I’m aiming to create the ultimate internet guide for TALL drivers looking for a new car.

Please add your Car make and model in the comments below and I will add them to the NOT MUCH FITS car list here

Miranda Hart is one of those performers who just exude likeableness. Every time I see her on TV I want her to be my new best friend.

Her new sitcom – based on her Radio 2 series Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop – trades on her gawkiness and the fact that, at 6ft 1in, she is often mistaken for a man.

Miranda (the on-screen one at least) is so clumsy she makes Bridget Jones look like Sienna Miller.

Emma Cahill is Britain’s tallest schoolgirl, measuring 6ft 5ins and she is still growing.

Emma Cahill, 16, towers over everyone at her school – including the teachers. Photo: SWNS.COM

The 16-year-old has just started sixth form at St Mary’s Convent School in Worcester. She is the star player on the netball team but needs shoes specially designed to fit her size 14 feet, while she also had to have her new uniform tailored to fit her 36in legs. But she says she wants to get even taller despite being bullied over her size.

Her father Andrew, 45, is 6ft 6ins while her mother Jane is 5ft 11in.

“I am really proud to be the tallest schoolgirl in Britain. I like being a bit different but I reckon I’m still growing,” she said.

”I’d like to grow an extra inch to catch up with my dad.

”I have been bullied but I try not to think about it. People call me names, laugh at me. Sometimes people do things they wouldn’t do to a short person but I just laugh it off.”

Mr Cahill, who runs a software company in Droitwich Spa, Worcs., said: ”Emma was always a big child but in the last few years she’s shot up.

”We keep joking we’ll have to buy a bigger house so we can all fit in it.

”She was born a normal size but genetics must have kicked in. My parents and my wife’s parents were tall so she must have got her height from there.”

Despite wanting to get taller, she does admit that being tall has disadvantages. She has to get her clothes made in Germany and America, while she added that it was affecting her love life.

“I haven’t got a boyfriend at the moment. I think I scare them off with my height.

”I’ll probably always be bigger than anyone I go out with but I’ll still wear heels – I’m proud to be tall.”

Despite her mother suggesting she become a catwalk model, Emma says she wants to study to become an occupational therapist.

Louise Ross, from the Tall Persons Club, said: ”Emma should enjoy being the tallest teenage girl in the country. Women like her are the future and she should be proud and never stoop.

”Around 98 per cent of tall people are bullied but the trick is to literally rise above it.”

The world’s tallest teenager is 17-year-old American Brandon Adams who stands at 7ft four-and-a-half inches.

“You can do a lot in a short space of time if you put your mind to it,” she says. Thornley is the most successful product of the original Sporting Giants scheme set up two years ago by UK Sport to recruit talent to height-specific sports. She might have become part of the GB team for handball or volleyball. Instead, her profile matched the demands of rowing’s World Class Start programme, sponsored by Siemens, and she soon found herself balancing precariously and often unsuccessfully in a single scull.

“I seemed to spend my whole time falling in and it was November so the water wasn’t warm,” she says. “But I’d read Steve Redgrave’s autobiography and Matt Pinsent’s to find out what they did day to day so I knew how tough it would be. It’s about what I expected.”

Less expected was the moment last summer when Thornley, seven crewmates and a cox sat on the starting line for the final of the under-23 world championships with a realistic chance of becoming the first British women’s VIII to win a world title. Thornley tried not to think of the strange route that had taken her to the biggest day of her life or of the consequences of victory or defeat. She just rowed for her life.

“We had two days after the heats to hang around for the final and I had a lot of time to think about what had happened to me and what it would be like to win,” she says. “I tried just to think of the processes. I can’t remember the race at all. I knew I’d gone places I’d never been before, pushed myself harder than I ever have done before and it was good to find that out about yourself. We just rowed the perfect race.”

Thornley can remember the whole process of selection for the Sporting Giants quite clearly. The ergo tests, the arm pulls and the leg presses, all monitored for scientific analysis. What she remembers best, though, is feeling normal, normally tall. “I’d never been in a room with so many tall people,” she says. “It was good to be normal. Because I’m around people who are tall I don’t feel different any more and that’s given me a lot of confidence about my height.

“I’m just over six feet three now and I was tall even at 14 so I always felt out of place and a bit gangly. People say nasty things at school and in the showjumping world I always stood out. On the ponies I had to kick my legs back so I didn’t hit the poles with my feet.”

Horses were so clearly Thornley’s passion that her parents moved to a farm near Wrexham to start a stables. Her original pony, Marquis, now 31, still lives in the field there and, when rowing commitments allow, Thornley will return to the sport at which she was talented enough to compete for Wales. After A-levels came a gap year and a chance to pursue a career as a model. In London, they said she was too tall — “I was six feet seven in heels, something ridiculous, and nothing fitted” — so she did some work in Manchester for a year before heading back to London to study business management at City University.

