The politics of size ...

... or why fat is strong in Spain.

Yes. I've been putting on the kilos over the past few months. A regular drip-drip of redundancies at work - and overwork in general - seems to have taken its toll. I visited my doctor recently and just before the appointment began saw the off-the-record notes on the computer screen that doctors like to make of their patients, notes which flatly contradict the open and honest relationship they are supposed to have with those under their care.

"Refuses to take even a minimum amount of exercise," ran the notes. That, about a person who walks an hour and a half to work and back.

Instead of typing me as the sort of person who is undeserving of NHS support because of his lifestyle, my GP might be better occupied trying to find out why middle-aged people put on weight.

8000 redundancies since April is one good reason.

Stress and lack of sleep another two.

Yet now I am out here in Spain, I find myself in a completely different world. This is a place of tolerance and unconditional relationship. Everyone says how much better I look than I did a year ago. Three daft days in Disneyland may be part of why I look more relaxed. But the most interesting observations describe me as being "stronger" (más fuerte) - that is to say, fatter in a good way. Here, people are looking to allow me a place I may occupy on my own terms instead of five-a-day exhortations to be something I am not.

Spain is a country where children are tolerated by society and encouraged to stay thus to a point that leads way past adulthood (yes, children remain children quite despite their rank chronology), rather than being brutally resized into nascent office tools at the age of eleven or twelve - or even younger.

And this relationship that a whole culture has with its offspring is repeated and re-experienced with everyone who visits and manages to occupy a space in it.

I am now a visitor.

I have not lived here for six years now, after having lived here for more than sixteen.

Yet I feel that in Spain, even now, I have a greater right to be fatter than I was in a way that Britain simply refuses to allow me to be.

I feel I have a right to be myself here - that being myself is, in fact, enough.

The politics of size is part of what is wrong with modern-day socialism. That overbearing desire to remake a nation for the benefit of the statistics, to resize individuals and their bald aspirations for the benefit of a collective - to redefine through political machination the instincts and ambitions and fires that drive us all to make our most important choices.

The food is so good here. The sense of being loved and approached rather than harangued and forcefully moulded is so right here. The right to just be and live and enjoy the weather instead of fighting it every day makes sense of one's existence in a way that Britain currently never offers.

Our politics, British politics, is like our weather. No climate. No predictability. Just unhappy spells of sunshine and heavy showers, coupled with a coolness of demeanour and a more than occasional storm of disgraceful controversy.

A place where public expressions of anger are quite the not-done-thing. Signs of weakness, even.

Oh, yes. I am a stranger in a land which has become strange to me again. I do not live their (that is to say, Spanish) politics any more, so can bask in the curiously detached non-existence that is all part of being a professional tourist.

But I have always been a kind of professional tourist anyway, even in the land of British socialism - never understanding entirely its rancour and rabid hurt. Perhaps I have assumed that my own sufferings were not located collectively enough for anything I might find distressing to have a wider applicability. Perhaps I have never seen myself as part of a wider collective and thus cannot empathise effectively with the hurt that the British socialist movement has always been so good at expressing.

Thus it is that holidays are good moments for understanding oneself, understanding one's ambitions. The hurly-burly of daily life obscures many truths.

I will continue to explore how I feel about life, as this holiday - a key holiday for me, containing as it will encounters with sadnesses as well as happinesses - develops into an electronic whiteboard of self-revelation.

In the meantime, for me, the politics of size here in Spain mean that I feel happy with myself and how I look at the moment for the first time in far too long.

For the first time in too many months.

Here, my michelines are made to feel at home.

How it would appear that Britain is just too able to make us all ill.