“I shall not waste my days,” said Ian Fleming, quoting Jack London, “in trying to prolong them”. The studied loucheness of the epigram would grate had he not lived a life so unwaveringly faithful to it. Gonorrhoea at 19, death at 56, the uncountable Morlands that he smoked in between — the Rake of Oracabessa mastered the lost art of what we can only call unwellness. Oh, for its return.

In the 1970s, medical researchers evolved the concept of Quality-Adjusted Life Years. What mattered was not how much longer a treatment would keep someone alive for, but whether that extension was free from pain and distress. The hard-won reprieve was meaningless if it entailed a living hell.

The modern cult of wellness ignores my own path-breaking addition to science: Pleasure-Adjusted Life Years. A brief, decadent existence can contain more “life”, I submit, than one that is prolonged by fastidious habits and Lenten self-denial. I calculate that, in PALYs, Fleming lived until he was around 90. Christopher Hitchens crammed 85 years into his nominal 62. Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and other members of the 27 Club were all but centurions. As for Isadora Duncan, she is more or less eternal. A stickler for wellness, on the other hand, a customer of Goop, might never see 30.