I take nutrition as seriously as the next man — that’s if the next man is late-period Elvis

"It’s Dry January all year,” a headline announced yesterday. Public Health England, it’s reported, is this spring going to demand fast-food chains and the manufacturers of ready meals cap calories in their products: lunches and dinners to be 600 calories or less, breakfasts 400. A separate study, meanwhile, concludes that a measly two units of alcohol a day increases your dementia risk. Boo, hiss: right? Maybe.

The main arguments against calorie caps for junk food and sterner alcohol advice are that a) they are illiberal and b) they don’t work. Easy to see how argument a) is made: I could happily cobble together a column from defrosted clichés like “nanny state”, “joyless”, “Big Brother” and “respected nutritionist Gillian McKeith” and it would be gobbled up by those who like that sort of thing. Argument b), likewise. Everyone knows that the “per half pizza” nutrition advice on your Pepperoni Delight has applied to nobody ever, that KFC’s “Bargain Bucket” serves one and that a “sharing pack” of Crunchie Rocks is nothing of the sort.

But there are arguments in favour of nannying. The first is that it’s illiberal, but so what? As long as it’s the taxpayer who’s expected to pick up the bill for your care when your arteries go on strike, or keep you going through 20 years of alcohol-exacerbated dementia, the taxpayer is entitled to a say in how you treat your own body.

The second is that, up to a point, it does work. People are stingy and they can’t be arsed with things. If you make chocolate bars smaller, people will eat smaller chocolate bars. If your ready meal is 600 calories, you’ll feel a bit cheated — but not enough to stumble out into the night and buy a whole new one. There’s no non-totalitarian way of preventing someone from eating two ready meals, but you’ll have a statistically significant effect on obesity if you can prevent one ready meal from being the equivalent of one and a half. The “nudge”, across a population, works.

I take nutrition as seriously as the next man; and — spiritually speaking — my neighbour is late-period Elvis. My lonely supper on Saturday consisted of half a family bag of crispy chicken strips from Iceland, paired with an entire garlic baguette. (Eat like this and you, too, can have a body like mine.)

I thought of boiling some peas but it would only have created more washing-up, not to mention needlessly introducing cutlery to the occasion, and garlic bread contains parsley, which is a green vegetable. Through most of my twenties I considered myself undernourished if I had had fewer than three pints of lunch.

I am exercising my rights as a freeborn Englishman. But, obviously, if I keel over tomorrow afternoon and am wheeled into A&E to have an emergency lardectomy that will be my own stupid fault. But the risk would be less had that garlic baguette been 10 per cent smaller.

Respect to one awesome oarsman

“My old mate George Biggar is rowing across the Atlantic,” my younger brother Jack told me over Christmas. I remember thinking, coo: that one-ups the half-marathons you see people boasting about on Facebook. Then, blow me: this weekend the same amiable figure I remember from his teenage years was splattered all over the news, bearded and ripped of torso, having not only completed his crossing but won the race and smashed the world record in the process. The Four Oarsmen of whom he is one deserve all our admiration. What an adventure! And at last, proof: Biggar is bettar.

* What conclusions are we to draw from the dismaying story of Philippa Molloy? Having been placed on a women-only psychiatric ward during a psychotic episode in which she believed men were conspiring to kill her, Molloy found herself sharing the six-bed ward with a trans person described as “extremely male-bodied”. She freaked out — and says when a nurse later told her they were “really surprised to read your opinions about trans people” she felt she was being painted as a “transphobic bigot”.

Having thought this one through to the best of my meagre abilities, I conclude that there are pretty much no conclusions to be drawn from it at all. Outliers such as this generate heat rather than light.

It’s hard to expect someone in the grip of psychosis to show impeccable consideration for the feelings of those around them; and, equally, making a thundering conclusion about NHS policy towards trans people seems a bit of a reach too. A little joined-up thinking, when both patients were admitted, might have avoided the whole brouhaha.

* What would you do if the three-minute warning sounded? The people of Hawaii got to find out when, thanks to an administrative error, mobile phone users were sent a text announcing: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” No doubt it was traumatising, terrifying, unspeakable. But imagine the relief! And imagine, too, how alive you would feel afterwards.

I’m not recommending this exercise be repeated but I hope some good came of it: priorities readjusted; dull marriages invigorated; parents told their kids love them; or even, as in Roger McGough’s poem At Lunchtime, an outbreak of random love-making on public transport. Aloha!