Sir, – "Drinking over a bottle of wine a week 'will shorten your life'" (News, April 13th). Am I the only one who is thoroughly sick and tired of this stuff? Covering this same story today, the Guardian headline added the gory detail that one additional glass of wine per day will lower your life expectancy by a full 30 minutes. Wow.
We all have to die sometime. The question is how much we are prepared to deprive ourselves of life’s small pleasures in order to prolong our existence – those last few wonderful weeks in the nursing home that we may miss out on. Over the years I have lost count of the number of things that I have been told are bad for me – in many cases, it being later discovered that actually some of these (butter, for example) were nothing like as harmful as I had been told and might actually do me some good. The ancient Greeks had it right. On one of the portals at the entrance to the temple at Delphi was the warning, “Nothing to excess”. Over two millennia later, this simple formula still remains the best single advice for living a good (and healthy) life. – Yours, etc,
FRANK E BANNISTER,
Dublin 4.