Recently, while waiting to have her hair braided at the Make Me Beautiful Salon she had noticed a magazine article on sleep. There was a famous doctor, she read, who knew all about sleep and had several words of advice for those whose sleep was troubled. This Dr Shapiro had a special clinic just for people who could not sleep and he attached wires to their heads to see what was wrong. Mma Ramotswe was intrigued: there was a picture of Dr Shapiro and a sleepy-looking man and woman, in dishevelled pyjamas, with a tangle of wires coming from their heads. She felt immediately sorry for them: the woman, in particular, looked miserable, like somebody who was being forced to participate in an immensely tedious procedure but who simply could not escape. Or was she miserable because of the hospital pyjamas, in which she was being photographed; she may always have wished to have her photograph in a magazine, and now her wish was to be fulfilled—in hospital pyjamas.

And then she read on, and became outraged. “Fat people often have difficulty in sleeping well,” the article went on. “They suffer from a condition called sleep apnoea, which means that their breathing is interrupted in sleep. Such people are advised to lose weight.”

Advised to lose weight! What has weight to do with it? There were many fat people who seemed to sleep perfectly well; indeed, there was a fat person who often sat under a tree outside Mma Ramotswe’s house and who seemed to be asleep most of the time. Would one advise that person to lose weight? It seemed to Mma Ramotswe as if such advice would be totally unnecessary and would probably simply lead to unhappiness. From being a fat person who was comfortably placed in the shade of a tree, this poor person would become a thin person, with not much of a bottom to sit upon, and probably unable to sleep as a result.

And what about her own case? She was a fat lady—traditionally built—and yet she had no difficulty in getting the required amount of sleep. It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas as to how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.