E Jane Dickson: Burgers and other class-A drugs

Big Macs make you fat. The alarming news, from research scientists at Rockefeller University, New York, comes as a deep blow to all of us who assumed that, as long as you ate the gherkin, a Big Mac constituted a nutritionally balanced meal.

Not only does fast food make you fat; the burgers are doing it deliberately. Lab tests on rats have proved that foods high in fat and sugar can cause biochemical changes comparable to the addictive reactions that follow repeated use of drugs such as heroin and cocaine, turning innocent consumers into slavering junk-food junkies.

The implications of the study are sinister and far-reaching. How long before our streets are terrorised by lardy-arsed addicts holding old ladies at knifepoint (or threatening to sit on them) for the price of their next Meal Deal? Will newspapers be crammed with cabinet ministers confessing their youthful indiscretion with a McFlurry? I fear the thin end of a wedge. We could wake up tomorrow and find out that doughnuts are not a health food.

I hate to spoil the lawyers' fun - even now, a class-action lawsuit, similar to that against tobacco companies, is being prepared against McDonald's - but it seems to me that we might put aside our belching indignation for a moment and consider the less palatable notion of personal responsibility. It is conceivable that some older smokers lit up their first fag without being aware of the health risk, but nobody in our diet-obsessed culture can possibly have escaped the intelligence that sugar and fat are not our friends.

I hold no brief for the McDonald's corporation. But it seems to me that you can't legislate against human frailty, and it is time we got our desperately confused notions of blame and responsibility sorted out. Look at poor old George Best. The same newspapers that portray Ronald McDonald as the seducer of helpless overeaters come on like Lady Bracknell when it comes to Bestie's lapse from sobriety. To lose one liver to alcohol, they grudgingly admit, is unfortunate. To lose two looks like carelessness and deserves all the opprobrium we can muster.

Yet Best, in the grip of an addiction arguably more terrible than a cheeseburger habit, has never tried to blame anyone but himself. Drunk or sober, Best can teach us a thing or two about dignity. I hope he beats his demons. The rest of us should come to terms with the hard truth about having our cake and eating it. We cannot eat cake or burgers or even a low-cal Chicken McSandwich and have the moral high ground on obesity. But at least the choice is ours.

What you can tell about a man from his books

What can they be putting in the claret at Cambridge these days? No sooner is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking, spotted calculating the resistible force of a lap dancer called Tiger in Stringfellows than we hear about the fellow of Jesus College forced to resign over his extracurricular activity with call girls.

Peter Smith, a philosophy lecturer, had, it turned out, been moonlighting as an external examiner for a local escort agency, reviewing the girls for a punters' website. "It was a bit difficult," said "Lucy", one of the girls sent round to the college for appraisal. "There were all these books around."

I think I know what she means. You can tell a lot about a man from his bookshelves. As a student, when invited back to a boy's room for sherry, I was always careful to sweep the room for suspect texts. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance showed lack of originality in 1979, but the situation was still negotiable. Any well-thumbed volumes by Tolkien, on the other hand, and I was out of there.

But what can have so alarmed Lucy? Certainly, it can't be easy for an escort to get on with her work in the stern shade of Immanuel Kant, who famously, if less than snappily, declared, "The surrender of one person to another for the satisfaction of sexual desire in return for money is the depth of infamy." Nor is there much to encourage a working girl in C S Lewis ("Lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.")

If only she had thought to scan the "20th-century (French)" shelf, the call girl - and, for that matter, her scholarly companion - might have found something more inspiring in the writings of J P Sartre. "If I became a philosopher," said the wall-eyed Lothario of the Left Bank, "if I have too keenly seized this fame for which I'm still waiting, it has all been to seduce women, basically." Plus, as they say on the Boul' Mich', ça change.

Signs of the times

The French may lead the field in seduction; Germans may beat us to the sun loungers; but the British are the best in Europe at making rude signs at one another. A new driving survey suggests that we are more likely to flick two fingers at someone who annoys us on the road than we are to swear at them. Unfortunately, the survey doesn't record the growing incidence of the sign used by women drivers to male aggressors - a measuring mime indicating something of pitifully slender girth - but my driving friends tell me it does the trick every time.

I have always favoured the belt-and-braces approach when it comes to swearing, backing up the verbals with body language. As a teenager, I was given invaluable advice by an elegant old lady of my acquaintance. "Never call a man an arse," she cautioned me; "always say 'arsehole'. It leaves the mouth in a more attractive shape." Try it in the mirror. It works.