Yesterday morning, on my way to a meeting at GM’s Millbrook test facility, I popped into Toddington Services for a full English. Walking in, dribbling at the thought of bacon, eggs, fried bread and black pudding, I noticed a ‘Spare Tyre Check’, and made the mistake of investigating. It was a free driver check-up, inspired by Commercial Motor’s Health Check campaign, and aimed squarely at truck drivers.
“The idea behind the spare tyre check,” explains independent nurse and organiser Jane DeVille-Almond, “is to see how many drivers have metabolic syndrome.” This apparently means seeing if drivers have dangerously high cholesterol, blood sugar levels, blood pressure and waist measurements. If the results are bad in three out of four, than there’s a good chance you’re going to suffer from Type Two diabetes. In fact, during the last couple of months of offering this free check-up at Moto service stations, she has discovered that 17% of drivers do have it. This really wasn’t what I wanted to hear while waiting for my results.
But luckily I got the all-clear – well kind of. My cholesterol, blood pressure and blood/sugar are all fine, but apparently I’m fat! Needless to say this came as a total shock to me.
Jane has had to break this news to quite a few drivers over the past few months, some of which were even bigger than me! She always asks people to guess their waist measurement before she measures it, and rarely does anyone get it right. I underestimated it by 2 inches, but apparently some bloke was 19 inches out! Presumably his wife must buy his trousers for him.
Jane’s Spare Tyre Checks come to an end on July 17, which I think is a terrible shame. She is keen to carry on, but without funding it’s not going to be feasible. So, anybody out there think they can help out? Maybe even lend her a van so that she can take her valuable service to all of the UK’s truck stops? If so please email her on deville.almond@virgin.net
In the end I decided to skip breakfast yesterday.

Caption 1: MT’s fat technical editor gets his pulse checked.

Caption 2: This is what human fat looks like. I'm not going to tell you how many of these I'm carrying around with me.