HERE are two stories hand-pulled from the pumps. They are local to York but with resonance.

The first concerns the Blue Bell, a small Edwardian pub that is one of York’s cherished curiosities. The Blue Bell has a  frontage of red tiles and a window bearing the words “Blue Bell”. Inside the pub is no less distinctive. A tight corridor runs down the left-hand side of the narrow building. Immediately to the right, a door leads to the small front room, while a few steps further takes you to the equally tiny back room. The bar sits between and swings both ways.

Not much more to the place than that, except there is everything to it. The unchanging nature of the Blue Bell is a comfort in times when everything else changes.

The landlord is called John Pybus. I’ve met John once or twice (honest disclosure: my son is a friend) but I don’t know him beyond those brief encounters.

John is a lively, characterful landlord, a pub natural who chats to anyone and whizzes about with energy. He is also still young, and that gives him a turbo-boost missing in some long-term landlords.

While the Blue Bell is small, it is part of something much bigger, and that’s where the story gets ugly. The giant pubco Punch Taverns are the owners and they want John out.

YorkMix website covered this story well and in detail a couple of weeks ago. A recent update reported that more than 1,500 people had signed a petition demanding that this popular landlord be allowed to stay. According to York Camra on Twitter, that figure has risen to 4,500.

The reasons for the argument are complicated but are captured here in a catch-up paragraph from YorkMix: “Essentially, it boils down to this. John exercised his legal right as the tenant of the Fossgate pub to negotiate a fair market rent and opt out of the beer tie, which meant he had to buy all his beer from the pubco at inflated expense.”

Punch Taverns are said to operate in this manner often. What should concern us, along with the appalling treatment of a popular landlord, is the idea of a treasured pub being owned by a distant, unsympathetic corporation. Across town, the Golden Ball, an old-school pub that faced oblivion, is now successfully owned by the locals. That would be a dream solution for the Blue Bell.

I’ve signed the petition to keep John Pybus at the pub, and if you live in York and like pubs, you should too.

The other pub story is that a micro-brewer called Crooked Brewing wants to open a craft ale bar facing Acomb Green. That’s a short walk from where we live and follows the opening of a small but top-notch beer shop, and a new fruit and veg/deli. All good news for an area that has been rather down-trodden; or so you might have thought.

The Press recently reported an objection to the micro-brewery bar. One objection, mind – and a complaint surely outweighed by all the supportive comments beneath the story online.

The objector moaned about opening a bar so close to a children’s play area across the road, fearing that drinkers will “infringe on a family area”. Local knowledge note: the proposed bar is two doors down from the Sun Inn that been there since 1838, with a longer history under different names.

The anonymous misery said the area did “not need another alcohol related establishment and the inevitable alcohol related issues”.

Ah, yes – those also related issues are a worry. If you ask me, the place will be full of middle-aged men trying the beer and having friendly chats/grumbles about life. And I’ll be joining that happy unthreatening throng.

Not for the first chuckle-some time, the Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph nails the moment. A man peers round a door into a committee room and says: “Is this the secret plot against Jeremy Corbyn, or the secret plot against Theresa May?”

Matt is even-handed with the irreverence, as shown today, and usually finds an askance way to the funny-bone.

More widely this morning, the headlines divide between Mrs Maybe’s Brexit bother, Jeremy Corbyn’s antisemitism troubles, and Chris Evans leaving BBC Radio 2.

I’ve never really got Chris Evans, didn’t like him on Top Gear, and felt that the weight of coverage of his exit yesterday on the BBC was absurdly over-the-top. But in defence of the BBC over-covering itself, Evans is all over the newspapers today as well.

But he’s not all over this ledge, as that previous paragraph contains all the topic deserves, except to add: please find someone who doesn’t cost licence-fee payers £1.6m a year, for heaven’s sake.

Does Brexit deserve more coverage? Oh, we’re stuck with that for now – or possibly until the last phlegmy cough before doomsday.

The front of the Daily Express – or the Brexit Bugle, if you prefer – has Boris Johnson and Theresa May in a face-off with the headline “BORIS v MAY”. That ‘Boris’ is there for typographical reasons, I guess, in that ‘Johnson’ would bust the character count. But it’s telling that he gets the chummy first name, while Theresa is stuck with her surname.

This latest display of Johnson trying to grab the wheel from Mrs Maybe is once again thanks to his column in the Daily Telegraph. It’s astonishing the way that whole newspaper seems to have been kidnapped by Johnson in the important business of keeping himself nailed to the ship of British life, like a mock-cheery figurehead squinting at the waves.

