SIZE DOESN'T MATTER

But bigger is still better to many, it seems. Bigger cars, bigger planes, bigger skyscrapers, bigger salaries – and so it goes on. Some of the cars cruising round Brighton with huge wheels and cowcatcher bumpers resemble tanks. The world is the same size as it ever was but we are defying gravity, as it were, in our architecture and ambitions. 

People are also obsessed by personal height with the Danes being the global leader in the race of giants.  But there was a useful corrective in a song in the film “The 7th Dwarf”, a German cartoon film from 2014:

“Size doesn't matter whatever you do 

and even if  the world causes too much stress 

please don't forget you're doing more with less 

your life will be better when size doesn't matter”

But try saying that to my charismatic and compact 14 year old grandson dwarfed by his 6 foot elder brother and try consoling him when a beautiful girl claimed she adored him but couldn’t go out with him because he was too short. (Breaking news: he’s recently put on several inches, is now about the same height as me and recently he’s stopped talking about height.)

  

Nonetheless have you noticed increasing interest in height amongst world leaders and the remarkable similarity in how tall a leader is ? Rishi Sunak nearly 5 feet 6 inches, Emmanuel Macron just over 5 feet 6 inches, Vladimir Putin 5 feet 6 inches, Olav Scholz, 5 feet 6 inches, Volodymyr Zelensky 5 feet 6 inches.

(Oh and George Santos 5 feet 8 inches or whatever he says it is.)

I recall a photograph of me when as an 17 year old Captain of Cricket at school I was leading the team out flanked by two amazing quick bowlers each nearly a foot taller than me. I was a curious sight with two killers at my side – rather like a mafia don.

Right now in the absence of anything other than the usual accusations of Tory kleptocracy, Rishi’s diminutive stature is dominating the cartoonists and some in the labour party who are playing the dwarf card. I’ve yet to hear cries of conviction in anyone shouting “stand up!” at PMQs when he stands up to speak. But already “is he up to the job?” barbs have started.

The reality is, of course, what matters is not how tall you are but how big you seem to be. Tom Cruise seems big, athletic and domineering and ready to take on Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet he’s 7 inches shorter than Arnie, in fact he’s even shorter than Julia Roberts.

Of course size doesn’t really matter except perhaps when you come to killing machines but even then as the Vietnamese and Taliban showed, cunning, courage and determination matter much more. 

Let’s stop being macho males and empty headed thugs. Talent was and is the only thing that really matters. Assemble  the most talented people in the world and they’ll tend to be average or slightly below average in height. But as we notice it’s amongst men that obsession with height predominates although to be fair my mother who was on the diminutive side rather aggressively insisted her height was “5 feet and HALF AN INCH!!”

 Maybe something is changing. It isn’t always the biggest football clubs  that are doing the best. It isn’t the tallest skyscrapers that are the most desirable. The biggest investments are often the ones most regretted. Those dire words “economies of scale” are often accompanied ironically by the word “downsizing”.

Back to those German Dwarves:

“your life will be better when size doesn't matter.”