Some have suggested that poverty is to blame and there is some correlation between socio-economic factors and obesity statistics. But its not all about wealth. Basically, it boils down to readily available, cheap and unhealthy foods combined with sedentary lifestyles and laziness.

People have become lazy. Lazy in their attitudes, thinking, opinions and in what they do. Rather than prepare a healthy, tasty salad for their children it’s far easier to open a bag of chips and fat laden dips. Instead of getting outdoors and doing something active with the whole family it’s far easier to let the children play computer games all day while consuming gallons of fizzy drinks. And it’s far easier for parents to deny their responsibility by telling themselves nonsense excuses like big-bones are the root cause when in fact the reason is simply big, fattening meals and no exercise.

The time has come for some radical new approaches to deal with this growing problem. Children mimic their parents and those parents who are conditioning their offspring to become fat, lazy copies of themselves are guilty of child abuse. Plain and simple. They are costing the nation a fortune and populating the country with miserable, fat kids who will die before their time after suffering from diseases that they should never experience.

Being overweight and obese needs to be massively disincentivised. It should be perfectly acceptable for airlines to set size limits and to charge overweight passengers more. Clothes for outsize people use significantly more material than clothes for normal sized people so they cost more to produce, store and transport so they should be sold for XXXL prices. Purchasing fattening, unhealthy foods and drink should somehow be discouraged in favour of more healthy options. Good parents who set great examples should be recognised and praised for what they are doing. Whereas parents who take the lazy approach should be identified, offered assistance and made aware of the consequences of their poor parenting.

Not so long ago smoking was considered to be cool and sophisticated. Films and TV series’ from the 1950s presented attractive, stylish actors and actresses puffing away on cigarettes, often engulfed in clouds of smoke. But if someone was to light up a cigarette in a restaurant or bar today they would be on the receiving end of some very disapproving stares and most likely be asked to go outside to a designated smoking area. People’s attitudes to smoking have changed radically and this has had an enormously beneficial impact on the nation’s health. The same needs to happen to over-consumption, laziness and obesity. It shouldn’t be considered discriminatory to enforce size restrictions on aircraft, at sports events, fairgrounds or in theatres. It shouldn’t be considered discriminatory to charge overweight and over-sized people more if it costs more to provide them with a product or service. It’s simply practical, common sense.

The post Segregate the Obese and Charge Them More appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

The Nurse has had a lovely time the last few months, trollying around Brighton off her face on various mind-bending substances, more or less behaving herself. But now she’s bored shitless.

How could she have contemplated giving up her wicked ways? Looking back, it seems insane.

She ran into The Chief Surgeon in Waitrose on Western Road yesterday. The silly old duffer. But The Nurse has a soft spot for him, since he was the man who introduced her to the whole amateur brain surgery thing in the first place. Of course he managed to stay out of gaol, the sod, but she’s prepared to let it lie. Life’s too short to bear grudges.

Seeing him brought back all sorts of lovely memories of her old guerilla trepanning days. But the thing that tipped The Nurse over the edge was the muff table, found in one of Kemptown’s excellent junk emporia a few hours later.

If you’re old enough to recall the 1970s and ever came across a porn magazine in a back alley behind your house (like The Nurse did) you’ll be unable to forget the sheer size and frightening vigour of muffs back then. In the days when the Brazilian wasn’t even a twinkle in a pervy beautician’s eye, ladygardens grew wild and free. Very wild and very free. And the muff table was absolutely covered in them, a triumph in the art of decoupage decorated with what must have been a hundred cut-out photos of minges, all complete with thick outcrops of wayward, wiry 1970s pubes. Blimey.

The Nurse doesn’t give a stuff about interior decor. It’s for wankers. But she desired the muff table with all her horrible black heart. And it was a snip at just seventy quid plus a crafty blow job out the back.

In fact she’s so delighted she couldn’t resist re-opening her dialogue with you lot, simply to show off.

If you’re ever brave enough to invite yourself over for tea you’ll find The Nurse sitting quietly on the sofa with the muff table in pride of place, her eyes glowing strangely in the dim light, surrounded by surgical instruments. She’ll make you very welcome… in her own special way.

Oh, The Nurse is so glad she’s back. This is going to be such fun.