It is the habit on this ledge to conclude that Johnson is a ruthless, self-serving schemer who merely pretends to be a characterful bumbler. But let’s hand the man one thing: he can write in that colourful manner favoured by columnists everywhere.

In his column, he compared the last leg of the Brexit negotiations to an old-style wrestling match…

“The whole thing is about as pre-ordained as a bout between Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy; and in this case, I am afraid, the inevitable outcome is a victory for the EU, with the UK lying flat on the canvas with 12 stars circling symbolically over our semi-conscious head…”

As someone who pats words about, I’d say that was pretty good; but as someone who remains determined to dislike Johnson, I’d also say: “Look beyond the colourful words.”

I hardly ever feel sorry for Theresa May, but a flush of empathy does arise whenever she is sabotaged yet again by the man with the incredible hulking ego. The official Downing Street response to Johnson’s column lambasting Mrs Maybe’s Chequers plan was the quote: “There’s no new ideas in this plan to respond to.”

That is a terrible sentence, but a true one.

The Johnson plan is always the ‘me manifesto’. There is no plan other than the one where he gets to be prime minister.

Incidentally, that glow of empathy for Mrs Maybe never lasts long. Soon enough I remember all the terrible things she has done, and again start to mutter the words ‘hostile environment’. And after that, I feel better for no longer feeling remotely sorry for her any more.

This one sounds fresh and dated in the same harmonious breath. Its arrival in August 1974 was dismissed by Graham Nash as “absurd” as by that stage the band had released precisely two albums.

Absurd perhaps, but profitable; So Far went gold straight away. Later CD compilations have removed the need for this ‘best of’, but here it is anyway, complete with scratches, country harmonies and the occasional wash of enjoyable hippie nonsense/nostalgia.

Crosby, Still and Nash had an on-off relationship with Neil Young, who only appears on four on the chosen tracks. To these ears, his contributions are the strongest, notably Ohio and Helpless, for at his best Young has the darker edge.

Other highlights in this dusty collection include two Nash numbers: Teach Your Children and Our House. Also holding up the standard is the long closing track Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, the melding together of four short songs by Stephen Stills in honour of his relationship with folk singer Judy Collins; the song ends with a life-lifting Latin climax, of all the unlikely but loveable things.

Jazzy, dreamy opener Déjà Vu and the Joni Mitchell song Woodstock add to the memories through a haze of joss-sticks and other questionable burning substances.

Ironically, Mitchell hadn’t been to Woodstock at all, but wrote the song after hearing tall festival tales from then boyfriend Nash.

Crosby, Stills and Nash brought together former members of Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and The Hollies, and were sometimes dubbed the “American Beatles” (not sure that stands up).

Adding Neil Young to the line-up gave heft and muscle to the band’s dynamic, and of the four, he’s still the one to listen to.

“Costa purchase takes Coke into coffee battle” – The Financial Times

I like a good coffee as much as the next caffeine-addled person of disrupted sleep patterns. But you won’t catch me in a Costa.

The news that the British coffee chain has been bought by Coca Cola for £3.9bn shows that coffee has become even bigger business than we thought. Which is funny because you won’t catch me with a bottle of coke in my hand either (horrid, over-sweet mouthfuls of dark nothing much).

In the parental branch of this family, we only drink local coffee. The beans aren’t grown hereabouts, of course, but the coffee is served in local shops and not chains. There are plenty around and York is full of them, removing the need to visit the likes of Costa and drink the so-so coffee.

The reasons for shunning the big boys are partly ideological, with local small-scale capitalism being preferable to the mammoth, world-denting kind. And because the coffee’s better, along with the chat usually, too.

Coffee is the simple crop that grew to dominate the world and make millions for corporations. Now you can’t avoid corporations altogether, but you can try not to drink their coffee or buy their beer.

Perhaps there is a misguide romanticism in all this, but I’m sticking to these sketched-out rules for life and coffee and assorted stopping-off points in between.

The day always starts with tea – leaf tea, made in a pot and left to stand for four minutes. There is no other way a day should start, although plenty of people plunge straight in with the coffee.

At home we grind the beans and use a cafetiere. Or an ancient stove-top espresso pot. Or an Aero-Press vacuum plunger. Or a simple one-cup filter. Or a dripping mug-topper thing bought for work years ago. Oh, the ways of making coffee in this house are many.

