Alain de Botton has a new book out, Art as Therapy, written with the philosopher and art historian John Armstrong. To illustrate their point, they’ve put up a load of giant yellow Post-it notes around the Rijksmuseum.

I couldn’t bear to read more than two – the first shouted the cliché about appreciating the beauty of nature; and the second, located next to a display of 19^th century daguerrotypes, tells us we are in ‘one of the saddest rooms in the museum. You might want to cry.’ I was expecting to discover that each sitter had a story of personal tragedy. But no: we’re being reminded that the sitters are dead. This is usually the case with old photos (and indeed, old paintings). The curated labels coincide with the recent launch of the Amsterdam outpost of de Botton’s School of Life (which is doing irritatingly well).

I also checked out the World Press Photo exhibition, the annual showcase of award-winning international news photography, last weekend. Of the two English-winning portraits, one was of an obese 16-year-old, dressed only in her underwear, who had decided to have a balloon inserted into her stomach for six months to help her lose weight.

According to most Dutch, whose main view of the English consists of the groups of stag and hen parties boozing around the Red Light District, we are a nation of fatties who eat sausages and bacon for breakfast every morning and wear next to nothing, so the inclusion of the aforementioned portrait in the globe-trotting exhibition certainly won’t help our reputation abroad.

But I’d rather be informed that ‘a 2012 government survey classed 28 percent of English children between the ages of 2 and 15 as overweight or obese’ than be told to wash my laundry by smarmy de Botton…