“I was a bit in limbo,” she admits. “I didn’t really know what to do next. Studying wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do. My parents saw an advertisement for the Sporting Giants programme in the paper and a friend heard it on the radio, so I signed up, not knowing what to expect.”

She considers whether any skills are transferable to rowing from showjumping or even the catwalk. “I was nervous about the pain in rowing, but more about messing up and letting people down,” she says. “Handling the nerves helps and I had to make sacrifices in showjumping just as I’ve had to do in rowing. But with rowing I had to become an elite athlete almost overnight.”

Thornley now trains at the University of Bath and, to keep her mind agile, studies French at evening class. Her coach, Paul Stannard, exhorts her to put on more weight, but her physique still seems more suited to the catwalk than the ergo.

Her body is hurrying to catch up with the changes in her life. “If someone had said to me two years ago, ‘Vicky, you’re going win a gold medal in a rowing boat’, I wouldn’t have believed them. It’s happened so fast. It’s changed my life. In a way, I don’t believe what’s happened. It’s been very emotional.

“Now I’ve got to make the step into the senior team for next year because, like everyone, London 2012 is my dream.” It will be a big jump. Vicky Thornley is quite used to those.

The 6ft 6ins cow, named Chilli, towers over other cattle in his herd at the Ferne Animal Sanctuary in Chard, Somerset.

Staff at the sanctuary have applied to Guinness World Records to have him named as Britain’s tallest cow.

They claim nine-year-old Chilli, who is kept on a strict diet of grass, has grown so tall because of the “Somerset air”.

“He eats about the same amount of grass as a normal cow, who you would expect to grow to about 5ft,” said sanctuary spokeswoman Jo Fox.

“But Chilli must love the Somerset air because he is huge.

“We have checked farms and sanctuaries across the country and we have been unable to find a cow even near his height.

“The closest was one recorded in Dorset at 6ft 1ins last year.

“We are convinced he is the biggest so now we have applied for him to be entered in the Guinness Book of Records. We are currently going through the checking process.”

Chilli, who now weighs more than a tonne, arrived at the sanctuary when he was six days old.

Fox added: “He is lucky to still be alive.

“It is unusual for Friesians to live to this age as they are usually slaughtered for beef in their youth.

By James Corrigan
Friday, 29 February 2008

Sir Steve Redgrave’s somewhat lofty ambition to prove his theory that “if you’re big enough, you’re good enough” took one almighty step forward yesterday with the announcement that his “Sporting Giants” initiative has added 34 rowers, 11 handball players and seven volleyball players to the national squads.

As everything seems to be in British sport nowadays, Redgrave’s project was set up with the 2012 Olympics in mind, although even the five-times gold medallist must have been surprised at the reaction to the nationwide appeal he made at a much-ridiculed launch in Trafalgar Square a year ago.

In all, 3,854 applications were received, which is some response, considering the strict restrictions placed on the candidates. Men had to measure at least 6ft 3in, while the cut-off mark for women was 5ft 11in. Furthermore, they had to be between 16 and 25 and have good, all-round athletic ability. A tall order if ever there was one.

Although perhaps not, if the initial interest and staggering conversion rate are reliable gauges. “This was a mild shake of the tree – we looked under a few rocks and look what we found,” Redgrave said. “This was all about finding tall people who had the right characteristics and some of the hidden talent that has emerged is incredible. I shouldn’t be too shocked, though, because I never thought I would row until my first coach came along and asked me to have a go. Years later I asked him, ‘Why did you pick me?’ He said, ‘Well, you had big hands and big feet’.”

At 6ft 9in, the 17-year-old Chris Gregory can boast two pairs of those and very useful they have proved, too, in propelling him into the British volleyball squad. Like Stuart Campbell, a 25-year-old who was working as a bricklayer when his father heard Redgrave’s call to the skyscrapers on the radio, Gregory knew nothing about the sport for which he is deemed ideal. “I had never seen a handball court before Sporting Giants,” said Campbell, now at the British handball academy in Denmark. “But we’re not just here to make up the numbers – we’re here to win medals.”

Indeed, Redgrave would doubtless claim that is what they were born for, which would be apt as the selection procedures have come straight from an Aldous Huxley novel. There were two stages of testing at six rowing centres, four for would-be handball players and three for volleyball. State-of-the-art equipment instructed the sporting overlords who would be up for it – and who would fall miserably short.