The beans are nearly always the same good Italian roast ones. But this doesn’t impress son number one. He has his beans sent monthly in the post by a specialist company and wouldn’t give a bean for our beans.

The beans we buy are Fair Trade or something similar, a salve to the caffeinated conscience. I hope the people who grow the beans earn a bean or two.

Costa is owned by Whitbread, once famed brewers of beer. The company started in London and was controlled by the Whitbread family from 1742 to 1992. Will those Whitbread family ghosts be happy or horrified at the way things turned out?

The company started diversifying a long time ago. People who grew up in and around Manchester will remember that Boddington’s beer was once a sound local brew. A hoppy, straw-hued beer with a creamy white head. Well, Whitbread bought up Boddies and put the beer in cans with widget things to keep that head. And it was never the same.

Whitbread sold off the brewing business in 2000 and offloaded its pubs the following year. The beer legacy is now owned by the global brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev – and if there is a more depressing notion than a ‘global brewer’, then I can’t think of it right now.

Global coffee, global beer, global tooth-rot black water – that’s the world we live in but try to avoid. We don’t need global beer in York as we have Brew York, who make splendid beer right here. Let’s hope and pray that no one ever buys them out.

THE world’s most widely read African novel may be considered a strange place to start when considering Frank Field resigning the Labour whip over the antisemitism crisis.

The reason lies in the title of Chinua Achebe’s acclaimed novel, widely read perhaps, but not by me (an oversight to correct). Another reason, perhaps, lies in Theresa May having just visited Nigeria, where Achebe was born in 1930, on her pre-Brexit dance tour of three African countries.

That slightly desperate trip has already been discussed on this ledge, although that was before those shameful moves. Mrs Maybe being terrible at dancing will do her no harm, as many people are similarly afflicted. Her robotic shuffle and weird jerking of the arms will be familiar to dancefloor refuseniks everywhere.

The title of the novel by Achebe is Things Fall Apart. It was there in a corner of the mental attic, and a quick Google pulled the name from the dust.

The novel is set at the end of the 19^th century and offers an insight on life in pre-colonial Nigeria and the cataclysmic changes brought about by the British. More widely, it also considers the “falling apart” of indigenous cultures in other countries.

Anyway, Frank Field. The veteran Labour MP has resigned his party’s whip over the antisemitism crisis. He says he was pushed over the edge by the former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks saying Jeremy Corbyn’s comment about Zionists not understanding irony was as offensive as Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech.

Labour dismissed the comparison with Powell as “absurd and offensive”.

Let’s agree that it is just that. But a smouldering fire that should have been put out months ago has carried on burning. Those flames have been fanned by Corbyn’s enemies, for sure: by those opposed to him within Labour, and by old external foes such as the Daily Mail.

Whatever you think of this row, and it still seems unfathomable, Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t put out that fire.

Frank Field says his resignation of the whip should be a wake-up call about antisemitism within Labour, and about a culture of nastiness in his party.

Dip your toe into the Twitter pool and you will find plenty of disobliging comments about Field, who is nearly 80 and has been a Labour MP for 40 years.

Instead of passing on anything like that, here is a thought from fellow Labour MP Mary Creagh: “Frank Field gave 40 years’ service to Labour, got £280m off Philip Green for BHS pensioners, fights child poverty & hunger. That his local party want to deselect him speaks volumes about the state of our Party.”

Field has often seemed an odd fit, as a devout Christian, admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and the man once charged by Tony Blair to “think the unthinkable” about the welfare state.

Oh, but I don’t wish to delve deeper into that pool. Let’s just say that the mention of Blair – a trigger insult to the Corbyn crew – should at least remind us that in the early days New Labour was brutally efficient in its media strategy. Not something you could say about Corbyn.

Blair arrived shiny and new, and all his faults lay before him; Corbyn arrived wrinkled with experience, and his faults, as well as his good points, lay behind him, waiting to be discovered.

Things Fall Apart. That should be the worry for Labour. The tiles are slipping from the roof and blaming and shouting and factionalism won’t do anything to appeal to ordinary voters. And in the end, they are more important than the ardent disciples.

Things Fall Apart is also a fitting image for Brexit Britain, as the tiles crash around us, and the barmy Brixiteers shout ever louder for what looks more and more like a post-apocalyptic future, rather than the green pastures as once so falsely advertised.

THE baby had just been born and there was a new job at a thriving newspaper in York. Thirty years on, the boy is a primary school teacher and the newspaper is no longer thriving.

