What did you inherit from your parents in terms of attitudes and values?
Halal food has taken a sustained battering in recent months. The President-elect of the British Veterinary Association hit the headlines when he proposed that the UK should follow Denmark and ban religious slaughter of animals without stunning. Now the news that all Pizza Express and Subway meat is Halal has caused an upsurge in media pieces calling for such meat to be labelled accordingly. This according to Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph is important in allowing people to choose.
It is the world’s most commonly performed surgical procedure – but more than any other it now divides global medical opinion.
Picture if you can a country in which parents had to explain to children what “food bank” meant because a generous and savvy welfare system, working in tandem with well–resourced voluntary groups in support of strengthened families and households, prevented people ever falling so low that they couldn’t afford the price of a bag of sugar.
Once upon a time, economists were moral philosophers, or maybe theologians, before they were economists. The point of this oft-noted observation is not that moral philosophy or theology somehow answers economic questions but that economics is, at root, the offspring of a family of intellectual disciplines, rather than the paterfamilias itself.
In Danny Boyle’s vibrant opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, the most impressive moment was Akram Khan’s muted dance, accompanied by Emile Sandé’s rendition of Abide With Me. In stark contrast to the rest of Boyle’s confident, colourful and humorous exploration of Britishness, and to the International Olympic Committee’s quazi-religious fruitcakery, Boyle had given Khan a one word brief: mortality. The ceremony was full of light and music, apart from the dance, which was dimly lit and very tense. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear the moment posed a quiet question against self-confidence of human physical prowess – what about death?
Rev, the BBC sitcom about a priest struggling in an inner city parish, is arguably one of the best advertisements for the work of the Church of England in recent years. Its main character, Revd Adam Smallbone, rarely has enough money to pay the bills, preaches to a half-empty church and is often plagued by self doubt.
Your family history is quite exotic – you were born on the Pacific coast of what is now north–east China. Can you tell us a little about your background?
The obesity crisis gets ever larger. According to Dame Sally Davies, England's chief medical officer, being overweight is increasingly seen as the norm. Astonishingly, almost two-thirds of adults and one-third of children aged 2 to 15 in Britain are overweight or obese. As Davies points out, this represents “a profound change in the health of the nation over a relatively short period of time”. In 1980, around 7% of adults were clinically obese. Today, it is a quarter. Her report can be read here