"JUST look at them - don't you think they get worse every year?" asked Mrs. C as we were out for a stroll on one of those warm Sundays just recently. "Just think - we are both related to that lot."

"That lot" in this case was the Tattoo Tribe, which has come back to haunt Beggarsdale - and, in particular, the Old Bridge Pool on the beck - now that summer has finally shown its face.

The pool has become a free swimming pool for the townies who discovered it perhaps 10 years ago and, year on year, their numbers seem to grow.

They get their name from the fact that most of them are tattooed all over except for their beer bellies - and that is only the women. A few years ago, they seemed as a tribe to be mainly on the plump side. Now, they are grotesque.

Few of them actually bring bathing costumes to lark in the pool (and destroy the fishing for us locals) but jump in and out in their jeans or underwear. Wet, this is not a scene for the fainthearted.

The village, in a way, has got used to them. We pick up their litter - mostly beer cans and broken bottles - and the summer sign has gone up outside the Beggars' Arms saying that people not wearing shirts will not be served. Even Ram's Blood loses its flavour when supped surrounded by so much sweating flesh.

One day, the Government should order that the top managers of all the junk food peddlers - manufacturers, takeaways, TV advertisers and supermarkets - should be brought to the dale on a sunny Sunday and chained to trees so they can see the results of their unhealthy trade in all its rippling, sagging, flopping glory.

The fact of the matter is that we Brits are now producing two separate races. One is sleek, shiny and well to do, eats healthily and takes regular exercise.

The other is fat-bellied, slack muscled and poor yet shovels in expensive long-term poisons as though stoking the boiler of a battleship. They consider that pressing a button on the TV zapper is exercise.

Yet, as Mrs C pointed out on that afternoon stroll, we are all related to each other: not just to fat yobbos in Beggarsdale beck but to every living human being, whether he or she be Chinese, African, Jew, Gentile or Hottentot.

For this gem, we are in debt to Channel Four's excellent Out of Eden documentary, which explains that DNA tracking has now proved that every human alive today is descended from one woman born in Africa a few hundred thousand years ago - a real-life Eve who mothered us all.

And just a few hundred of her descendents broke out of Africa by crossing the Red Sea into Asia and colonised India and China long before some of them went west to Europe.

In other words, we Europeans, who pride ourselves as the creators of civilisation, were an after thought when all the best bits of the East had been snapped up.

However, this should, in fact, be good news. As we are all cousins, perhaps we can now stop killing each other and live as one big and happy family.

Trouble is, most families I know these days are nearly always in a state of war anyway. As the adage goes, you can choose your friends but not your relatives.

But how's this for a thought: you have relatives even more loathsome than the Tattoo Tribe. Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, even Jack the Ripper are/were all cousins. I am even related to Jonathan Ross, God help me. Perhaps some facts of life are best kept secret!

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.