We may indeed be a sedentary lot, but this seat is still taken

Are you sitting comfortably? Well, stop it. No slumping, no slouching, no burrowing of bums into favourite armchairs as you settle in with the Daily Telegraph crossword. Look lively. Stand tall. Balance on one leg if your hips are up to it. Chuck the cushions and set fire to the sofa. If you’re not bouncing on the balls of your feet, you’re not doing it right.

Sitting is for wimps.

If you want to stand out, stand up. As a lesson to couch-potato patients, the Royal College of General Practitioners is to schedule standing appointments. Family doctors will stand at £2,000 desks (what NHS cash crisis?) that can be raised or lowered at the push of a button. GPS lecturing on the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle will now practise what they prescribe. Though they will, apparently, sit down to deliver bad news, which I imagine will lead to alarm every time a standing GP so much as bends a knee.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a looming consultant. Some of us are short enough as it is. There’s something reassuring about being asked to take a seat, safely separated from the physician by desk, prescription pad and box of cold season Kleenex. Neither do I fancy an upright job interview, a power-walking performance review or a brisk Fitbit session with my line manager.

Certainly, we’re a sedentary lot. No doubt this country has an obesity problem. But treadmill desks and stand-up-andshout meetings aren’t going to make a difference. If it’s not having our knuckles rapped for eating on trains (yes, that means you over there, dropping crumbs on the Comment pages), it’s the hot poker to the posterior for the (potentially) deadly sin of sitting.

The next time I read an interview with a go-getting, high-fiving, live-streaming, Ted-talking, microdosing twerp from Silicon Valley who claims that adopting the yoga “tree” pose at their desk revolutionised their whole, like, philosophy, I will buy myself a beanbag, snuggle my bottom into its folds and never stand up again.

Whenever some bright spark suggests we’d all be leaner and keener with desks on stilts, I think of the Tudor episode of Blackadder when Edmund’s Puritan aunt and uncle Whiteadder come to visit and tell him he’s a “wicked boy” for indulging in such luxuries as chairs and benches. At home, Lord Whiteadder sits on a spike, while Lady Whiteadder sits on her husband. “Two spikes would be extravagant.”

That’s not to say we should all sag in our seats or hunch at our laptops (you should see me as a deadline approaches), but there must be a happy angle between Jacob Rees-mogg in full front-bench slither and tip-of-the-toes, book-onthe-head, ladies-finishingschool perfection.

I’m a dance critic and twice a week I leave the auditorium vowing to extend my neck with the swanlike grace of Sadler’s Wells. Next morning I’m back to normal: proper posture when I remember, tendency to subsidence otherwise. I spent weeks researching orthopaedic chairs at spine-harrowing prices and concluded the best thing I could do was to get up every half-hour and swing my arms and touch my toes and stomp from one end of the flat to the other.

This fad for lectern desks will pass. In the meantime, rise up, take a stand and ask the stiff-backed bullies: “Is this seat taken?”