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.