Alas, not all the applicants were totally honest and a few platform-heeled impostors tiptoed through. At least six did not satisfy the height criterion and added the odd inch to their forms. They were still tested, however, and have since graduated to the British canoeing squad. That is not big. But it is clever.

http://community.livejournal.com/tall/profile

Most people don’t say anything until after they’ve passed by. Then they’ll turn and gawp. It doesn’t bother me. When you are asked, “Is it cold up there?” half a dozen times a day, you get used to it.I was only 7lb 14oz when I was born. At 62cm, I was a little longer than the 50cm average, but in those days a big baby was a bonny baby, so no one made much of it. After that, though, I just grew and grew and grew. By three I was 4ft tall, at five I was 5ft, and by 10 I was pushing 6ft. The sacks in the sack race came up to my shins and when the football landed on the roof at school, it was me, not the headmaster, who would be the one to get it down.

While my classmates adopted me as their unofficial security guard, the older boys would shower me with punches as I passed and call me a freak. It wasn’t as if I could keep a low profile; after I was laughed out of the school uniform shop at the age of 12 – and at 6ft 3in – Mum had to take me to a tailor to fit me out in a £250 business suit.

As my body shot up during puberty, it began to outgrow my insides. I developed bad asthma as my 10-year-old lungs struggled to support my man-sized frame, and it was up to my mum to wake me four times a night to hook me up to an oxygen mask. I also suffered from terrible growing pains – sometimes I could almost feel the bones in my legs moving.

My height continued to creep up throughout my teens: 6ft 8in at 15; 6ft 10in at 18; 7ft 1in at 21. By this stage my appetite was enormous. For as long as I can remember, a typical day has begun with a mixing bowl full of cereal and a pint of milk, followed by two rounds of toast. By mid-morning, I need three packets of crisps or a couple of pasties to keep me going until my three-course lunch. Next up is the afternoon filler of four crumpets and a tin of beans, before a tea of two-inch-thick pork chops, eight or nine potatoes, carrots and peas. I’ll cap the day off with another mixing bowl of cereal before bed, though if I’m doing a lot of exercise, I’ll swap that for a mixing bowl of pasta.

I made a decision early on not to be ashamed of my size. I have always preferred to be called a giant than to resort to euphemisms such as “big chap” or “tall person”. There isn’t a universal definition of what constitutes a giant – especially for someone like me who grew naturally rather than as a result of a hormonal disorder – but experts agree that it’s reasonable to ascribe the term to anyone over 7ft.

There are inconveniences, of course: I’ve never been able to lie down in the bath, for example, and door frames and ceiling lights pose a constant threat. It helps that I now live in a new-build: before I moved in, I was able to ensure that the light fittings were flush to the ceiling and that the shower was installed a foot higher than normal.

Most of the time, I love being a giant. There are the obvious advantages – reaching for high things for small ladies in shops, painting ceilings, putting the fairy on the Christmas tree and scaring small children into silence – and it was certainly an asset during my stint with the Cheshire police, when I was nudging 8ft in my hat and boots. During one incident, I arrived at a house to find a man brandishing an eight-inch bread knife. As I entered the room, he put down the knife. “Fair dos, mate,” he said. “I don’t want any bother.”

I come from a fairly tall family – Dad’s 6ft 3in and Mum’s 5ft 10in – which might explain why I’ve always felt pretty normal. All my height is in my 48in legs, so when I’m sitting down, I look like anyone else. When I first met my managing director, I stood up to introduce myself and watched his head move to where he thought my face would be – then up, and up again. His look of shock is a familiar one.

I have only once met someone taller than myself. I was playing basketball against a man called Alan Bannister, who is 7ft 5in, and I remember turning around at one point and finding this vast figure towering over me. I immediately messed up my shot. For the first time in my life, I was the normal bloke with the shocked expression, and it felt great.

Short people suffer worse physical and mental health than those of normal height, scientists claim today.

They also claim shorter people would feel much better about themselves if they were only marginally taller, and so could improve their health just by wearing high-heeled shoes.

The researchers, led by Torsten Christensen at Novo Nordisk in Denmark, based their analysis of the responses of 14,416 people to a Department of Health survey.

The team, which included Prof Peter Clayton at Manchester University, found that people in the shortest height category – men shorter than 5ft 4in and women shorter than 5ft – said they experienced significantly worse health than people of normal height.

Mr Christensen said that actual health correlates with a person’s perception of their health, so that an alternative explanation – that short people are anxious hypochondriacs – can be ruled out. Nor were short people more depressed or anxious.

Additionally, the shorter the person, the more pronounced this effect becomes, so that a small increase in height has a much larger positive effect on a short person than it does on a person of normal height, Mr Christensen.