The post The Nurse returns, thanks to the Muff Table appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

Is Valentine’s day a scam? If this question is really asking if Valentine’s day was contrived purely for the purposes of making money then the answer is definitely no. Contrary to popular belief Valentine’s day was not invented by greetings card manufacturers, although they do derive a lot of revenue from the occasion. February the 14^th first became St. Valentine’s day in 498 AD when Pope Gelasius made it a church sanctioned holiday. But there is much uncertainty and mystery relating to St. Valentine and why this particular saints day should be associated with love.

Very much like Christmas, Easter and many other religion-related public holidays, commerce has turned St. Valentine’s day into big business. In 2012 it was estimated that Americans would spend almost $15 billion on romantic gifts, nights out, special trips and treats for their loved ones over the Valentines weekend. Valentine’s day can clearly be a massive earner if you have the right product and promotion.

However, it is not compulsory to join in. If you, like me, are as tight as a gnat’s chuff you will find other ways to express your love, fondness or sexual desire for your partner. For example, you might simply do a few things around the home that you normally leave for them to attend too, like stacking the dishwasher, walking the dog or retrieving the children from school. Or why not think of those irritating little habits that we all have and try to curb them, at least for one day.

This is my cheapskate approach to the occasion so I shall be attempting not to fart at the breakfast table and refraining from plucking my nose hairs while watching television in the evening, both of which irritate the hell out of Mrs Surgeon. But things will be back to normal the following day so that she really appreciates the effort that I made.

The post Actions Speak Louder than Words on Valentines Day appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

She’d assumed that freedom from the loony bin would bring opportunities for amateur brain surgery experimentation, perhaps a little light trepanning, maybe a spot of dealing to top up the pension of the poor old dear she knocked off and buried under the patio (and which she now faintly regrets). But no.

Life in Brighton is both frothy and pithy enough to provide The Nurse with a constant, bubbling stream of delight. The ugly, persistent nagging voices that used to drive her murdering, drug-fuelled days have quietened and now all she hears is the murmuring and crashing of the Sussex seas. She still loves getting off her head – some things don’t change – but but otherwise she’s an angel. Relatively speaking.

These days she roams North Street, the North Laine and Hove’s charity shops dressed to the nines, smiling, fizzing with joy for the first time in decades. It’s time to put her trepanning set to one side and sail into middle age disgracefully.

So, it’s goodbye from The Nurse. She’d like to thank you for supporting her through the past five years of imprisonment, ennui, frustration, angst, neglect, violence, hatred and pain. And for your variously epic, ill advised, terrifyingly dim-witted, genius, legendary and extremely silly feedback.

Ladies and gents, The Nurse salutes you. Now fuck off.

The post Brighton serial killer mends wicked ways appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

The Nurse is tripping. She’s completely spanked. Shitfaced. Trollied. Trousered. Annihilated. 

It’s nice. She can’t remember the last time she dropped LSD. Must be at least two decades ago.

This afternoon she meandered into Brighton city centre. Nobody notices an ordinary-looking lady, even when she’s tripping her nuts off.

As far as the Zeitgeist goes, she’s human wallpaper. A smart beige twin set, wavy beige perm, stolen pearls, clown-like rouged cheeks, tan support tights and sensible black patent court shoes do the trick every time.

Thus rendered invisible, she explores the streets she used to prowl as a young woman. Before those bastards caught her and banged her up.

She re-visited her old flat on Western Road, accessible via Waitrose car park, whose pale blue door hasn’t been painted since she scarpered in 1985. The damp, insect infested flat down Orange Row, the back alley behind Gardener Street. The dilapidated mansion flat on Denmark Terrace where she first became fascinated by amateur brain surgery, before everything went horribly wrong.

After a long, chilled afternoon reminiscing in town while the drug swirled, stormed, coiled, roiled and boiled around her brain, The Nurse is at home enjoying well-deserved tea and cake, watching the news on telly.

Oh, what a den of cunts.

This week The Nurse is astonished that we can extradite a British teenager to the USA for building a website linking to pirate TV and film content, but we can’t get rid of that tit of a terror whore  Abu Hamza. He sticks to the UK like shit to a blanket, bless him.

She’s vexed about the student who’s been sentenced to 56 days in gaol because he got pissed and wrote racist comments on Twitter. Which means, presumably, that any arse who takes it into his or her head to exercise poor taste and even worse judgement faces a stint behind bars. A silly piece of news on the face of it. But it has a sinister side, as the people who run the country steadily encroach further  into our personal territory. The powers that be obviously don’t trust communities or individuals, whether online or offline, to self-police. So they’ve decided to become our moral guardians. Well, fuck ‘em. What’s happening to free speech? Or does the principle of free speech only apply when we say nice, positive things?

