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Tuesday - March 24, 2009

Overweight and claim thousands in benefits - can’t work. Who do they blame? Anyone but themselves

THERE ARE 14 POUNDS TO ONE STONE. SO YOU GUYS CAN WORK IT OUT IN POUNDS FOR THESE HIPPOS.

Naturally their weight is the taxpayer problem. What else would we expect?
I wish em luck and hope somehow they’ll get themselves out of this MESS. I hope for their sake they can finally get help. But it doesn’t look good, does it?

This has to be my final post for today .... will try my best to catch up on emails tomorrow if I can.
Thanks.

They weigh 80 stone, claim thousands in benefits - and can’t work. Who do they blame? Anyone but themselves
By JENNY JOHNSTON
Last updated at 10:21 AM on 24th March 2009

DAILY MAIL

This family say they are unable to work because they are too fat. They blame their GP, the Government, even Simon Cowell - but not themselves

There’s something a little surreal about listening to a family with a combined weight of nearly 80 stone falling over themselves to explain how little they eat. ‘Some days I barely eat at all,’ declares Emma Chawner, daughter of the house and, at 17 stone, its lightest occupant.

‘I don’t have breakfast most days. Sometimes I don’t have lunch either, and might only have a salad roll for tea. I’m always eating lettuce and apples and stuff.’

Her dad Philip (’22 stone, but I used to be 26’) nods in agreement. ‘I’m the same. Cornflakes for breakfast, a roll for lunch and one of those microwave meals for my dinner.’

A Weightwatchers one, Dad!’ interjects elder daughter Samantha (circa 18 stone). For her part, Samantha says she ‘is always eating salads’.

Only Mum Audrey (20ish stone, but understandably reluctant to be specific) seems off message. She has been asleep on the sofa for most of our interview, but wakes up in time to raise the issue of Easter eggs.

She points out that her girls get one each every year. Both leap in with clarifications. ‘Only a little one, Mum,’ says Emma. ‘Tiny. Like those little mini eggs,’ says Samantha, holding her thumb and finger about two millimetres apart.’

She admits there might be crisps and chocolate in the kitchen cupboards, ‘but they aren’t for us. They are for our niece. You have to have those things in the house for children, don’t you?’

Now a cynic might say that there is some overegging of the pudding going on here, so to speak. And the little trio of bottles standing by the armchair of the Chawner family living room, is certainly suspect. There is Lucozade, tomato ketchup and, for good measure, the heartburn remedy Gaviscon, a veritable holy trinity of overconsumption, surely?

Normally, it would be of no consequence what the Chawners eat, or whether their ample girths reflect their diet. But the family’s eating habits - indeed entire living habits - became a matter of national debate recently when they granted an interview in a weekly gossip magazine about how their weight has been a barrier to any of them finding work.

‘Too fat to work’, screamed the headline, while the article called them real-life Tellytubbies and accused them pretty much of sponging off the State while slobbing round on the sofa all day, eating pies.

Now, of course, they are declaring misrepresentation in extremis. They don’t eat pies, apparently. In fact, the way they tell it, the family budgie would struggle to survive on what they do actually eat. And the raking in of public funds? Nonsense!

‘They said we got £22,000 a year in benefits, but Mum totted it up and it isn’t quite that much,’ says Emma.

How much do you get, then? ‘I can’t remember, but it isn’t that much. All the figures were wrong, anyway. They said Dad was 24 stone, but that was rubbish. You are 22 stone, aren’t you Dad?’

The facts that aren’t in contention are these. There are four adults living in this Blackburn terrace home. None of them work, so their rent and living expenses are covered by the State. They are all medically obese.

s their size relevant to their reliance on benefits? They say yes. Both adults claim they have weight-related health issues which have rendered them disabled.

Philip, 53, suffers from diabetes and heart problems. Audrey, 57, has asthma and epilepsy (which no doctor would link to obesity, but she seems convinced that there is a connection).

Their daughters have health issues of their own, despite being only 21 and 19. Emma is already on medication for problems with acid reflux. Samantha claims she is losing the sight in one eye. ‘I’ve got a mole behind my eye which is growing. It might lead to cancer.’