People who are of short stature could increase their perceived health by 6.1 per cent if their height was increased by high heels of around 2.5 inches. This is equivalent to the health benefits of losing 33 pounds for an obese person, the researchers said.

“We know that people who are short experience more difficulties in areas of their life such as education, employment and relationships than people of normal height,” Mr Christensen said.

“However, the relationship between height and psychosocial well-being is not well understood. Using this large and nationally representative sample of the UK population, we found shorter people report that they experience lower physical and mental well-being than taller people do.

The shorter someone is, the stronger this relationship becomes. For example, an increase in height of just over an inch would have a positive impact on the health related quality of life of a short person, whereas the effect of an extra inch or so would be negligible for a person of normal height.

The long and short of it

• Ever since our ancestors hit each other over the head with wooden clubs, height has been important in the battle for power and, in particular, the struggle for food, shelter and mates, commented Prof Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertforshire, who is 5ft 8. “The advantages afforded tall people may have evolutionary roots, dating from a time when there were real benefits to hanging around with taller people because they were better at gathering food and defeating foes,” he said. “In modern society this is no longer the case, and so we should now change with the times”.

• Numerous studies have shown there is an advantage to being tall. In the 1940s, psychologists found that tall salesmen were more successful than their shorter colleagues. Psychologists examining the American presidential elections since 1948 have noticed a strong tendency for the taller candidates to win.

• In the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas Gregor, an anthropologist at America’s Vanderbilt University, lived among the Mehinaku, a tropical forest people of central Brazil and found that the taller the man, the more girlfriends he had. As he explained: “The three tallest men had as many affairs as the seven shortest men, even though their average estimated ages were identical.”

• American psychologists Leslie Martel and Henry Biller published a book called Stature and Stigma in 1987 in which they asked university students to rate the qualities of men of varying heights, on 17 different criteria. Both men and women, whether short or tall, thought that short men were less mature, less positive, less secure, less masculine, less successful, less capable, less confident, less outgoing, more inhibited, more timid and more passive. That year, a survey revealed that the typical 6ft male earned about £3,000 more than his 5ft 5 counterpart.

• In 2001, research showed that women taller than 5ft 10 took home an average of £2,000 more per year than women who were only 5ft 2.

• The perceived link between height and success is so strong that people often overestimate the height of high-status individuals, such as media celebrities. Dustin Hoffman, for example, is 5ft 5 and Madonna is just 5ft 4.

• The Guardian
• Monday September 3 2007

The first gene linked to tallness, one of the most heritable of traits, has been discovered by scientists, a finding that is expected to shed light on human development and further understanding of cancer. An international team including researchers at Oxford and Exeter analysed DNA from 35,000 people and found that a single letter in the human genetic code was responsible for making some people taller than others.

The scientists zeroed in on a gene called HMGA2, of which we inherit two copies, one from each parent. Inheriting a form of the gene that has a C written into the genetic code instead of a T adds about half a centimetre to a person’s height, the scientists found, while inheriting two copies adds nearly a full centimetre.

The discovery is the first to identify a single gene that directly influences natural variation of height. Around a quarter of white Europeans will carry two versions of the “tall” version of the gene, with another quarter carrying two “short” versions.

Scientists at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston joined British researchers at Oxford University and the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter to scour the genomes of 5,000 white European patients who had volunteered DNA samples and details of their height and weight for medical studies into diabetes and heart disease. The scientists identified the HMGA2 gene as playing a major role in height variation and noted that changing just one letter in the genetic code had a significant effect on growth. The discovery was confirmed by searching for the same two versions of the gene in a further 30,000 patients.

“Because height is a complex trait, involving a variety of genetic and non-genetic factors, it can teach us valuable lessons about the genetic framework of other complex traits, such as diabetes, cancer and other common human diseases,” said Joel Hirshhorn, a senior researcher on the study, which appeared in Nature Genetics yesterday.

A study published in 2005 suggests that HMGA2 is fundamental to human growth and may play a role in tumour formation. An eight-year-old boy with a damaged version of the gene had multiple tumours and stood 5ft 6ins tall, the average height of a 15-year-old boy. Tall people are known to be more at risk of certain cancers, such as prostate, bladder and lung, and are also more at risk of osteoporosis.

Tim Frayling, a geneticist at Peninsula Medical School and co-author of the study, said the team expects that tens to hundreds more genes linked to height will be identified within the next year.

