I’m thoroughly sick of people telling us how we should live.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/healthy_living - stuff like this....

Although I personally try to lead a healthy and active lifestyle, and don’t feel that I m in a position to lecture to others how best to live their lives-if you want to sit about your sofa and eat pizza by all means do so… Similarly, I am an ex-smoker and although I am now vehemently anti-smoking I recognise the individual’s right to smoke. Except in restaurants, you filthy, dirty bastards…

I am writing this as it seems increasingly difficult to escape from this attitude in the media. I also don’t like it because it is cheap and easy journalism-everyone knows what’s bad for them, and what it will do to us. Everyone with any sense has looked at the facts and decided on their own “enjoyment”:”fear of early death” ratio, so it’s all preaching to the converted really-nothing anyone says will make a blind bit of difference. We don’t need more programs telling us that if we eat chips every day we get fat, ugly and can’t walk up stairs as we are fully aware of it. If you aren’t aware of it you are too stupid to live and will drown in your own fat. If it was something we worried about we do something about it, if it isn’t we don’t.

Health and fitness wasn’t something we used to worry about, people just got on with their lives. My grandfather smoked about 40 cigarettes a day and drank several pints of mild during lunchtime, but got his fitness and prodigious strength from being a steelworker, and also from carrying with him at all other times a life size cast metal statue of a beagle.

Lumping around this huge lump of metal gave him enormous amounts of endurance and amazing upper body strength with a grip like a vice.

I remember as a child watching him flex his biceps and saying to me “Look at that lad! Look at the size of them! That’s all down to my brass hound.”

After his untimely death in the early 90’s the brass beagle was passed into the hands of my eldest cousin Michael, who is now a veritable goliath of a man.

There's a moral there somewhere...