She’s livid about the police too. It’s all getting too political, just like in the States. The Nurse doesn’t know about you, but she’s not interested in voting for a police chief. She doesn’t want a choice, thank you very much, no matter what the gonks in parliament think. She wants a bunch of people who know what they’re doing – the police – to choose the best person for the job.

The same goes for hospitals. She’s sick to her pointy back teeth of hearing about fucking ‘patient choice’. Jesus. She doesn’t want to choose which hospital suits her needs best. Sod that. She just wants her local hospital to be really good, no better or worse than any other hospital in Britain.

Not that she’s in need of hospital treatment or anything. But she’s wondering whether hospitals might prove fertile hunting grounds, what with all those helpless folk trapped in bed. She has hidden the intricate little Victorian trepanning kit she half-inched on the journey south. It’s rusty as fuck, so her first job is sharpening it. She hums nasally, leering in the gathering dusk as her tiny, delicate tools begin to gleam and sparkle under her expert hand.

Although thinking about it, she’d actually much rather sit outdoors with a nice slice of Madeira. Hmm, weird.

The post The Nurse is pleasantly trollied… good old LSD appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

She has settled into her stolen flat and built a flower bed on top of the ex-owner’s final resting place (under the patio). She’s made a load of new pals, none of whom have the faintest clue about her past transgressions.  And she has found lucrative work as a freelance virtual assistant.

Only one client has pissed her off so far. A law firm of  quite spectacular nastiness up in Finchley, run by the rudest man on earth, refused to pay her this week. The arseholes. She’d name and shame the fuckers but they’d only sue her. And she can’t afford to draw attention to herself. After all, she’s still a fugitive. Never mind. May their tiny, weeny cocks rot off. If she ever goes to Finchley, she’ll pop in and treat them to a free amateur brain surgery session. See how they like that.

On a lighter note, The Nurse is living it up ’til late most nights in the Poison Ivy at the bottom of St James St, a splendid fun-house of a bar packed solid with top class nutters of every imaginable sexual persuasion. And more. Marvellous place.

The old urges are still there.

Now and again, when she’s off her face on E or whatever, she finds it hard to resist jumping some poor sod down one of those quaint little Kemptown snickleways and trepanning the fuck out of ‘em.  Most of the time she’s fine. But spring’s in the air, her urges are growing more insistent by the day and some people – to be frank – would probably benefit from a nice, neat hole in the head.

In the wee small hours The Nurse wakes with a start. An unnerving grin creeps across her face as she climbs  out of bed, takes a dusty box from the wardrobe and unpacks her Nurse uniform. Sniffing richly, she savours the meaty old blood stains.

Nectar.

How long can she stay on the so-called right side of the law? So far it’s all in her mind. She’s oddly reluctant to get back to her old ways.

The post Bastard Finchley lawyers and other stuff appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

It took the best part of four days to limp from London to her home town, Brighton, and she’s been as busy as a particularly vicious and scary bee ever since, getting her new identity in shape.

Her teeth were her first priority. It’s no good trying to be inconspicuous with filed pointy gnashers, but thankfully all The Nurse had to do was track down and blackmail a former Amateur Brain Surgery Club member – now (hilarously) a dentist – to get them sorted out. You should see her gorgeous new pearlies, which cover her real teeth perfectly.

Second came a new name. After digging up one of her secret cash stashes, buried for convenience in the graveyard off Bear Road thirty years ago, she could easily afford a false identity. Thank goodness for Chemical Dave, another old ex-brain surgery cohort.

Third, somewhere to live. It was easy enough to knock off the old bat in the smart Kemptown house that The Nurse now ‘owns’ and bury the body under her small but very pretty city centre patio. Amazingly it doesn’t smell too bad out there, all things considered… but then again that’s the beauty of cold weather.

This evening The Nurse sits on her new leather settee, hunched over her laptop, poised to write her first rant of 2012 and her first  as a free woman. If you didn’t know any better you’d think she was a respectable, smart widow about town. The thought makes her grin in a most unladylike fashion. Oh what fun this is going to be.

What’s pissing The Nurse off this evening? David Cameron’s Christian shenanigans, that’s what. OK, it was a couple of weeks ago. She’s been otherwise occupied. But it rankles like fuck.

The Nurse quite likes Cameron. Oddly, he’s less Conservative than Tony Blair. But she objects to his call for Britain to declare herself a Christian nation. That’s just divisive. She thinks it’d be much more sensible to declare ourselves a secular nation that tolerates all religions, whether it’s  Pastafarianism or Christian God botherers.

