad Men actress, breasts were “back in”, and suddenly Mail Online was teeming with lasses “pouring their enviable curves” into various jewel-coloured outfits and “celebrating” the fact that they were “real women”.

“So what am I? A fictional character?” the skinny woman cried. The tide had turned as the fat-shamers shifted their attention to poking size eights in the ribs instead. Of course, in the past hundred years the ideal female body type has waxed and waned more rapidly than the phases of that most mind-controlling of feminine motherships, the moon. Whether it was the flapper girls of the Twenties, the pinups of the Fifties or the Amazonian supermodels of the Eighties, we’ve always had something to aspire to, body-wise. Shop mannequins have changed too, over time. In the war years they were much broader and chunkier, a look unachievable for those on meagre wartime rations. Why are we encouraged to hate those who look the way we ourselves are supposed to want to look?

If society deems that fatness indicates a gross inability to control oneself, then thinness connotes the maniacal opposite: steely resistance to temptation and a stoic submission to the deprivation required to maintain such a figure. Never can a woman be naturally slim and healthy; oh no, she must be subsisting on a diet of salad leaves and a fascist exercise regime that makes Gwyneth Paltrow’s look like a Sunday tea dance for the Blackpool elderly.

In 2013, when – thanks to advertising such as Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty – merely owning tits is seen as a great achievement, those who are slight and flat-chested complain of feeling shamed and marginalised. Oh boo hoo, the wobbly-arsed might think, naturally conforming to society’s definition of beauty must be so difficult for you. And yet being told “you’re a twig” comes from exactly the same place as telling someone that they’re fat – a place where women’s bodies are common property, to be jabbed, pinched and dissected, like meat.

Mad Men is set in the Sixties, a period when our emancipation looked not only likely, but achievable. Naturally, it coincided with society tightening its grip on its women. Keep us anxious, keep us hungry, and we’ll achieve little. An advert from Betty Draper’s day reads: “Are you twice the woman your husband married?” Another, for tapeworm tablets: “Eat! Eat! Eat! And always stay thin.” And yet it is when Betty ignores the adverts and deigns to eat that she becomes a figure of pity.

As a character, Betty Draper is fascinating. Cold and unfeeling, she has little maternal instinct, something that becomes most apparent in her interaction with her daughter, Sally, who she worries “looks fat” and is a “little lesbian”. It’s one of the few times we’ve seen the mother- daughter relationship portrayed so dispassionately on screen, as Betty transmits her fears and anxieties to Sally before our eyes. This is not unique to fiction. Perhaps it’s because mothers see their daughters as an extension of themselves, and so their self-criticisms and their anxieties are easily projected on to those with whom they share flesh and blood.

So many of my friends and acquaintances talk of being “fat-shamed” by their mothers, of how they’ll reach out and pinch their hips when they return home, how they’ll say, “Are you sure you want to eat that?” If it sounds like something from the Fifties, that’s because it is. It has trickled down from our mothers and grandmothers and, regardless of whichever size society happens to be championing, it will continue to do so, to our daughters. Because, whatever the size society decides to champion at any one time, you can bet your (barrel-shaped) arse it probably isn’t yours.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter write the V Spot blog for the New Statesman

Sophie Elmhirst: Not long ago, I met Aleksandar Hemon for lunch in St Pancras station. We spoke mostly about his new memoir, The Book of My Lives, which recounts chapters of Hemon’s life both sides of its central event, when he left Bosnia as a young man just before the siege of Sarajevo (I reviewed the memoir here). In conversation, Hemon roamed widely – from European football to how to teach creative writing. He was most poignantly open on the subject of the final essay in his book, his daughter Isabel. She died as a baby from a rare form of cancer and if you haven’t read it, Hemon’s account – in "The Aquarium" (originally published in the New Yorker) is an almost impossibly frank account of the trauma of losing his daughter. Aleksander will speak on 25 May. Here are four other events well worth checking out.

