One of my friends had a patient who came in angry that his prescription wasn’t ready for him.

‘What was it for?’ she asked. To which he replied: ‘An exercise bike.’

Although she tried to explain the limitations of an exercise prescription, and how he might be better off popping into John Lewis this time, the consultation dragged on and also left her wondering – ‘maybe we can prescribe exercise bikes on the NHS?’

Why not? I wouldn’t put anything past the DH. Obesity costs the NHS £5bn, so in an attempt to tackle it they shelled out £329,000 in providing food porn for people to watch on their sofas at home whilst eating crap.

YouTube videos starring Ainsley Harriott have been made to encourage people to eat healthily. Except they’ve only been viewed 2,000 times in total, and given that people who watch cooking programmes never actually cook the food, preferring instead to eat sausages and pretend it’s whatever is on the screen, this isn’t going to work. At £9 per view of a video, it’s the equivalent of me seeing a sex addict in clinic and saying: ‘Oh, I’ve got just the thing for you. Here’s a cinema ticket to go see Shame.’

The only weight question being tackled here is: ‘How do we make government chum fat cats fatter?’ Answer: ‘Run a publicly funded ad campaign thinly disguised as an anti-obesity campaign.’

A spokesperson for the DH said it was ‘unfair to judge it on a “snapshot” of what was going on, as the recipe packs are also used by local supporters including health professionals’. Well I take great offence at being called a local supporter. I wonder how many practices are using these recipe packs, and if they are, what for? Quilling springs to mind.

For now though, the gym equiptment guys don’t have friends in high enough places yet, so we are still able to deal with requests like this with a polite: ‘get on your bike’.