Cosmo Landesman

It’s no longer just clean eaters who are the health bores

David Hockney has just endorsed a series of specially designed beer mats, created by an artist called Mr Bingo, that display a cigarette in an ashtray with the slogan: ‘Bored with wellness.’ He went on to declare he found the very idea of wellness ‘ridiculous’ and ‘too bossy’.

Hockney is a verification of that urban legend often cited but rarely seen: the granny who ‘smoked like a chimney’ and ‘drank like a fish’ and lived to be 100. He is now the nation’s good-time gran. At 84 he’s still standing — and smoking — and boasts that he’s never been to a gym in his life.

I know people just like Hockney, usually obese middle-aged men, who boast that they never do any exercise, never go to the gym and who smoke, eat and drink whatever and whenever they like. I kind of admire these people who won’t let a little thing like a double coronary heart attack get between them and their fags-booze-burger lifestyle. As one of them — who has had two heart attacks and has been warned to get healthy or die — said to me: ‘A life of salads is no life at all.’

There are times when you think that life is too short for workout routines, gluten-free this and soya that. We need to assert a personal autonomy through appetite and stop being sensible and just gorge on the forbidden — whatever the consequences.

Yes, the joys of the gym are dull, but try having a conversation with someone who has drunk too much

I know all about this because I had health-food fanatics for parents. In the mid-1970s, my dad put the family on a macro-biotic diet. He was so fanatical about healthy food that he once threatened to divorce my mother when he caught her with an ice cream.

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