Our move north came about at an age when people are now said to be turning their backs on London. We’d both grown up in the north and going back made sense.

It was a good move, even if staying in London would have been better for my career. And my wife gave up her job, too.

It was a confusing, all-consuming time, as it is when the first baby arrives. We stayed with the in-laws for six months while looking for somewhere to live. When we bought the house, we decorated at night, then drove back to Wetherby, often in the autumn fog. Once my wife had to open the passenger door on the MG Metro to check where the road was.

A long time ago, and now we have three grown-up children. None of them  wants to live in London, and who can blame them? It’s a shame, in a sense, as London is a good playground when you are young. Or it was. My knowledge probably needs an update.

I had a great time in south east London working on a newspaper that’s no longer around (bit of a theme going on here). On Saturdays, I did shifts at the Observer (still around, fingers crossed).

All that went with the move, but York’s a top place to live and we’re not aiming to go anywhere else.

According to a report in the Guardian, by financial writer Patrick Collinson, a record proportion of Londoners are selling up to buy cheaper property in the Midlands and the north.

He was commenting on research by agents Hamptons International that found the number of Londoners leaving the capital had tripled since 2010.

Those leaving pay an average of £424,610 for their new property. That buys a “large detached house in a good suburb of Birmingham” or “a two-bed flat above a shop in east London”.

That difference shows you the madness of London prices: not far off half a million for a flat above a shop in an area that would have been considered rough in our day but is now trendy and desirable. Or a proper house in the proper north (or Midlands).

Our flat in London cost £40,000 and sold 18 months later for around £20,000 more than that – enough to buy a three-bedroom house in York. That house was expensive in York terms, as prices had just shot up.

Also in the Guardian, Helen Pidd, the north of England editor, wrote about how she longed to live in London when she was growing up in Lancashire. That’s what she did for most of her 20s. “It was mega,” she writes.

Living in a damp basement was less mega by the time she hit 30, so she headed back. Now she lives in a suburb of Stockport in a four-bedroom house with a view of Kinder Scout from her bedroom window.

Before writing this opinion piece, Helen appeared on last Sunday’s Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4, talking to young people who’d left, or stayed in the north, or gone to London reluctantly for work.

Two of our three live in York. The eldest boy has always lived here, apart from university. The middle boy lives in Salford and loves Manchester. I share an enthusiasm for that city, too, and can see where he’s coming from (or gone too).

Our youngest is back in York after a year in Australia, new job, new shared rented house, with dreams of travelling again at some time.

Only the eldest has a mortgage for a dinky flat bang in the middle of York. It’s lovely but tiny and any cats swung in there would need short tails.

The middle boy is coming up to the age we were when we bought our flat, and he’d like to buy.

All of them want to stay in the north. The days when London was the place to be are long gone. As a northerner by inclination, if not birth or accent, that strikes me as a wholesomely wonderful thing.

IN the news today, Brexit. Oh, there’s no need to make that face, as we’ll not be shaking off that pestilence for a while yet.

Mrs Maybe is heading to Africa to drum up post-Brexit business. As she put on her safari suit, and took her pained smile out of the freezer, where she is rumoured to keep it between public appearances, she said a no-deal Brexit “wouldn’t be the end of the world”.

And she said this while going to the ends of the world to patch up the Brexit holes in the British economy. Of course, Africa isn’t the end of the world if you live there: Britain is.

In readiness for another trip to faraway places to atone for breaking with that near trading place called Europe, Mrs Maybe issued one of those zinging statements that so often put us all at ease.

What she said, or possibly mumbled between gritted teeth, was that the government was “putting in place the preparation such that if we are in that situation, we can make a success of it, just as we can make a success of a good deal”.

Words to make you worry that the art of oratory should be reported missing to the police.

For some reason, her leaden prose summoned the black spot. This, you will recall, is the pirate curse; or perhaps you will recall it after a quick Google, as I did.

Robert Louis Stevenson created the black spot in his novel Treasure Island as an indicator of guilt in an accused pirate. This marker consisted of a circular piece of card or paper, blackened on one side, with the other side containing a message. The message wasn’t usually good news and could lead to a pirate being deposed or killed.

If you see Theresa May glancing at her hand while she is on her African shopping trip, she’ll be checking for that pirate curse, as placed there by her feuding ‘friends’ in the Tory party. So far, it must be said, all that’s been written on the reverse is one word: “Brexit.” But that’s a mighty curse for the prime minister and the rest of us.

