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Staying ‘healthy’ sounds like such a joy. Don’t hold back on the plankton!

Is there anything more restful or restorative than reading about other people’s demented health and exercise regimes? It’s just what you need to prep for Blue Monday.

Last weekend the papers were full of them. There was Alexander, 38, whose day begins with “a glass of Rebel Kitchen pink coconut water” followed by “a shot of activated charcoal”, apple cider vinegar tablets and the close company of a quartz crystal, under his Himalayan salt lamp. Stretching, yoga and “F45 training, an intense fitness regime exercising different parts of your body for 45 minutes” keep him going. “Mood-boarding” often helps his thoughts vibrate.

Tim, 39, starts with shots of probiotics and a plankton supplement before turning on his HumanCharger that shines light into his ear to give him energy. In the evenings he lies in a pressurised oxygen chamber for an hour — for a treat — following that up on Saturdays with a magnesium and amino acids intravenous drip, then a massage. Tim only lets himself watch half of any TV episode “as we only live once”. If that.

Alex and Tim, who I hope are real and not fibbing, are an inspiration, just like all the other exponents of healthy living and clean eating presented every January. Their full routines — these are only highlights — evidently fill their days to the exclusion of almost anything else.

Studying them makes it clear that what these regimes supply most essentially is not probiotics and isotonics, multivitamins and collagens, nootropics and anti-inflammatories, enzymes and electrolytes and all the rest of that twaddle, but meaning and structure.

They are acts of ritual and observance (therefore all the better for being superstitious in origin, of course). They are new religions, confected in the hope of life everlasting. Regard them with compassion, when we’ve finished snorting.

Warmth has got the garden confused

Strange days. It’s mid-January now, yet in Haringey at least, there’s not been even a trace of a frost in the garden. At this time of year it’s usually just the hellebores and Christmas box making a show. But right now primroses are emerging, the mutabilis rose continues to flower and there are still a few blooms on the Mme Alfred Carrière. Not only have the jasmines and deciduous ferns not yet been nipped back, the nicotianas have foolishly started growing again.

The forecasters keep rumbling away about a second Beast from the East. While they last, these soft days are a treat.

Hannibal’s creator breaks his silence

Exciting details of the new Thomas Harris novel have been announced. Cari Mora, to be published on May 16, is his first non-Hannibal Lecter book for 40 years. Reticent as ever, the only quote Harris supplies is that he’s pleased his publisher is publishing his new novel.

There’s an enticing blurb, evidently from a lesser hand. “Monsters lurk in the crevices between male desire and female survival,” it begins. They do, don’t they? Cari, it reveals, is the caretaker of a Miami mansion in which $25 million in cartel gold has been hidden. The loot is being hunted by Hans-Peter Schneider, “driven by unspeakable appetites” — and “Cari catches the eye of Hans-Peter as he closes in on the treasure”. Oh dear! But Cari, a refugee from violence in her native land, has “surprising skills” — a bit like Liam Neeson in Taken? I will be furious if I expire before reading it.

Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (SKY TV)
Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (SKY TV)

Harris’s female characters have always been among his best creations (notably Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs). Nothing could be more promising than to know that his new book is named for his latest.

A penny well spent

The eighth volume of T S Eliot’s letters is set to appear, in 1,100 pages, not all equally thrilling. But there are pleasures. On December 30, 1937, Eliot writes to Polly Tandy: “Have you seen that remarkable Piece in the Standard about Mr Woodiwiss the bull-dog breeder?

Well, it seems Mr Woodiwiss went to a dog show some years ago and he noticed ‘a smell of cats’; so he went upstairs and there was a cat show in progress, and his attention was caught by a short-haired tabby called Champion Xenophon. ‘Within a few minutes he was mine.’ And that’s how Mr Woodiwiss began to breed cats. You do get yr. 1d. worth out of the Evening Standard, and no mistake, every time.” You do, you do.