It seems French doctors haven't changed.
Late one night in 1981 I fell down a hole in a French road. It was a substantial hole and a serious fall, but I had the good fortune to be young and drunk.
I won't say that young drunks fall like cats, but
Joe Bennett: There are two epidemics in the fat west. One is of vanity, the other of longevity
In declaring that wine promotes cancer the medics have appointed themselves experts on the effects of wine, but have entirely ignored its actual effects. Photo / 123rf.com
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'I tripped,' I said, when he asked me how it had happened. He looked at me, and then he said, with a face like a flat-iron, 'you were drunk'.
It was not a question. Nor yet was it an accusation. It was a verdict.
And having delivered the verdict, he took his sweet time preparing the sentence, saying nothing, but making sure I could see what was on its way. 'This may sting a little,' he said eventually, and he tipped white spirit onto a pad of wire wool and went at the wound in the manner of one trying to clean old stains from a frying pan.
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When I came down from the ceiling he had another go, purely for the righteous pleasure that was in it.
Monsieur le médecin comes to mind today because of President Macron. Macron likes his wine. 'I drink wine every day,' he famously said, 'at lunch and in the evening.' This went down well with the French wine industry who named him Wine Personality of the Year. It went down less well with the medics.
Apparently for the last decade or so, the official line adopted by the French state department of health is that, and I quote, 'wine promotes cancer from the first glass'. That's it, in full. That's all the lab-coated ones have to say about a substance that has been considered a good for 8000 years.
Every second ancient vessel dug up by archaeologists is a wine jar.
The Greeks drank wine. The Phoenicians drank wine. The Persians, the Turks and Chinese all drank wine. Rome sent wine to the furthest edges of its empire to keep its citizens happy. And the key word there is happy. Wine made people happy then and it makes them happy now and happy, like wine, is a good. Happy does far more for the health than any doctor.
Have these wowsers no grasp of happiness, no notion of the good it does?
At the end of a long day have they never pulled a cork and poured a glass and sniffed at the fumes and sipped and sighed as the velvet pleasure spread across the tongue and down the throat and seeped into the very tissues of their being?
Have they never felt the easing of tension that comes with the first glass of wine, the peace of mind?
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It's a serious question. For in declaring that wine promotes cancer the medics have appointed themselves experts on the effects of wine, but have entirely ignored its actual effects.
I've been drinking the stuff for half a century and the result has never once been cancer. It has been pleasure. The pleasure of the taste. The pleasure of laughter. The pleasure of bonhomie. And these have done me an incalculable quantity of good, every ounce of which the medics discount.
Now it may well be that the vinous road will end in cancer. But every road ends somewhere and few of the endings are pleasant. What matters, if anything does, is not how long we live but how well.
There are two epidemics in the fat west. One is of vanity, the other of longevity. There is no virtue in getting to a hundred. And there is no virtue in fussing about our health.
I come back to Sir Toby Belch, as committed a puller of corks as any Frenchman. 'Dost thou think,' said he to the puritan Malvolio, 'because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Go sir, rub your chain with crumbs.'
