We can become modern monks, teetotal, gluten-free, cleansed of all vices, doing as the doctor says, shutting our ears to all the other medics who say something different – some in the pay of the companies that want us to swallow their products, preferably for a decade or several – or we can accept that risk is part of grown-up life and trust our gut instinct.
But once or twice he may have regretted his decision to go teetotal.
Lots of young adults, including students, are opting to go teetotal and binge-drinking is in decline.
The fact that one of the quintet is now teetotal becomes a target of Gary's arch mockery: a man ordering water in a pub, he says, "is like a lion eating hummus".
And going teetotal becomes more of a thing with age, too, although the numbers are still low: "Non-drinkers were uncommon, particularly among men, where the proportion remained under 10percentt until old age, when it rose to above 20percentt among those aged over 90," the research said.
But this series he's gone teetotal because he's decided to become a professional boxer, so it's not been quite as fun".
He became religious in the last years of his life, holding ostentatiously teetotal parties in the West Wycombe's gardens in aid of the "Friends of Order and Sobriety" — these would have been vastly different from the bacchanalian fêtes given by his uncle in the grounds.
When he left university, he became a full-time RSS activist, a pracharak, sworn to a celibate, teetotal, vegetarian life of organisation and propaganda.
He is gay (which his father apparently found "difficult"), teetotal, read English at Cambridge (not at his father's college, Trinity Hall, but at King's), and became the distinguished editor of many classic films, including John Boorman's Deliverance, The Great Gatsby, and Michael Radford's White Mischief.
