HOWZAT

8 Watching television programmes made by Chris Morris.

9 Enjoying modern art.

10 Taking drugs.

Now I can claim a happy adherence to at least eight of the above Government-designated criminal activities. No, I’m not telling you which ones (and believe me, I’m working on the other two). So I suppose I’m quite a long way down the road to being the very antithesis of all that they want us to be. Looking at the list, it seems to me that they would wish upon us a fairly ascetic and determinedly middle-brow existence; the staples of lumpenprole culture — smoking, bad food, idleness — are disavowed, as are the top-end affections for modern art, drugs, promiscuity and Brass Eye.

They want us to jog and eat salads prior to reading a good — although not too good — book, maybe something by Sebastian Faulks or Ruth Rendell — and all the while bedecked in the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and sipping mineral water. It has the whiff of the church youth club about it, does it not? Although any mention of God is, as ever, most definitely absent — they don’t do God. They wish us instead to live in a sanitised, secular hell. The Prime Minister himself seems to be the living embodiment of clean, healthy, family living. He plays tennis. He doesn’t get pissed or smoke crack. He doesn’t, so far as we are aware, shag around, although one has to say that there is a somewhat unprepossessing pool of potential shagees surrounding him from whom to choose an illicit partner. He eats fish and chips only when he’s about to be photographed by a snapper from a newspaper in the North of England. And, of course, he has occasional chats with Sir Cliff Richard. All of this is very healthy indeed — so it was a surprise to find him in hospital with heart trouble last week.

One wishes him a speedy recovery, of course — and in fact I was tempted to send him a pack or two of Raffles, some vouchers for Burger King and the address of this girl called Tiffany I met in Lexington Street a few months ago. Come on, Tony, I thought to myself, live a little. And check out that list above. Almost everything on it serves as a powerful antidote to stress. Lying on a sofa watching Wife Swap while eating deep-fried Caramac and chugging down cans of Kestrel is about as stress-relieving as it is possible to get.

The more so if high-quality skunk and that nice girl from Lexington Street are involved, somewhere along the line. This is how we live, some of us, and we do it for a reason: we are not blind in the face of evidence, or living a denial. We know that our chosen forms of relaxation carry with them risks. But those risks are outweighed, most of the time, by the burning necessity to alleviate our other, rather pressing needs.

I’m getting a little bored of being told how to live my life. Every time Kim Howells, or Beverley Hughes or any of those anonymous health ministers tells me that something is bad, I make a mental note to transgress at the earliest possible opportunity. This has made for a more interesting life: if it wasn’t for Kim, for example, I wouldn’t have spent half as much time at Tate Modern as I have just lately. Because there is a rather nasty, smug narcissism inherent in these ministerial strictures and, of course, the connotation that they know better than we do. The only possible response is to disobey, often.