James Salter

The 87-year-old has just published his first novel for more than 30 years. All That Is is an elegant journey through the life of one man in Salter’s distinct, sensuous prose. He is often cited as the most unsung of the great American writers of the 20th century, or a writer’s writer (Richard Ford is a devoted admirer). 25 May.

John Burnside

Our very own nature columnist will be speaking about bees (a theme which will recurs across the festival - remember Einstein: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live") and reading from his poems. 27 May.

Heather Philippson and Emily Berry

Two exciting young poets (Berry’s work has been published in the New Statesman here) will read from their work. 28 May.

Tracey Thorn

The singer, one half of Everything But The Girl, talks about her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen. A fine writer (read her in the New Statesman here), Thorn’s account is witty and personal. 2 Jun.

The London Literature Festival will run until 8 September at the Southbank Centre. You can read the full programme of events here.

There are interesting juxtapositions. A second generation iPod is placed beside a Sony Walkman, the latter boasting 370 individual components, by comparison with the iPod’s slick 80. A mark of progressive design? Elsewhere the trend is reversed. An Asahi Pentax SLR camera from the 1970s - which I was delighted to see, having inherited the same model from a friend’s father after he died - appears next to a 2012 Sony Digital SLR, which has retained roughly the same number of parts (580 to the Asahi's 576), despite having made the transition from film to digital.

Digital SLR Camera, 2012, Sony. Component count: 580. All images copyright: Todd McLellan 2013

For McLellan, there exists a danger in our “locked out” culture. We have become alienated from the objects in our homes. In his introductory essay, “We all have ADHD these days...”, McLellan expresses dissatisfaction with the “exasperating” waste and expense of having to replace everything we buy after a few years' use. It was not always thus, he writes:

It fascinates me that older objects were so well built, and were most likely put together by hand. These items were repaired when broken, not discarded like our devices today.

There is no mention of the word “neat” anywhere in the book. I find this strange because the most arresting thing about the images is the way they impose order upon a large number of connected yet disparate parts. The inner elements of everyday items are grouped and arranged with almost fanatical, geometrical precision. Yet McLellan does not make mention of the aesthetic impact of looking at a piano with all its hammers, pegs, pedals and keys lined up - or a typewriter, its cipher-tipped metal arms and levers arranged to create diametric patterns that leap off the page like a William Morris print.

The effect is both satisfying and superficial. Similar images have appeared online over the last five years, particularly on blogs such as FFFFound! and Things Organized Neatly (perhaps another reason to avoid the word “neat”, though I have no idea who precipitated the movement). At university, I became addicted to scrolling through these sites, feeding my obsessive compulsiveness by forcing an industrial degree of orderliness upon what would otherwise have been an unrecognisable mess. I spent hours clicking from one post to the next in search of the most grand - or minute - or unlikely - disassembly. Technology, matches, motorbikes - even families. The desire to seek out form and meaning in the world is a primary human urge, and the maximalist stratification of deconstructed household objects provides an instant hit that pleases intensely for a second, but is soon forgotten.

Things Come Apart - a slightly clunky adaptation of Yeats’s line in “The Second Coming” - claims to be working against the finished, holistic and pristine. If you look at enough of these kind of images online, their contrivance begins to feel restrictive. Unlike those images of calculated destruction which circulate fairly rapidly following the release of a new must-have gadget, there is no anarchy here. Rather we are witnessing the curatorial effort and surgical design that put the finished product on the shelves to begin with - and they are always products: buyable items. One issue I have with Things Organised Neatly is that its materialism can get to be a little much. The things take over. The most common submission seems to be a sort of Brooklynite starter-kit of leather shoes, stationary, clothes from Urban Outfitters, Apple devices and some kind of weighty SLR camera. It starts to be less art and more “look at all the things that I own.”