Crikey. Admittedly that wasn’t much of a rant. But it’s difficult to generate a decent head of steam and vent your spleen effectively when you’re warm, wealthy, nice-looking and popular amongst your very nice neighbours.

She actually babysat for one of the buggers last night. Imagine if they knew she was a psycho killer with an unfortunate taste for soft, tender, well-cooked infant flesh.

The post Kemptown, Cameron and evil criminal acts appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

In the United States there are now more people aged 65 and over than ever before. In 1900 there were 3.1 million Americans in that age group and by April 2010 this had increased to 40.3 million. And as more baby boomers reach their 65th birthdays it is anticipated that this number will increase more rapidly.

Life expectancy is increasing and many of us can expect to live into our eighties, nineties and even beyond 100. Not only are we living longer, we are staying fitter and healthier into our old age. But some see an ageing population as a potential burden on society. They are worried that the proportion of the population of working age will dwindle making it tough to maintain living standards for the dependent older population.

The answer must be revision of the way in which we retire. Instead of ceasing to work at 65 we’ll need to consider a more flexible, gradual retirement process, perhaps opting for part time work or consultancy roles in order to provide the benefit of a lifetime’s work experience.

I for one don’t want to completely stop working as I enjoy the stimulation that my work provides. It has been found that keeping the brain active can help prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease which is enough for me to keep working until I drop.

My plan is to get old disgracefully. As I’ve matured I’ve become increasingly less likely to become embarrassed and much more confident. For example, my singing skills are abysmal but I love to do it so I recently took to the stage at a local talent night. I picked one of my all time favourites (Great Balls of Fire) and tormented the assembled audience to my rendition of this timeless classic. The lovely people in the audience all clapped politely but it was suggested that I shouldn’t give up my day job any time soon.

So I am now compiling what is quickly becoming a very long ‘bucket list’ of other things that I would like to do before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Fortunately for other people there are very few singing performances in the list although I have always wanted to ride through Brighton naked while singing God Save the Queen through a megaphone, but I shall put that one at the bottom of the list.

The post A Long Life Means a Huge Bucket List appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

If you want to blend in, come to London.

The Nurse, having tidied herself up somewhat in a Swiss Cottage public loo, cuts a reasonably inconspicuous figure in the big smelly.

There’s nutters galore here. A middle aged lady limping along with a Margaret Thatcher hair do, filed pointy teeth and a thunderous expression doesn’t stand out too much. Especially in a place like Oxford Street, where the loonies of the world congregate. Stand there long enough and you’ll eventually see every booby on the planet shuffle by.

Right now she’s hanging around outside the Lloyd’s of London building in The City, admiring the funky metal tubing, reminded momentarily and pleasurably of escaped intestines.

Last night she broke into a posh flat along a leafy London street and slept like a baby in the softest bed she’s dreamed in for decades. Then breakfasted well in a stranger’s spotless contemporary kitchen, hooking out a tin of grapefruit, a stray avocado and a chunk of fragrant pink and yellow Battenburg. Fucking tofu-eating Twittering Classes – no hope of fucking bacon.

Tonight she’s walking through the wee small hours, hoping to hit Sussex by Christmas day. At this stage in the game, sleep isn’t an option.

The Nurse imagines she can taste the salty tang of the sea on the westerly breeze but it’s probably wishful thinking. The channel’s siren call always did bring out the best in her. Or the worst, depending on your perspective. If you object to having your skull trepanned when you’re least expecting it, you probably won’t like her much. If, on the other hand, you think carrying out amateur brain surgery on unwitting victims without their permission sounds like fun, she’ll see you in Brighton.

The post Bright lights, big city… The Nurse hits the big smelly appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.

The Nurse doesn’t laugh very often. She’d laugh more if life was fucking funny, but it ain’t. Not for her. Not right now.

Five miles short of the ugly north London sprawl, struggling through dense, winter-dark woodland, she’s just fallen arse over tit into a filthy, stinking pond.

There isn’t a swear word in existence that can describe how she feels right now. So she’s made up a new one. Which, unaccountably given the circumstances, just made her giggle… easier said than done with a mouth full of mud.

Next time you need it, why not try ‘FUNT’? What does it mean? Fat cunt, of course.

Enjoy.

The post The Nurse proposes a new swear word appeared first on Amateur Brain Surgery.