Country Mouse

When I used to socialise rather than garden all day – 25 years ago – I once enraged a lunch hostess by using the words ‘unit’ and ‘toxins’ to refer to a glass of wine.

The alcoholic unit was then a relatively new concept and government guidelines had just been issued. The limit for men was a weekly maximum of 21 units. As a friend offered to fill up my glass, I called across the table, ‘Mary, am I allowed another unit of toxins?’

‘Toxins, Giles? This is the finest claret in our cellar!’ cried our hostess.

Strictly speaking, I was right though. Alcohol is a poison and I’ve seen the damage it has done, not only in my own extended family, but on a daily basis to others.

These days, since Mary miraculously ‘went off’ alcohol, rather than struggling to resist it, she has thankfully put away the sorry ways of violence. Now we spend evenings free of troubles, sitting calmly by the log fire, she mending Irish linen pillowcases, me filling in vegetable seed order forms on the new, drop-leaf Georgian rosewood table.

But the sober Mary has more time on her hands and is more observant – so once again my units are being carefully monitored. And now that inflammation has been identified as the fashionable new health condition – allegedly the scourge of our age – Mary has put us both on an anti-inflammation diet.

Gluten-free spelt bread, goats’ and sheep’s milk, butter, cheese and yoghurt are IN. Wheat and cow’s milk, butter, cheese and yoghurt OUT. Eating protein and carbs simultaneously is banned. Puzzlingly, tomatoes and citrus fruit are also forbidden, but avocados are in – if you can live with your conscience.

Alarming fresh reports blame influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow for the spiralling demands for the fruit which is causing deforestation and habitat destruction on a global scale.

Indeed it was on her Goop website that Gwyneth once recommended the painful practice of apipuncture: a system of acupuncture using live, stinging bees instead of traditional needles to relieve a swarm of ailments including arthritis, inflammation, generalised pain, scarring and skin issues.

Mary hasn’t gone so far as to prescribe apipuncture. Instead she urges me, ‘All you have to do is stop “Elvising”.’ She is trying to deter me from spiralling down into the nutritional squalor similar to that of the rock legend’s final days.

In truth, the very act of simply noticing what is going down the gullet has had an almost immediate beneficial effect, with the loss of 12 pounds in three weeks.

Now that their principal customer has deserted it, I worry about the fate of our local bakery, purveyors of Wiltshire’s finest Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, doughnuts and lardy cake.

The expectant faces of the hair-netted bakery counter girls were too much to bear. So I went in to explain.

‘I’m on nettle soup now; I’m on an anti-inflammation diet,’ I enunciated in a thick Wiltshire accent. ‘According to my new bible, Hedgerow Medicine, by Julie Bruton-seal and Matt Seal, our ancestors here in the Vale of Pewsey used to find the vitamin C content of nettles provided a valuable spring tonic after a winter living on ancient grains and salted meat.’ But, as so often happens round here, my attempts at affability fell on stony ground.

It’s not just inflammation-causing food and drinks that have been doing us down. ‘We live in a time of extreme rhetorical inflation,’ writes Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian. There is a veritable epidemic of catastrophising and fear-mongering, to say nothing of ‘climate alarmism’.

All of which make it hard to achieve the correct, millpond-calm mental conditions for self-improvement on the spiritual front.

There’s no point working just on the body. Another of Mary’s homespun injunctions is that anxiety or ‘spiritual inflammation’ would be reduced if, like her, I boycotted television news and restricted myself to radio coverage. In this way, I could tamp down general hysteria levels.

But old habits die hard and my role model is my late father. Godfrey Wood liked to watch the news at 6pm and 7pm, followed by News at Ten, Newsnight and Hardtalk because each ‘might offer a slightly different angle’.

If it wasn’t on the news, he disapproved of macabre or weird TV material and frequently sabotaged my – and my sister’s – viewing of ‘unsuitable’ programmes by simply turning the TV off at the knob. This meant we were cheated in childhood of seminal programmes watched by our contemporaries such as the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland.

So I should be in clover, now that television has become a race to the bottom to break any taboos that remain. Becoming a television reviewer for Gogglebox changed all that. It has acted as a kind of aversion therapy and now the content of the news, dramas and documentaries is more than even I can bear. Desperate to escape the other night, I began flicking through the channels and found Talking Pictures TV.

It was playing a gem of a film from Ealing Studios, 1954 – Lease of Life, starring Robert Donat as a country parson. We discovered that Talking Pictures specialises in ‘vintage film nostalgia’. I’ve heard from a reliable source that it’s a favourite channel of Her Majesty the Queen.

Such soothing viewing will surely offer a cure for rhetorical inflation and must be ideal for Oldie readers for whom ordinary television has also become something of a no-go zone. I cannot recommend it too highly.

‘Since Mary “went off ” alcohol, she has thankfully put away the sorry ways of violence’