Healthy appetites
Charles Spencer
There’s nothing like a medical — or, as it is now known, an ‘executive health check’ — to make you feel painfully aware of your own mortality.
As Leonard Cohen mournfully observed on his splendid album I’m Your Man, ‘I ache in the places where I used to play.’ I’m so stiff when I wake up in the mornings — no, madam, no, don’t titter, titter ye not, as dear old Frankie Howerd used to say — that I can barely get out of bed. The lower back appears to have completely seized up overnight and I sometimes actually have to roll out of bed and on to all fours beside it, before painfully heaving myself up into a position approximating the vertical.
So as you can imagine it was with some trepidation that I made my way to the private clinic, clutching various samples. Needs must, however. I know three people of my age or younger (51 this Saturday, since you ask, and a book or record token would be more than acceptable) who have had bowel cancer — and one of them died of it. The faecal occult blood test is apparently a good way of screening for the disease. It occurs to me that Occult Blood would also make a splendid name for a heavy metal band.
Anyway, it was three hours of non-stop probing and testing at the clinic, and considering the hammering I’ve given my body over the years, particularly in the lung (smoking), liver (drinking) and stomach (sheer greed) departments, I seem to have got off remarkably lightly. Needless to say, I was advised to lose a stone in weight and take more exercise, but my fitness level was pronounced above average.
The biggest surprise of all was the lungfunction test, in which you have to blow as hard and fast as you can into a cardboard tube until you’ve expelled every last vestige of air from your lungs and end up as a coughing heap on the floor. I was a star performer here, despite being a 20-a-day smoker before my voice broke and only giving up the fags a few weeks ago.
And here the delightful Scottish physiologist spilled beans that are unlikely to be spilled by the government’s medical advisers. Apparently, until you get struck down by such killer diseases as lung cancer and emphysema, smoking can actually improve your lung capacity. Smokers, you see, use every available square inch of their lungs to get the maximum hit. Non-smokers rarely inhale and exhale to the full extent.
This explains why so many ballet dancers smoke like chimneys (it helps keep the weight off) but still manage to perform. I’ve seen a ballerina pirouette off into the wings, take a couple of drags from the lighted cigarette proffered by an attendant stage hand, and then shimmy back on again with the last of the smoke emerging from her nostrils. Apparently, most of those mad ‘free divers’ who swim to impossible depths on just a single breath of air are heroic smokers, too.
A doctor acquaintance of mine once admitted that smoking five cigarettes a day is virtually harmless, and smoking a great deal more than that isn’t particularly dangerous until you reach the age of 40 or so, when the risk sharply increases. So, kids, keep on puffing. The trick is to remember to give up before it’s too late.
I was feeling pretty good in the clinic until the doc asked me how many cups of tea or coffee I drank each day. ‘About eight,’ I said, automatically reducing the true total by 50 per cent, as addicts do. ‘Two or three a day, at most,’ she replied. Well, I ask you. You give up drink, you give up fags, and then they tell you to cut down on the caffeine. Oh, and to drink two litres of water a day. I have to get up enough times in the night already without an extra two litres of water sloshing around in my bladder.
Leaving the clinic, and seeking an immediate hit of caffeine plus a celebratory Krispy Kreme doughnut to go with it, I realised how absurd it was that a man of my advanced years (with an enlarged prostate to prove it) should still be buying CDs by such absurdly young whippersnappers as the Arctic Monkeys. How can records about telling a girl at a disco that you bet she looks good on the dance floor have anything to do with an old buffer like me? No, never mind giving up the caffeine, it’s time to give up spending a fortune on all those overhyped records by the Next Big Thing that I play once (if that) and never again. And who needs youth, anyway, when you’ve got Haydn, Louis Armstrong and laughing Leonard Cohen to beguile the fretful hours?
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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