She points out, however, that she is not on any medication. ‘Yet!’ insists her father, with an astonishing glee in his voice.

The girls claim they are both fit and well, despite their size. Samantha insists that she goes to the gym. Both trained as hairdressers, but have never had a paid job. Why? Again, it’s a matter of size.

‘People don’t want to employ large hairdressers, simple as that,’ says Samantha. ‘They won’t say it to your face, but that’s how it is. I’ve been in salons and done good interviews, but look around and it’s all skinny minnies. We’re discriminated against.

‘We’re the victims in all of this. It’s not our fault we can’t work. We’ve been accused of sitting around watching telly all day, well, it’s just not true.

‘We’ve both applied for hundreds of jobs. It’s not our fault no one wants to employ fat people. Someone should be helping us, not accusing us.’

The issues thrown up here are about as controversial as they come, so it’s not surprising that people have been getting het up about the Chawners, and all they represent.

What is surprising, though, is the level of vitriol they have inspired.

When I arrive, I walk straight into evidence of it. The family laptop is open on the dining table and there is an air of hysteria in the room. Emma has fled upstairs, in tears, after discovering a message on her Facebook site saying, ‘I hope you die’.

Her sister Samantha is stomping about, arms flailing, shouting: ‘I’m not having this. It’s disgusting.’

It’s all too much for Mum. ‘If Emma has one of her panic attacks, we are done for,’ says Audrey, raising her arm but letting it flop back down. Philip’s attempts to intervene seem equally ineffective. ‘How do you send a message back?’ he asks, peering at the keyboard. ‘I’m not sure how this works.’

What’s immediately striking is how stationary Audrey and Philip are amid all the commotion. In fact, during the 90 minute interview that follows neither of them moves once from their respective chairs. Just before Audrey actually falls asleep there is a curious moment when she tries to pass one of her daughters a magazine, but cannot reach, so gives up.

‘We love TV,’ Philip had told the magazine. ‘It’s on from the moment we get up. Often I’m so tired from watching TV I have to have a nap.’

Still the girls provide enough animation for both of them. Both keep leaving the room, for fag breaks, and to have whispered discussions about future media deals. There is a documentary maker present during the interview.

See More Below The Fold

Is their size relevant to their reliance on benefits? They say yes. Both adults claim they have weight-related health issues which have rendered them disabled.

Philip, 53, suffers from diabetes and heart problems. Audrey, 57, has asthma and epilepsy (which no doctor would link to obesity, but she seems convinced that there is a connection).

Their daughters have health issues of their own, despite being only 21 and 19. Emma is already on medication for problems with acid reflux. Samantha claims she is losing the sight in one eye. ‘I’ve got a mole behind my eye which is growing. It might lead to cancer.’

She points out, however, that she is not on any medication. ‘Yet!’ insists her father, with an astonishing glee in his voice.

The girls claim they are both fit and well, despite their size. Samantha insists that she goes to the gym. Both trained as hairdressers, but have never had a paid job. Why? Again, it’s a matter of size.

‘People don’t want to employ large hairdressers, simple as that,’ says Samantha. ‘They won’t say it to your face, but that’s how it is. I’ve been in salons and done good interviews, but look around and it’s all skinny minnies. We’re discriminated against.

‘We’re the victims in all of this. It’s not our fault we can’t work. We’ve been accused of sitting around watching telly all day, well, it’s just not true.

‘We’ve both applied for hundreds of jobs. It’s not our fault no one wants to employ fat people. Someone should be helping us, not accusing us.’

The issues thrown up here are about as controversial as they come, so it’s not surprising that people have been getting het up about the Chawners, and all they represent.

What is surprising, though, is the level of vitriol they have inspired.

When I arrive, I walk straight into evidence of it. The family laptop is open on the dining table and there is an air of hysteria in the room. Emma has fled upstairs, in tears, after discovering a message on her Facebook site saying, ‘I hope you die’.

