In a word . . . Puritan

I do not like them, those glum neo-Puritans. Those who have assumed it as a mission in life to make misery. Those who lacerate our simple pleasures, relentlessly, our fleshy ways and desires. They would have us reduced to concept, without body or local habitation. Just a name.

It can seem they have an inbuilt detestation for ordinary, flabby humanity. So they’ve taken away our cigarettes, our beer, our red meat, rashers, sausages, eggs and now our sugar. No more sweets to the sweet.

If we like it, they don’t. So they aim for the tender spot – anxiety about health to which all flesh is heir.

They warn that if we go against their counsel, the wages of our sin will be death. Soon. Yet, and as I saw on Facebook recently, "if you eat well, sleep well, exercise often and only drink water, you too will die". Indeed, should you attempt to live like that you could end up half in love with easeful death.

They are not put off. Where they are concerned it is, as Mark Twain once said, a case of "the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not".

Or, as Woody Allen put it, "you can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred".

So dear reader, take no heed of these pale, thin killjoys who take out their lack of delight in living on the rest of us and/or who have turned into careers the punishment of all fun in our lives.

Tell them to be off. Quote Sir Toby Belch at them: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Follow that with quotes from the Bible.

From Ecclesiastes: "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry".

Or Isaiah: "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die." Going therefore, do ye likewise.

Puritan: a person who adheres to a strict moral code or religious principle, particularly opposed to luxury and sensual enjoyment. Believed derived from purity, itself from the Latin purus, meaning clean, pure, unmixed, chaste, undefiled.

[ inaword@irishtimes.com ]