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Meeting of the Parliament 17 May 2012

17 May 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Physical Activity

Robertson, Dennis SNP Aberdeenshire West Watch on SPTV

I am guilty as charged, Presiding Officer. I stand before you as a person who knows that he is overweight and does not take enough exercise, but who is perhaps not totally inactive. I walk to work most days. Perhaps I have no other option, although Mr Q, my dog, is not with me this afternoon—he is out walking.

Obesity is a complex matter, but one that must be put into perspective. We must find out what the causal links are. Yesterday, we discussed the national parenting strategy in the chamber, and that links to part of what I will say this afternoon. As parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and relatives who have young children, we have a responsibility. It is not so many weeks since Easter passed. How many of us indulged in the Easter festivities and went out and bought our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews chocolate? We had alternatives and choices. We could have taken them something healthy. Did we? We know that a healthy option is better for them but, as role models, did we take that step forward? If we are going to make a change, it is our responsibility to make it. We must not be a society of people who just tell others, “This is how you do it”; we must adopt the philosophy ourselves and lead by example.

In my constituency of Aberdeenshire West, we have some of the most wonderful opportunities to keep active. We have fantastic forestry walks, areas where people can ramble, hillwalking, rivers in which we can canoe, areas where we can take our mountain bikes and areas where we can just have leisurely pleasure walks. However, as Nigel Don said, sometimes it is an effort to get there. If the infrastructure is not there to enable people to get there, they might not go.

In Huntly in my constituency, the Deveron Arts organisation had what I think is a unique initiative: a slow marathon, which I took part in. I do not have the medal to prove it, but I did sign up. The marathon involved walking the distance from Huntly to Ethiopia and back. One of the participants in Deveron Arts is from Ethiopia and she came up with the idea that if our schools and people in our community all signed up, we would walk a distance equivalent to 225 marathons. With the number of people who took part, we covered the distance from Huntly to Ethiopia and back. That was a nice initiative for getting children, parents and older members of our community involved, all walking whatever number of miles they wished for the slow marathon. There are nice initiatives out there that people can do that do not take money or a Government to implement.

I congratulate Aberdeenshire Council on endorsing the community sport hubs, which are a way of getting our younger people back into sport—hopefully, at a cost that is affordable to them. Sport, physical activity and exercise alone are not the answer, however. We have heard the stark reality of the statistics, which cannot be addressed by exercise and physical activity alone. As Margaret Burgess concluded in her speech, we need a combination of exercise or activity and the right food in the right amounts. Often, we eat the right food but the quantity that we take is far beyond what we require.

I thank Patricia Ferguson for taking me back to all my yesterdays. She reminded me of when my mother tied the dusters round my feet and asked me to slide up and down the hall to polish the linoleum. I inform the younger members in the chamber that that was before fitted carpets.

I say to Alison Johnstone that in 1976 I was a fit, healthy 20-year-old. I was fit and healthy because I swam three times a week, I ran at Meadowbank stadium, I went abseiling and I canoed. Why did I stop all those activities? I started work and my lifestyle changed. I went into a completely different lifestyle and the time that I had available to do those things changed.

Currently, my lifestyle in the Parliament is different. I do not eat regular meals because the activities in the Parliament—the various events that I attend, and so on—mean that I cannot. However, that is no excuse. The problem is that we all try to find an excuse for why we are overweight, why we do not take exercise and why we are inactive. We need to find solutions and accept the fact that we must be role models for our young children. We should ask them not to do as we say, but to do as we do.

16:17

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Meeting of the Parliament 17 May 2012

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