I spent all my days on my recent visit to Chicago in a bubble of happiness and grinning with delight, yet there was one moment when I came near to weeping. We were on a bus and a pretty young woman tried to sit in a seat near us. She was unable to squeeze her thigh into the seat because of the armrest, so she stayed with half her thigh stranded in the air.

I have no doubt that other American cities are no different and Chicago also had plenty of slim and normal sized people, but to someone from another country, the vast number of over-sized people was a shocking sight. After a while you adjust and normal looks thin, fat looks normal and obese just looks fat. Yet every day watching so many people struggling to move around made me sad.