While Mrs Maybe is meeting officials in Keyna, South Africa and Nigeria, back home the pirates in all parties will be preparing for six months of full-on political drama.

Never a bad thing to get out of the house and have a break, especially when the place is in such a mess.

But it is easy to detect a sense of desperation in Mrs Maybe’s trips abroad. For if we hadn’t got ourselves into this anti-Europe tangle, there would be no need for all the desperate glad-handing in far-flung places.

The Brexit buccaneers such as Jacob Rees-Moog (sorry, but that’s his name now: see Sunday’s blog) seem to be harking back to the days of Empire, when we ‘owned’ large parts of the world and took along the pink paint to prove squatters’ rights.

The whole Brexit vision thing is simply looking back to a dusted-off so-called golden past to reimagine a possibly bleak future.

Mrs Maybe’s own chancellor said last week that a no-deal Brexit would cost £80 billion in extra borrowing and inhibit long-term economic growth. But she’s having none of that and has another zippy line up her sleeve – “What we are doing is just sitting down, getting on with the work.”

Meanwhile, on No Treasure Island, the bickering continues about whose fault all this might be. David Cameron’s, of course, although that’s an old story now.

‘Pill beats middle-aged spread’ is a story in the headlines today. I just took mine out for a five-mile run instead.

A man from the National Obesity Forum tells the Times that a drug that will safely suppress appetite will be “the holy grail in obesity medication”.

According to the Telegraph, four out of ten of those who take lorcaserin “lost a significant amount of weight over the course of a year”. Now I’m no mathematician, but that implies that the other six didn’t lose a significant amount of weight.

I don’t like taking pills but might stretch a point for one that would reduce the stomach. My middle-aged spread hasn’t spread as far as some but it’s there for sure.

At a family party a few months back, my wife told me that I was now as fat as my brothers. To be fair, that’s a mischievous mishearing. What she said was that I could no longer claim to be the slimmest brother, or something.

Meeting brothers as you age is like looking into a real-life mirror. Their changing shape, their lines, their receding hairlines – they’re all yours, too. It’s a comfort in a sense, and yes, I am leading the way for disappearing hair.

At that party I overheard one brother say to the other: “Oh, I’m alright but could do with losing a stone.”

Ah, yes, brother where art thou on the scales? About the same as me and him.

Last week I weighed myself and got a shock. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry, as shocks at this age aren’t said to be good for you.

“Slim arms, slim legs and something going awry in the middle” sums up the problem. Perhaps there is a pill that stops you spreading butter on that left-over slice of bread. Or pinching muesli from the big glass jar. Or liking to drink beer. Or having a fancy for cheese on toast. Or a pill to make wine taste awful. Or a pill that stops apple crumble being the food of the gods. And so on.

I am a little dismayed by my stomach, even if it isn’t as large as some. Two games of squash, a game of badminton, a bit of cycling and a run every week used to suppress that stomach. But not so much now.

The runs aren’t as swift as they used to be, and anyway they were never that swift. If I keep this up, the incremental decline will see me going out for a shuffle in a few years.

But back to that pill. According to the Guardian, a US study saw 12,000 people who were either obese or overweight shedding an average of 9lbs in 40 months.

Next to that story is a link to another. This has the headline: “Poor sleep makes people pile on the pounds, study finds.”

Oh, great. Dare I click on that or not?

Yawns instead…

HERE is a mistake spotted last night. I pass it on because it had a cheering effect.

A writer on the Irish newspaper accidentally rechristened that arch Brexit bully Jacob Rees-Mogg in a way that tickled, and we all need a tickle nowadays.

Incidentally, no slight is intended on the writer of the piece, as we all do these things. I just typed “William Rees-Mogg”, stiff-backed father to the appalling son.

Incidentally times two, that occasionally disinterred TV footage of Jacob Rees-Mogg as a 12-year-old in a stiff suit reading The Times just shows we’ve been indulging the man for far too long. And look where it’s got us.

Anyway, that mistake.

Throughout a report on Brexit, he was referred to as Jacob Rees-Moog. This raise a smile at the end of a shift busy with the Pope’s visit to Ireland.

This amused me on two grounds.

