Smoking? Guilty. Drinking? Yup. Now they say pessimism shortens life, it’s a wonder I’m still here

WELL, that was all I needed. Every time scientists identify anything likely to shorten our lives, you can pretty well guarantee that it will apply to me.

Smoking? Guilty. Excess drinking? Yup. A taste for red meat? Middle-age spread? Aversion to physical exercise? Keeping irregular hours? A tendency to feel stress and anxiety? Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I’m doomed.

To cap it all, a Harvard study of almost 160,000 human guinea pigs, published this week, finds that people with a pessimistic outlook on life are likely to live significantly shorter lives than optimists. Remarkably, this is irrespective of other factors such as diet, social class, financial circumstances or even chronic health conditions.

To be precise, researchers at the American university’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that the 25 per cent who were most optimistic in their replies to a questionnaire, followed up for 26 years, were likely to have a 5.4 per cent longer lifespan than the 25 per cent who were most pessimistic.

In other words, those who look on the bright side tend to live a good four years longer than miserable old so-and-sos like me, who tend to take the gloomiest possible view of what life has in store for us.

Ritual

Indeed, once we’ve added pessimism to all my other life-threatening vices, it’s a wonder I’m not dead already.

From my earliest childhood in the Cold War, when I was convinced that we stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, I’ve always expected the worst — as I still do to this day.

Take yesterday morning, when I broke the habit of a lifetime by putting a tenner on a horse to win the 3.30 at Nottingham.

As a rule, I bet only once a year, sacrificing a ritual fiver in an each-way flutter on the Grand National.

But I made an exception on this occasion, because the previous evening I’d bumped into a racing buff in the pub, who assured me that Bernardo O’Reilly was a cert to win yesterday’s race.

As a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, of course, I was convinced that if I bet on the wretched animal, it would have no hope. On the other hand, I was equally convinced that if I failed to place my bet, the horse would be sure to romp home to victory.

I figured that the pain of losing a tenner, when Bernardo O’Reilly inevitably lost, would be marginally less acute than the anguish of witnessing its inevitable triumph if I failed to back that hot tip.

I remembered the words of one poet: ‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen/ The saddest are these: It might have been.’ As I write, the race is due to start in 30 minutes. I’ll bring you an update as soon as my fears are confirmed.

Meanwhile, I wonder if you’re as baffled as I am by hearing people say, after every misfortune that befalls them: ‘You never think it’ll happen to you.’ Speaking for myself, I always think it will happen to me.

Whenever I go away on holiday, I tell myself that my house will be burgled in my absence. Every time I cough (which is increasingly often these days) I become more convinced that I have lung cancer — but I steer well clear of the doctor, since I’m just as sure that if I sought her help, she’d find an awful lot more wrong with me. Fearing the worst, I simply don’t want to know.

In the same way, I’ve never bought a season ticket that lasted longer than a week, believing throughout my 45 years of commuting to the office daily that I would probably be sacked before the week was out.

Horrible

Indeed, I’ve never forgotten the First Rule of Journalism, attributed to the great Press baron Lord Beaverbrook: ‘Any journalist can be replaced by any other journalist at any time.’

Nor have I ever begun writing a column without the horrible feeling that this will be the week when I run out of things to say and find myself staring at a blank screen, with my masters screaming blue murder at me.

In defence of my pessimism, which exasperates my poor wife, I can only point out that Murphy’s Law applies in almost every area of all our lives. Truly, if anything can go wrong, it will.

Arrive early at the station, for example, and you can bet your last farthing that your train will be cancelled or delayed. Get there half a minute late, on the other hand, and you can be sure it will have left bang on time. How often, meanwhile, have you set the TV to record the final episode of a favourite programme, only to find that the news bulletin before it was specially extended, and the recording of your show therefore cuts off before you can discover whodunnit?

If you cancel the dog’s pet insurance, in protest at yet another outrageous hike in the premium, isn’t it a near certainty that the poor mutt will fall expensively ill within days?

And isn’t the washing machine sure to break down, bang on cue, just as soon as the manufacturer’s warranty expires?

No wonder so many of us, with long experience of life and its little ways, have come to believe that whatever may be round the corner, it’s guaranteed to kick us in the teeth.

Mind you, there’s an obvious upside to our morbid pessimism. For those of us who always expect the worst, after all, it comes as a wonderful surprise if we return from holiday to find our house hasn’t been burgled, the car is parked where we left it and we didn’t leave the gas on, as we’d feared.

Resolve

For the sake of a longer life, however, I must clearly resolve to be more optimistic. Here, then, are my top ten predictions for the rest of the year:

England will win the World Cup; taxes and fuel prices will plummet; Russia will withdraw its troops from Ukraine; the Tories will soar in the polls, as Boris Johnson is hailed by one and all as the wisest of statesmen; fed up with identity politics, the BBC, universities and our other great institutions will stop lecturing us about the evils of Britain’s past; Emma Raducanu will repeat her U.S. Open success at Wimbledon; global temperatures will fall, leading climatechange alarmists to admit they got it all wrong; China will embrace human rights and free speech; the EU will abandon its efforts to punish us for Brexit. Finally, the NHS will clear its waiting lists before Christmas.

Oh, and here’s one more prediction, for good measure: before the year is out, the sky above Britain will be thick with flying pigs.

Perhaps now you’ll understand why so many of us find it hard to look on the bright side.

I guess we’ll just have to reconcile ourselves to living four years shorter than those maddening Pollyannas who keep telling us: ‘Cheer up! It may never happen!’ Believe me, it almost certainly will.

Stop Press: a horse called Mitrosonfire won the 3.30 at Nottingham yesterday, while Bernardo O’Reilly came fourth in a field of six. So that’s my tenner down the drain.

I hate to sound gloomy, but what did I tell you?