Mounjaro

When I wrote here 30 years ago that ‘Middlesbrough, once renowned for building bridges for Sydney Harbour and the White Nile, is now better known as the north-east capital of motorised crime’, I earned a rebuke from the town’s evening paper under the headline ‘Slur in toffs’ magazine’. But I wasn’t wrong – there was an outbreak of ‘ram-raiding’ at the time – and it was Rod Liddle, writing about his teenage years there in the 1970s, who compared the place with Mogadishu. My point is that the current lawlessness in Middlesbrough is nothing new. It’s endemic, it goes back decades, and it gives rise to two potent questions.

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionised weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic or Mounjaro might appear to have nothing in common with artificial intelligence, but both phenomena have created a sensation that we’re entering an era of accelerating and uncontrollable change. Alas, he screwed it up. He had someone inject him with a megadose, puked all night and then lay in bed for days ‘staring at a white ceiling thinking nothing’, not only feeling no urge to eat but also no ‘desire for anything’.

One of the drawbacks of being on the jabs is that you can lose muscle mass as well as body fat. I’ve been taking Mounjaro for about six months and, apart from the expense, I have few complaints. I’ve lost about 20lb and generally feel healthier. But Caroline insists I combine the weight loss with lifting weights, so I’ve been making regular visits to a gym in White City. I hear horror stories from gym users about people treating the space as if it’s their personal film set I used to be a bit of a gym rat in my twenties and thirties, but marriage and children, not to mention a full workload, put paid to that. Not much has changed in the last quarter century, save for one glaring difference: everyone is constantly on their phones.