With the heatwave due to end this week, it looks as if we’re not going to break the all-time Irish heatwave record, set almost exactly 50 years ago.

The official definition of a heatwave is five or more consecutive days when the mercury tops 25 degrees, and the last time that happened was in August 1976. All childhood summers are somehow recalled as endless and sunny, but for those of us who were schoolkids back then, the summer of ’76 really did seem to go on forever. 

Out of nostalgia for that blissfully infinite summer, given the inevitable comparisons with our current hot spell, I found myself looking back at old newspaper and RTE archive footage from beaches and parks around the country, trawling them for glimpses of the decade that fashion forgot, but also to marvel at the differences to our urban landscapes that half a century has wrought.

The clothes may look dated, and the shops, streets and parklands have a quaintly bygone air, but there’s something else you can’t help noticing in comparison with any modern street or beach scene: nobody is overweight. 

The children playing with their buckets and spades are uniformly slim, active and healthy-looking, and the adults sunning themselves behind their big striped windbreakers (the one constant on any Irish beach since old God’s time) are also noticeably average in shape and size. 

One picture shows a young brother and sister frying an egg on a Dublin pavement – today, it’d probably be a stack of chicken nuggets, a couple of burgers and a few melted marshmallows to follow.

When you brought a picnic to the beach, in the 70s, it was a tinfoil packet of ham or tomato sandwiches and a flask of tea. 

Somehow, we survived without having flagons of water welded to our hands at all times, and a ‘snack’ was something that American kids like The Brady Bunch plucked from their giant fridges, or else it was a small chocolate bar in a purple wrapper that you bought with your pocket money once a week.

There might occasionally have been a packet of Marietta biscuits to go with the sandwiches for the beach outing, but that was strictly a Sunday treat and you wouldn’t see another biscuit for a week. If you were hungry between meals, you were warned about ‘ruining your appetite’, and told to go out and play.

To modern youngsters, I guess that sounds like child abuse, and certainly does seem rather strict and joyless. Then again, it also meant that we didn’t have dangerously obese primary school children, we didn’t have uniform retailers and school desk manufacturers having to increase the size of their products to accommodate overweight kids, and the health authorities didn’t have to provide weight loss medication to 12-year-olds with middle-aged morbidities.

According to weekend reports, obese children as young as 12 will be prescribed weight-loss injections to prevent them developing serious medical conditions more usually associated with unfit adults five times their age. 

High blood pressure, high cholesterol, insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes will be among the conditions to be treated by the drugs, because the earlier the onset of some of these diseases the more aggressive they tend to be. 

Dr Robbie Kernan, a consultant paediatrician at Children’s Health Ireland, warned that a child who is seriously overweight at 12 is four times more likely to suffer ‘a major cardiac event’ – a heart attack, in laypersons’ language – by the age of 40. 

His clinic is currently treating up to 300 children with obesity and the number being prescribed a drug like Wegovy, which works by suppressing appetite, is on the increase.

Until recently, though, none of these drugs were available on the medical card or the drug payment scheme, and the cost of around €200 a month was prohibitive for many families. 

Since February, patients can access a daily injection called liraglutide, but as a weekly dose, Wegovy is obviously a more convenient option and so the HSE is planning to introduce it for children who meet their requirements.

Dr Kernan says they’re ‘reluctant’ to prescribe these drugs for under-12s, while their bones and muscles are still developing, but in the UK there are hundreds of obese four-year-olds, some of whom are as heavy as children of ten, on weight loss jabs. 

The choice between limiting their physical development with the drug, or seeing them die ‘decades too soon’ through obesity, is clearly an horrendous medical dilemma that previous generations of paediatricians never had to face.

Out of the average Irish classroom of 30, according to current statistics, there will be six who are obese. So why have we got so many primary schoolchildren who are dangerously overweight? 

That all-purpose villain, the smartphone, definitely plays a role. Litigious parents, who’ve made schools fearful of encouraging children to run and play at lunchtime in case someone falls and cuts their knee, also share the blame. 

And highly-processed convenience foods, ready-meals and takeaways, stuffed with salt, sugar and fats to make them all the more tempting, are the main culprits.

But Wegovy won’t make children more active. It won’t make them put down their smartphones. It won’t make pizzas and hotdogs and fizzy drinks any more expensive or difficult to access. 

It will simply make children eat less and, for all the myriad explanations we hear for obesity – metabolism issues, genetic predispositions, emotional problems, socio-economic factors, heavy bones – the success of these drugs has made this simple fact difficult to dispute: if you eat less, you lose weight.

That applies to children as much as to adults, and those parents who blame their kids’ obesity on multiple factors, while stuffing their cupboards with treats, snacks and sugary drinks, and spending at least a tenner a pop on regular takeaways, will see those excuses crumble as the jabs kick in.

It’s not complicated. The best weight loss exercise any of us can take is pushing ourselves away from the table.

The World Cup final interval act was a bit like one of those weird dreams where all kinds of random people turn up in the strangest circumstances doing the oddest things – Tom Cruise reading a poem, Ferris Bueller on a day off sitting in the crowd with Carrie from Sex and the City, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy warbling a duet, and Madonna doing the splits in skimpy hot pants – alright, maybe that bit wasn’t so odd, but you get the picture. 

Still, at least it made for a bit of action on the pitch since, to this fairweather fan, the main attraction was dull as ditchwater, and I gave up long before the extra-time goal won it for Spain. The interval act should be a breather between two exciting halves, not the highlight of the day – it made me long for the calming respite of the Artane Boys Band.

I was an air fryer advocate long before they became the must-have kitchen gadget – I bought my first one in 2011, shortly after they came on the market, a Phillips model that cost me all of €180 at the time but gave sterling service until it died last year. And its replacement, supposedly the best on the market from a trendy brand, isn’t a patch on the original, even if it did take several minutes to pre-heat. But it turns out it’s been a deathtrap all along – according to new research they shouldn’t be placed against a wall, where my trusty old Phillips served out its days, and must be cleaned regularly or they’ll burst into flames. Considering the long and productive life of benign neglect that mine enjoyed, I might just take that with a pinch of salt and a small dash of olive oil.

This is why we can’t have nice things – e-scooters are in danger of being banned because parents are buying them for underage children, and now disposable barbecues are for the chop because irresponsible users are leaving them smouldering and setting off wildfires. E-scooters are perfectly safe if used legally, by adults in bike lanes, with helmets and lights, and probably take lots of cars off the road. And portable barbecues are handy and fun, they elevate a beach-side picnic from curly sandwiches to char-grilled chicken legs. It shouldn’t be too hard to make sure they’re fully extinguished after use – if you’re by a lake or a seaside, there’s a really obvious solution to hand – but since that’d require a modicum of consideration for others, these numpties have spoiled it for everyone.