]]> http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/09/03/scientists-find-a-gene-that-makes-some-people-taller/feed/ 0 http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/27/club-members-gather-to-find-solace-in-heightist-world/ http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/27/club-members-gather-to-find-solace-in-heightist-world/#comments Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:27:20 +0000 6ft 6 http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/27/club-members-gather-to-find-solace-in-heightist-world/ Stephen Moss
Saturday August 25, 2007
The Guardian

I am 6ft 4in, which yesterday made me one of the shorter men in the Wotton House Hotel, near Dorking, Surrey, the suitably spacious venue for the annual convention of the Tall Persons Club of Great Britain and Ireland. “I bet you don’t often feel like this,” says club director Jim Briggs (6ft 9in), as he and fellow director Stuart Logan (6ft 8in) peer down at me.The three-day convention is the climax of National Tall Awareness Week, which highlights discrimination against tall people.”Airlines don’t make you pay more if you are blonde, so why should they be allowed to charge you more for being tall?” says Mr Briggs, a British-based American whose transatlantic twang bears an uncanny resemblance to Loyd Grossman.

“We’re living in a heightist world,” he says, complaining that recently he was barred from sitting in the exit row of a plane because he was not deemed “able bodied”. “The stewardess was accusing me of being disabled because I am tall. But I’m not a disabled person. This is what we are fighting against.”

Karsten Mathiesen (7ft 2in), a visitor from Denmark, demonstrates just how far he has to bend to enter the room. Mr Briggs launches another salvo. “The world just doesn’t seem to cater for the taller, larger person. Take the average 6ft 6in doorway. That standard was set in 1865, so we are using 100-year-old technology here. We’re gaining a couple of inches in each generation, so why are we using 100-year-old standards on these doors?”

Competition for the king-sized beds at the hotel must have been ferocious.

The club, which was founded in 1991, campaigns, provides information to its 600 members on suppliers that specialise in larger-than-average clothes and furniture, and offers help and support to people who have suffered psychologically because of their size.

“It can be isolating to be very tall,” says Gill Hebb (a mere 6ft ½in). “Sometimes you are literally on a different plane. One of the nice things about going out with people from the Tall Club is that, when you go into a nightclub, you can hear what everyone is saying because they can talk straight into your ear. I don’t think you can describe how comforting it is to walk into a room and have to look up to everybody.”

Today the 90-strong group of delegates is planning a ramble around Guildford, and they know they will attract unwanted attention.

“When we walk around together, people stop and stare, nudge each other and giggle, ” says Ms Hebb. “Karsten and I once went into a pub in Edinburgh and I just couldn’t believe how impertinent people were, staring at us and making comments.”

Trying to change public attitudes is a key part of National Tall Awareness Week. “For some reason,” says Mr Briggs, “it’s OK to walk up to me in the street and say ‘My God you’re tall, how tall are you? But would you walk up to a large-breasted woman in Tesco and say ‘My God you’ve got big tits, what’s your bra size?’ Of course you wouldn’t. So why is it OK to come up to me and say ‘What kind of freak are you?’ ”

The club emphasises the problems faced by teenagers and the prevalence of bullying.

“It’s hard enough as a teenager of average height growing up,” says Jackie Timbs (6ft 1in), “but when you’re head and shoulders above everybody else, as I was as a teenager, you’re not just dealing with the everyday teenage issues. You do get picked on.”

But the convention is not just about campaigning. There’s plenty of partying, too. Finding a partner if you’re close to 7ft can be a tall order, and this is a good place to size up possibilities. Briggs says the club has so far brokered 40 marriages.

Above all, the delegates are pleased, for once in their lives, not to stand out in a crowd or be defined by their tallness. In one corner of leafy Surrey this weekend it will be the men of 5ft 10in and women of 5ft 6in who look out of place. Bending to enter rooms and struggling to get knees under tables will be the norm, and height will not be the sole topic of conversation, as it too often is in the wider (and shorter) world.

]]> http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/27/club-members-gather-to-find-solace-in-heightist-world/feed/ 0 http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/14/soyou-think-youre-tall/ http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/14/soyou-think-youre-tall/#comments Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:19:25 +0000 6ft 6 http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/14/soyou-think-youre-tall/ Guinness World Records -Search for The Tallest Man in each country
For more than 50 years Guinness World Records has been chronicling records including the Tallest Man in the World and now we are looking to find the Tallest Man in each country*. Why? Because we believe this record is so amazing we want to find out how each country stacks up.

For the next THREE MONTHS we will be searching countries for their Tallest Men and will unveil our newest members of the GWR family on November 8th in celebration of Global Guinness World Records Day.

Send in your information or if you know someone encourage them to do the same.

Thanks again and we look forward to hearing from you.

Register yourself here

]]> http://notmuchfits.co.uk/2007/08/14/soyou-think-youre-tall/feed/ 1