I would gladly give up two years of life for that extra drink
Drinking alcohol shortens your life, says a major new study published in The Lancet. But I knew that anyway. I was hospitalised with alcoholism when I was 27, and I haven’t touched a drop in 16 years. Yet I am not an advocate for abstinence, unless you are an alcoholic – the kind of drinker who punches policemen, weeps on strangers and longs for death each dawn. The kind of drinker you probably aren’t. If anything, my alcoholism makes me more likely to tell people who can drink relatively safely: do it.
Alcohol is a wonderful drug. Now I am denied it, I can see it. It isn’t subtle – drinking is a five-act melodrama, while cannabis a tedious two-hander, and cocaine a denouement by itself – but it is cheap, varied and effective. It exhilarates and soothes. It makes the fearful brave and the cold-hearted lustful; the exhausted bright-eyed and the bored excited. It strips off our masks, and people need that because living in groups, though necessary, is exhausting.
How could we live together without alcohol? Why would we want to? Where would be the jeopardy, the remembrance of youth, the surprising emotion that English people find so hard to feel? Where would be the purple nights?
But longevity, and how to get it, has become a fetish. Being ancient is the prize, no matter the cost, and, in pursuit of this, people eat plant-based diets, go to hot yoga and read studies in The Lancet. Never mind that my beloved grandmother would rather have gone at 85 in her own home, than as she did, at 94 in a care home, haunted by hallucinations and not knowing who she was or who loved her.
But, if you want the prize of being very, very old, know this, courtesy of The Lancet: if you drink three glasses of wine a night – rather than the five a week considered the healthy limit – you will live two years less than you might have done had you never got drunk.
Two years! I’d give two years of my eighties for the bliss, the unknowability, of regular drunkenness in the tedium of a composed life. I probably have done already, and I do not regret it. Alcohol showed me the size of life.
I am not alone. People do not want to live longer if they must give up their pleasures; if they did, they would. Another study said that a sizeable number would not take exercise for the prize of another five years of life, yet alone a pitiful two.
People need alcohol as much as they need dementia. Probably more.
The conservation charity Plantlife UK has established The Great British Wildflower Hunt to encourage children to care about flowers, rather than computers, sugar and beating each other with sticks. Now children are encouraged to pick 12 types of wildflower from a list of 68 provided by Plantlife UK. If the children can navigate the list – and parents who help them are probably the kind of parents who would tell their children about wildlife anyway – they will be able to pluck them from roundabouts if they can find them, which was not my experience when I lived in Camden Town.
Even so, bee-keepers are angry. They worry that opportunist children will start ripping up whole fields of primroses.
I think this is unlikely, but isn’t it odd, and possibly counter-productive, to interest children in plants by telling them that they can, at the moment of seeing, possess them? To offer up the plant as sacrifice? Does that give them more respect for nature, or does it encourage them to see it as just another useless piece of tat to be plucked and then discarded? It will hardly create tiny gardeners, who need patience for success. And who pauses to consult a list before picking a dandelion anyway?
I live in west Cornwall now and, if you live close to nature, you are forced to respect it. If you stand on the promenade at Penzance in stormy weather, waves will hit you with rocks. In the playground at Pendeen, the drowsing toddler will be blown off his feet. Can I swim safely in this cove, I asked a local man at Porthgwarra last summer. Of course, he smiled, but don’t swim beyond the rocks. You’ll drown.
Perhaps Plantlife UK should forget about daisies and concentrate instead on Water Hemlock and Deadly Nightshade. Tell the children that plants can fight back. That will teach them.
The BBC’S three-part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence ends on Sunday night. It was supposed to run on Boxing Day but Ed Westwick, the young actor playing Mickey Argyll, was accused of rape (an allegation he strenuously denies) and scrubbed off the screen. He was replaced by Christian Cooke and his scenes were reshot at a cost to you of £1 million.
That this is not even the focus of this short piece is a sign of how glibly we have abandoned the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and I hope Christie would laugh hard at that.
There is more anger at the fact that the screen-writer Sarah Phelps has changed Christie’s ending to Ordeal by Innocence, and even her murderer. I cannot be upset by this. I think it is thrilling, for if writers cannot be bold then what are they for? I have seen the new ending and it is brilliant.
I also saw Kenneth Branagh’s stately and beautiful Murder on the Orient Express last year. Branagh is a Shakespearian, but he has no less respect for Christie, and the train. He wouldn’t dream of changing her ending, but I wish he had.
Everyone knows how Murder on the Orient Express ends and Branagh, who is serious, gifted and in this case very moustached, delivered everything a whodunnit can offer except that which is essential – surprise.