It's almost a miracle I can make it to a computer to post this blog, writes David Fickling. My lungs are shot from the peasouper smog that smothers old London town. My waistline has been bloated by endless chip suppers and cups of piping hot tea. My idea of exercise is a game of shove ha'penny. And my teeth are a broken mess of yellow crockery exuding the stench of the grave.
At least, that's the image of the average Brit that a lot of Americans seem to have, judging by the US reaction to this week's news that people in the UK are healthier than their American counterparts.
The amount of transatlantic thigh-slapping generated by this story leaves me a bit crestfallen. One suspects there wouldn't be quite the level of outraged horror if it was revealed that, say, the Swedes were the more healthy nation.
But then the Swedes are associated with Abba, willowy blondes and mixed saunas, whereas the main British cultural footprints in the US belong to pallid fleshy types like Lou and Andy.
The distinctive feature of the US response is an amused incredulity that Britain, of all countries, could ever be held up as a paragon of health.
Even the sober National Geographic couldn't resist a dig about chips and pints of ale, alongside a picture of one of the worst adverts for the physical condition of the British.
Of course, the UK has its own stereotypes. Primary among them is the belief that most Americans look a bit like the chap on the cover of Fatboy Slim's second album (record label bosses astutely switched the picture for a less controversial image on its US release).
Much of the US interest in the story comes from the fact that Americans are currently obsessed with the state of their healthcare system.
To a nation where fact-free claims about the superiority of US healthcare are a staple of right-wing talk radio, the discovery that another country could be getting better health across the board for less than half the spending comes as a shock. Writing in the New Yorker last year, Malcolm Gladwell introduced the notion that other countries might have better healthcare than the US as if he was preaching revolutionary heresy.
But the bottom line is that a lot of Americans seem to think we Brits are a uniquely unhealthy nation. Regardless of the troubled state of the NHS, it's a reputation that's hard to fully explain.
Perhaps it's about the picture of national life we choose to show in our national media. Mainstream US television producers and film-makers celebrate permatanned, personal-trained figures who would look good on a red carpet next to the cast of Friends. Their British equivalents, in contrast, are mostly an unattractive rogues' gallery of the diseased and decayed.
