First, weigh your nanny

This being the time of year when people are hiring new nannies and au pairs, I would like to offer some words of caution: do not hire a fatty. Although it is no doubt offensive and quite possibly illegal to say so, my considerable experience of the fat ones is that they are not very good. When my daughter was about a year old, we hired a great fat girl from Northumberland. I was sceptical about having something so space-consuming and undecorative in our moderately sized house, but held my tongue. I shouldn’t have, for within days of her starting work she revealed that she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Quite apart from the fact that she had lied by omission in her interview, there was the concern that she might decide, according to her religion, that our daughter should not be treated by doctors in the event of an accident or illness. She assured us that she applied the rules only to herself, and we decided to let her stay. This was a mistake, for after another few months she told my wife that she was receiving psychiatric counselling relating to her unhappy family circumstances. Furthermore, she was taking my daughter, who was by now able to understand much of what she heard, along to her therapy sessions. My wife kept this information from me, knowing that I would have chucked the nanny out had I been aware of it. We let the situation drift and she munched her way along moderately competently. But when my son was born and we had a maternity nurse in the house for a few weeks, Mary Pop-it-in-her-mouth became quite seriously unhinged. She threatened the nurse, who reported it to us, and then she confided to my mother that she was feeling suicidal. Two parents of children at the local playgroup telephoned us, unprompted, to say that they were worried about our daughter’s welfare in the hands of the fat Geordie, so obvious were her symptoms.