I HAVE had some difficulty this week in deciding what to buy my partner for her birthday, but cheered myself up by contemplating the terrible trouble the husband of irritating sanctimonious multi-millionaire TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith must have when it comes to furnishing the healthy and wealthy one with gifts come her annual big day.
One of the more unusual items I happened across in my search for the perfect gift was a Viking smell cube, which allows its owner to obtain a whiff of ye olde worlde poo whenever they feel the need.
Apparently the cube also enables the proprietor to experience the pong of Viking farmyards, fish and, strangely enough, molten iron. Well I never, get thee down the Viking accessory shop pronto.
A quick Google of 'Viking dietary habits' furnishes me with the information that the Norse-types largely existed on agricultural products grown on their own farms, meat, cereals, dairy products, vegetables, herbs, the eggs of sea birds, and wild fruits and plants. The most common method of food preparation was boiling.
Nowhere does it mention crisps, sweets, chips, burgers or fry-ups. Though ale was, apparently, the staple drink for residents of all ages.
Taking away the alcohol, the foodstuffs available would have made it extremely difficult for the average Viking to consume today's recommended daily intake of 2,500 calories. And it has to be remembered that Erik, Noggin the Nog and their pals worked their bodies a lot harder than most of us do today.
What I'm trying to say is that it doesn't take a genius or Gillian "Laughing all the way to the bank" McKeith — who, on the back of sniffing the poo of over-weight unhealthy types, has books and her own range of food on the market — to tell us that Viking poo probably smelt somewhat better than today's.
Bolton Wanderers manager Sam Allardyce was right to say we are a fat and lazy nation, and this is unlikely to change.
These days, even those of us who claim to eat healthily, in reality do no such thing. For temptation is all around us. People are forever offering chocolate, crisps, cakes, kebabs, deep-fried chocolate bars and chips, and inviting us to pop into the pub for a quick one. We go home believing all we have eaten is a salad sandwich, when we have probably consumed a couple of thousand calories of rubbish and swilled it all down with 10 cups of vending machine "coffee".
And when we do eat chips, crisps or a bar of chocolate, these days, more often than not, we're 'larging it'. Thanks, of course, to the Americans and our eagerness to replicate the actions of the fast food nation in any way possible.
Despite thousands of years of development, millions of pounds spent on research, endless books and TV programmes informing us that we are what we eat, we display less common sense when it comes to what we shove into our bodies than we did way back in the days of yore and Jorvik.
Is it our desire to lead hedonistic lifestyles that means we can't control the amount or what we eat? Is it stupidity? Or simply greed?
Whatever the truth is — more than likely a combination of all the above — I suspect Gillian McKeith's TV poo sniffing job would have been far more pleasant prior to the formation of the lethal partnership of television and takeaways.
However, a lack of electric would have denied her the TV career and resulting millions she now undoubtedly has.
Me, I'm still searching for that birthday gift (one day remaining). Wonder what McKeith's husband got her? What do you buy the woman who has everything? A Viking smell cube, perhaps.