What to do about crisps and snakes

On diet and poison

I would happily swap most meals for this

Happy new year! Happy new you! I hope you had a lovely Christmas.

I’ve just been reading a piece in The Times about how to lose weight. It’s by a journalist called Peta Bee. According to The Times website, she has written 1650 pieces for the paper, many of them on this very issue.

The latest tells us that “cutting down on alcohol, sugar and foods that are ultra-processed and salty” is “essential”. We should, apparently, get our “daily quota of fibre” and make sure we “take on enough fluids”. Consuming “more plant-based foods”, she tells us, “has the potential to boost your health”.

Who knew? I mean, really, who knew?

Me. I knew. You knew. Pretty much everyone knew who hasn’t been living on Mars.

I am, by the way, so looking forward to the day when Elon Musk climbs into one of his rockets, straps himself in and zooms off, rocks off and f***s off to the planet he is so keen to colonise. I have a long, long, long list of people he can take with him.

But I don’t want to think about Elon Musk today. I don’t want to think about his stupid new name on Twitter/X, “Kekius Maximus”, and his stupid new profile image, a frog in Roman military dress holding what appears to be a game console.

According to the BBC website, Kekius is a Latinisation of "kek", a word that’s roughly equivalent to "laugh out loud". It was, apparently, initially used by gamers but is now often associated with the alt right.

Which is nice.

The richest man in the world, who’s also the second most powerful, is nailing his colours very clearly to his console. He’s making it clear that he thinks he’s playing a game. He thinks we’re his pawns. He thinks it’s funny.

I don’t.

But it’s the third day of a new year and I don’t want to think about Kekius Muskimus or whatever he’s calling himself this morning. I don’t want to think about him or Trump or the terrorist attack in New Orleans, where hundreds of people were celebrating New Year’s Eve.

What kind of a person hires a truck, packs it with home-made bombs and then crashes through a barrier to crush the legs, torsos and organs of men and women trying to mark the start of a new year with a celebration?

An illegal immigrant, according to Donald Trump. An American citizen born and raised in Texas, according to the police. Either way, a man hell bent on hate.

I have had enough of hate.

This is why I’m reading newspaper pieces about eating more vegetables and drinking more water. I have known that this is a good thing to do since I was about five. I have thought I ought to be doing it since I was about fifteen. Almost every year, on New Year’s Day, I read pieces by people in newspapers telling me to do it. Do they tell me anything new? No, they don’t. I read these pieces because I find them soothing. They make me think of the Lord’s prayer, which we all used to mumble at our local C of E church before rushing home to our mother’s roast chicken. Hallowed be thy name, forgive us our trespasses, art in heaven.

This Christmas, I have “trespassed” in the usual way. I have consumed sugar, alcohol, and salty snacks pretty much all day long. And I have loved it. It seems to have turned most of December into a party. I love a party. I love cakes, crisps, crémant, negronis and champagne. I loved the seafood risotto our guests cooked on New Year’s Eve. (That’s the way to do New Year’s Eve! Invite people round and watch them cook! So much more relaxing than schlepping out to pretend to have fun with a bunch of strangers.)

On New Year’s Day, we all decided that we would do something called “dry January”. The idea was that we would purify ourselves by drinking only freshly melted Alpine snow or the closest equivalent we could grab from a supermarket shelf. When the neighbours popped round for a new year’s aperitivo, we cracked. Or perhaps I should say that we boomers cracked. Anthony and I, and two of our house guests, decided it would be bad manners to offer our neighbours drinks and sit there in sack cloth and ashes. Our third house guest, who’s 29, stuck to his resolve.

(That’s the problem with the youngsters. Always shaming their elders and betters. He was also the one who cooked the seafood risotto. That’s the problem with the youngsters. Always shaming their hosts.)

All in all, it was an excellent way to start the year. Delightful people, sparkling conversation and more of the bubbles we had raised with our sparklers at midnight the night before. That’s the tone I wanted at the end of the year. That’s the tone I want for the new one.

Whatever our concern for, er, good manners, no one in that room cared what anyone put in their mouths. Sure, we could all at some stage perhaps do with swapping a few glasses of wine for a few glasses of water. Sure, we could all think about swapping a few bowls of crisps for some cruciferous veg. Our jeans might feel a bit looser if we did and that might be nice. Or it might not. It all depends on what you want. Do you want the crisps or the halo? I will usually plump for the crisps, but I can see that a halo might make a pleasant change.

Eat crisps. Don’t eat crisps. (I will continue to eat crisps, not least since my dear cousin gave me the best ever Crispmas present. Crunch: an ode to crisps. I’m furious that I didn’t write it.) Eat cake. Don’t eat cake. Drink wine. Don’t drink wine. Do whatever makes you happy. If it doesn’t make you happy, eat or drink something else. If you want to be thinner, eat less. If you want to be bigger, eat more. If you want to live for a long time, eat more veg.

Put whatever the hell you like in your mouth. What matters much, much more is what comes out of it.

What comes out of so many people’s mouths these days appears to be pure poison. Musk spews poison. Trump spews poison. Farage spews poison. Whatever Kemi Badenoch says always seems to sound pretty sour. There is so much poison and I am so, so sick of poison.

This Christmas, I’ve had a lovely holiday from poison. I’ve been largely off social media and have barely glanced at the news. I can’t keep off it for ever, of course, not least because I have to talk about it twice a month on Sky News. But I would really, really like to have a bit less poison in my life.

What can we do about the poison? I don’t know. I wish I did. I don’t think we should live in a bubble cut off from the news. We’re all in the same world and we need to engage with it. We need to work out where we can make a difference and where we can’t. To do this, we will all have to work out for ourselves how much exposure we need and how much we can bear.

What I do know is that when a snake bites, you need an antidote. I think we should all try to be the antidote. In 2025, I will eat what I want and drink what I want, but I will try to be an antidote. I want to be an antidote to poison and to snake oil. And I will keep some bubbles chilled, ready for the moment when some of those snakes start to eat each other alive.