A recent post from Things Organized Neatly

Perhaps Wes Anderson is to blame. The miniaturisation and artificiality fundamental to his films makes them at once symbolic and deeply materialistic. He has created doll’s house replicas of mansions, tenements, tents, trains and perhaps most memorably, the research vessel Belafonte in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2009). The American novelist Michael Chabon has noted the uncanny effect of seeing recognisable human events play out amid the palpable fakeness of Anderson’s toybox universe:

That is the paradoxical power of the scale model; a child holding a globe has a more direct, more intuitive grasp of the earth’s scope and variety, of its local vastness and its cosmic tininess, than a man who spends a year in circumnavigation ... When he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of shards, refuse, bits of junk and feather and butterly wing, tokens and totems of memory, maps of exile, documentation of loss.

The research vessel Belafonte from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Image: Touchstone Pictures

Anderson mirrors common experiences in an undeniably contrived way, yet somehow manages to move beyond the artifice and point to something true. But as with TON, there is no denying that aspiration plays an important role. The characters tend to belong to the 1 per cent. They have the money to buy nice things and pursue their eccentricities. The beautiful boxes inside which Anderson frames people and places free us from the ugliness that is the norm. The mess remains off-screen.

Like Todd McLellan, Anderson utilises grids and boundaries in order to make us realise something profound: in presenting order we are confronted by its absense. It becomes a kind of boasting - one which has infected social media. People tend not to post pictures of a half-eaten plate of food or the damp behind the bed on Instagram. It's a version of reality, and in that way a little shallow. A bit like overexposure to pornography: if you keep clicking through, sooner or later you become aware of the absence of real, fleshy people. Porn is not like people, it is a presentation. Life is not neat. Nor will we ever stop arranging it.

Things Come Apart is published on 3 June by Thames & Hudson (£19.95)

A new survey released just a day before the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest final in Sweden, a pan-European YouGov poll has shown that Brits are most likely to say that some countries suffer unfairly from political voting, and don't have any real chance of winning the annual talent contest.

YouGov’s EuroTrack survey, which tracks public opinion in Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, found that a monstrous 75% of Brits believe some countries don’t have a proper chance of winning Eurovision because of political voting by other competing nations.

Britain has won five times since the competition began in 1956, but has done particularly poorly since 1999 when the rule that songs must be performed in one of the official languages of the participating country was abandoned. It has only finished in the top ten twice since 1999, and last year’s entry, musical veteran Engelbert Humperdinck, ended second last in 25^th place.

In the past it has been suggested that voters were reluctant to vote for Britain following the start of the war in Iraq in 2003. Indeed that very same year, Britain’s entry of male-female duo Jemini received a record 0 points. The pair admitted they had sung off-key but claimed they were unable to hear the backing track due to a technical fault. Performer Chris also claimed Terry Wogan had warned them before the contest that they would not get any points due to the Iraq War.

It is worth noting, however, that while the number of competing nations has increased over the years, the probability of Britain winning has naturally decreased. There were only seven countries represented when the competition started and in recent years there have been 26. Britain’s entry this year is veteran Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler, who will perform ‘Believe in Me’ tomorrow night at the final held in Malmö, Sweden.

Does Eurovision really unite Europe?

The Eurovision Song Contest was started after World War II with the aim of bringing European countries closer together around a programme of fun, light entertainment.

However, the YouGov EuroTrack survey shows that all of the countries surveyed, and especially Britain, are rather skeptical about Eurovision’s capacity to unite. The Swedes are most likely to see Eurovision as a unifying force, with a third (33%) saying it helps bring Europe closer together, whilst only 14% of Brits felt the same.

Commenting on the EuroTrack findings, YouGov Director of Political and Social Research Joe Twyman said: “We haven’t won Eurovision since 1997, and a more than decade-long losing streak has obviously had an impact on how people in Britain feel about it. While all of the countries we surveyed have some degree of cynicism about Eurovision, it’s interesting that the Swedes – who won last year – are most likely to say it helps bring Europe together. I think it’s reasonable to assume that were Bonnie Tyler to win, or even finish strongly, Brits might start to feel just a little more enthusiastic about Eurovision.”