Her sister Samantha is stomping about, arms flailing, shouting: ‘I’m not having this. It’s disgusting.’

It’s all too much for Mum. ‘If Emma has one of her panic attacks, we are done for,’ says Audrey, raising her arm but letting it flop back down. Philip’s attempts to intervene seem equally ineffective. ‘How do you send a message back?’ he asks, peering at the keyboard. ‘I’m not sure how this works.’

What’s immediately striking is how stationary Audrey and Philip are amid all the commotion. In fact, during the 90 minute interview that follows neither of them moves once from their respective chairs. Just before Audrey actually falls asleep there is a curious moment when she tries to pass one of her daughters a magazine, but cannot reach, so gives up.

‘We love TV,’ Philip had told the magazine. ‘It’s on from the moment we get up. Often I’m so tired from watching TV I have to have a nap.’

Still the girls provide enough animation for both of them. Both keep leaving the room, for fag breaks, and to have whispered discussions about future media deals. There is a documentary maker present during the interview.

Oddly, he is the one who offers the suggestion that the best way to deal with spiteful online messages might be to ignore them, rather than to stoke the fires yet further. They all gaze at him, uncomprehending.

When Emma is finally ready to talk, her story comes out through sniffles.’ This has been happening all my life,’ she says, with more than a touch of melodrama. ‘I haven’t talked about this before, but I will now because I want people to know what we have been through.

‘All my life we’ve been persecuted and treated like freaks. We haven’t done anything to anyone, but everyone is against us. When we lived in Bristol we had paint daubed on the house. That’s when the Tellytubby thing started.

‘Then in our next place we were attacked. Then we got evicted as people just made things up about us. The X Factor just made things worse.’
For that, rightly or wrongly, many will rejoice.

Oh yes, The X Factor. This week’s sharp dose of public humiliation wasn’t the first for the Chawners. Two years ago, young Emma - convinced that she was the next Amy Winehouse - auditioned for Mr Cowell and Co. It was something of a disaster. He told the world she was rubbish, basically, and her family were as deluded as she was for supporting her.

Her angry Dad - who had made the unfortunate dress Emma was wearing to audition in - confronted Cowell. The debacle would be something most families would want to forget. But the Chawners aren’t most families.

‘The X Factor was the best thing that happened to me because I met so many celebrities through it,’ says Emma, nodding to a picture of her with Eamonn Holmes on top of the TV.

‘But it was also the worst thing that happened, because people feel they can say anything about me now. The worst thing is that my agent sorted out that interview. Well, I’m done with her now. From now on I’m doing it all on my own. Well, me and my family, obviously. We’ll show them.

Oh dear. Where do you start? Perhaps fittingly, the Chawner family story began in the pages of a newspaper. Philip and Audrey met through a small ad. ‘I’d always been shy with women, and just looked after my mother, but when she died, a neighbour put an advert in the paper for me,’ he explains. ‘Audrey was one of the ones who replied.’

They married 23 years ago, and had three children in quick succession (their oldest son, who is also overweight, no longer lives with the family), and insist that there was nothing unusual about the early years.

‘I was working as a lorry driver, away from home quite a bit. Audrey was a housewife. Once the health problems set in, though, things changed.’

We are going back some 15 years now. Philip - always hefty, ‘but not massively so’ - was diagnosed with diabetes and was forced to quit his job. It seems extreme, but he is adamant. ‘I was falling asleep at the wheel because of my medication, so there was no option. I didn’t want to not work. Actually, I missed it. I still miss meeting people, and, of course, I miss the money.’

Audrey hadn’t worked since the Eighties, when she used to help out in a local riding school. By then, she couldn’t take over as the breadwinner as her health had also deteriorated.

‘She had a fall when she was younger, and had epilepsy as a result of it,’ says Philip. ‘For a while we ran a flower and plant business, but she started to have fits, so that had to go.

‘People think we just decided to opt out of work, but that wasn’t the case. By then, I’d been diagnosed with heart problems. I didn’t have a choice. Now I can’t walk far. Or stand for long periods. The doctors say I’ve only got four or five years to live.’

