HARRY BELL

the survey by admitting that I go to the pub between two and four times a week, that is the hysterical conclusion the authority reached.

It did so because it wants to terrify me into submission, into giving up my vice, and because it wants so desperately to play the part of saviour of health.

Instead of all these, all it has done is look like an officious clipboard-wielding twerp knocking on the doors of people’s lives asking personal questions and dispensing panicked advice.

The state has no place dictating, or at least trying to dictate, how we choose to live our lives.

Life is for living, for enjoying oneself and making the most of the roughly four score years

Stop spending our money and telling us how to live our lives. Even better, don’t take this money off us in the first place and let us spend it how we want

the Almighty has deigned to allow the majority of us to live on His earth.

If my time is cut short by a few years because I ate a Mcdonald’s breakfast once a week, smoked and drank and sat on my bed reading instead of wobbling about the streets in lycra, then so what?

I don’t care and I’ll only have myself to blame.

When it comes to our health and lifestyles, the state isn’t just some benign and wise old man interested in our wellbeing.

It’s an obsessively intrusive prating harridan which treats people who have perfectly normal lifestyles as benighted oafs in need of help rather than fully functioning adults capable of making choices.

Stop spending our money and telling us how to live our lives. Even better, don’t take this money off us in the first place and let us spend it how we want to.

That gives me an idea... now what’s the name of that Canterbury pub I like again?