One, it just sounded funny. Two, as ageing music fans will know, a Moog is a sort of synthesizer. Not only that, it is an analogue (or analog) synthesizer. That means it’s a pre-digital instrument. As is Jacob Rees-Moog himself, a man from a pre-modern era who wants to hasten us back to a dark new future in which wealthy financiers such as himself will be free to be even wealthier

It is often said, rightly, that the BBC has been much too tolerant of Brexit midwife Nigel Farage over the years (call the midwife – oh, please, don’t). The breath of institutional laziness has helped to keep Farage in the air for far too long. And look where it got us (times two).

The same is true of the Moog man. No discussion of Brexit on the BBC is complete without Jacob Rees-Mogg being given yet another platform from which to rumble and moan. And there he stands like an upper-class undertaker ready to pick a pocket or two, or possibly a million, as he drones out his usual pro-Leave hymn (onward cross-eyed soldiers).

The bad boys of Brexit all went into meltdown on Friday with plenty of ‘Project Fear’ ranting, and all because the chancellor, Philip Hammond, said a no-deal Brexit could have “large financial consequences”.

The Tory MP Marcus Fysh hit out at “another instalment of dodgy Project Fear”, the Brexit-blighted Daily Express let out a shriek of “Project Fear 2.0”, and the Daily Mail went all nursery room on us with “Eeyore Hammond launches Project Fear (Pt 2)”.

Mail launches Project Brexit (Pt two million and two).

I have always thought that Project Fear was just Project Sensible Concern About All This Over-Heated Brexit Shit As No One Has A Clue Where It Will All End. Not snappy, but it gets the message across.

Today’s Project Fear story is that a no-deal Brexit could bugger up next year’s Grand National, according to the British Horseracing Authority. This is because crashing out of the EU would potentially hit Irish trainers and Irish Horses. At present a Tripartite Agreement system allows horses to be moved between the UK, France and Ireland.

Horseracing passes me by, much like the bouncing jockeys and their skinny arses, but this latest Project Fear story suggests that just about nothing has been thought through at all.

But never mind. I’m sure the Rees-Moog pre-modern synthesizer will be along in a moment with another stern graveside lecture.

LAST night I ‘celebrated’ the latest advice on alcohol consumption with one bottle of beer, followed by a small tin.

The message from this latest study, and don’t worry there’s bound to be another along soon, is that no alcohol is safe to drink.

The Global Burden of Disease study, published in the Lancet, looked at levels of drinking and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK, between 1990 and 2016.

It’s all there on the BBC website, should you wish to depress yourself. The headline figure compared people who did not drink at all with those who had one drink a day.

Here’s something to swill round your mouth…. “They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day.”

An extra four people a day might not sound like a lot, and that’s because it’s not. Two drinks a day, and 63 more developed ‘a condition’ and for five drinks a day, an extra 338 people developed a health problem. And so gloomily on.

Two years ago, the government cut the recommended levels of alcohol to 14 units a week: that’s equivalent to six pints of average strength beer or seven glasses of wine.

I never drink as much beer as that in a week, but I do drink wine as well, usually a shared bottle a week, so let’s call it quits.

This study made me feel grumpy. Perhaps that’s because I kid myself about what I drink, although I think I know what passes these lips. And drinking is enjoyable, the taste, the unwinding, the pleasure of it all.

Perhaps I drink too much wine at the weekends, especially if my wife isn’t bothered. But the drinking days are followed by three or four non-drinking days, and that suits me fine.

The BBC report fizzed with alarming facts and figures, popped with enough statistics to give you a black eye. But I don’t think it will change the way I drink.

A parting quote said more than all the other alarmist slaps about the face. It was from another professor, and what a lot of those there are to go around (I even have one for a brother).

Prof David Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge – a title so long he probably pulls it around on wheels.

“Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention,” the wise prof said. “There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.

“Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

Give that man another title. How right he is. There is no safe level of anything, everything comes with risks. Being alive is a risk; stepping outside and breathing the traffic-fogged air is a risk; turning on the news and being assaulted by the latest Brexit idiocies or Trump tantrums is a risk of fatally ruining your mood.

Oh, it’s all a risk. I shall stick to what I consider to be moderate drinking, if that’s all right with you and all those tongue-tutting profs. Spiegelhalter is the man for me, and “there is no safe level of living” is my new motto.

Of course, it is possible to be a hypocrite about all this. All the advice about not smoking seems sensible to me, but then I stopped having the occasional cigar about 35 years ago. Smoking is worse than drinking, so it’s fine for the government to offer advice on that. But because I like drinking, anti-alcohol advice is irritating.

But I’ll carry on being a hypocrite if that’s all right, although maybe some nights I’ll skip that second tin.