Emma and Samantha cannot remember either parent working, and look on, bemused, as I ask questions about whether Philip was ever offered retraining, or ever considered that he could work in another field.

‘But driving is all I know,’ he says. ‘What else could I do?’

Whatever, the ill health of the parents - exacerbated by their ever-increasing sizes - defined family life. With their parents unable to walk more than short distances, or do household chores, the girls took over. ‘Mum never cooked. She can’t cook,’ says Emma breezily.

‘We’d come home and she’d have burnt the toast and left the beans on so they were stuck to the pan. Or she’d leave the gas on.

‘The big problem was that she has no sense of smell so couldn’t tell. It was safer for her not to bother trying.’

Did they ever think it was odd that their parents didn’t work?

‘No, why would we? They were disabled. They couldn’t. It wasn’t their fault.’ It’s a phrase that must be employed a dozen times during this interview (outnumbered only by the mention of gastric bands, which seems another obsession).

Work and benefits aside, there is clearly an issue here about the burden placed on the health system by families like the Chawners. Has their GP ever suggested that they lose weight, for their health’s sake?

‘Not really. What would be the point?’ says Philip. ‘It’s not our fault that we are this size. OK, so they have sent me to a dietician, but what can they do? It’s all in the genes.’

Emma agrees. ‘It’s the way we are. Some people are born thin, some fat. We’ve tried everything but nothing works.’

Pinning down what diets they have tried is pretty nigh impossible, though. ‘All of them,’ is all Emma will say. WeightWatchers? ‘Yes, but the meals, not the classes and all that.’ Calorie counting? ‘For a week or so. Nothing works, I tell you. I can’t do it. They don’t work, diets. The only time we lost weight was when we were living in our car for seven weeks. Then, it just fell off.’

This seems to contradict the claim that ‘I never eat much anyway’, but we must move on. This living in the car is another curious business - one, again, that ‘wasn’t our fault’.

After a falling out with a neighbour, allegedly over Emma doing karaoke at 3am, they were taken to court and lost their right to council accommodation. They spent a while in a hostel, but ended up bedding down in the car, along with their dog and bird. Was it a big car? Not big enough, clearly.

‘It’s disgraceful that we had to do that. We’ve got Asbos now,’ says Samantha. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong. It was just another case of everyone having it in for us. This woman just convinced the courts that she was right, but it was a vendetta. We were blameless.’

Philip nods. It must have been a devastating time, I say. Whatever the circumstances, to find yourself - head of a family - living in a car, must be a blow to a man’s ego, pride, sense of worth?

He looks blankly. ‘It wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t my fault.’

That this family needs help is obvious. What’s infuriating is that they seem to be looking in all the wrong places. We talk about their family doctor - surely the man on the frontline - and they say he is a waste of space.

‘He’s rubbish,’ says Samantha. ‘He’s new and he can’t even remember what tablets Dad is on.’

Has anyone else been able to help? Job agencies? Careers advisers? Social workers? More blank looks. ‘Jeremy Kyle said he was going to help,’ says Samantha of the daytime TV host who has made a career out of shock, confessional TV. ‘He was going to get us on, with experts and that, but it didn’t happen. I can’t remember why. I think we went on Trisha instead.’

But Jeremy Kyle isn’t in the business of helping, is he? He makes entertaining, car-crash TV. ‘Yeah, but.’ says Emma, and words suddenly fail her.

What will happen to the Chawners now? All roads unfortunately point again to Jeremy Kyle, perhaps via GMTV. The girls are quite excited about the fact that the producers have been on the phone, talking encouragingly about gastric bands.

Philip seems delighted for them. ‘I’d have had one myself, but they say my heart wouldn’t be up to the op.’

Odd that anyone thinks a gastric band would help, if their food intake is really as tiny as they say, but who are we to judge?

If a TV company is willing to foot the bill, the taxpayer won’t have to.

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

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Posted by peiper

on 03/24/2009 at 12:12 PM
Filed Under: • Health-Medicine • Odd-Strange • UK •
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