London - Funny, isn’t it, what some people find amusing.
The moment my boss heard about the new online test to tell us how likely we are to die within the next five years, his eyes lit up.
There was no doubt about who should try it out, he said. Clearly, this was a job for chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, chip-loving, sedentary, 61-year-old Tom Utley - of all the Mail’s columnists, surely the most likely to pop his clogs before 2020.
Of course, a charitable explanation of his choice of guinea-pig might be that he hoped the test would persuade me to change my unhealthy ways, and so prolong my life. But if you had seen the malicious gleam behind his smile, as I did, you would know that this was the last thing on his mind.
No, he just thought this might have the makings of an amusing column - and the higher my likelihood of imminent death turned out to be, the more side-splittingly hilarious for everyone.
Ah, well, I didn’t get where I am today by disobeying bosses’ orders. And, anyway, wasn’t he right to treat this as just a bit of fun? I mean, who could possibly take a simple 13-question test (11 for women) seriously enough to believe it offered a credible guide to any individual’s life-expectancy? PR companies launch such unscientific stunts all the time. Ha! This one didn’t scare me in the least.
Or so I thought, when I accepted the challenge. It was only when I looked more deeply into this particular test that I began to have misgivings.
For a start, the UbbLE UK Longevity Explorer is not the work of some fly-by-night marketing firm, trying to flog fitness apps or rowing machines. It’s the fruit of alarmingly respectable research, published in this week’s Lancet medical journal and based on data provided by no fewer than 500 000 volunteers in the UK Biobank study.
If these pukka scientists claimed to have isolated the 13 most reliable indicators of a male UK citizen’s life expectancy, perhaps I shouldn’t laugh.
Oh, lawks, I thought. Though my unwholesome habits may suggest I sneer defiantly into the face of death, the truth is that I’d very much rather not know how much longer I have left. Indeed, this is the main reason for my extreme fear of doctors, which has kept me away from the GP’s surgery throughout my adult life.
I also remembered a very dear friend on another paper who, still in her early 30s, volunteered as a guinea-pig to take a new fertility test for a colleague who was writing a feature about it.
Brave though she was and is, she was devastated when the results showed she could never have children. How much better and kinder if she’d been able to hope for a while longer.
But orders are orders, and it would be unutterably wet of me to chicken out. So I took a deep breath, logged on to www.ubble.co.uk and with a thumping heart prepared for the worst. Reader, it wasn’t so bad.
Of the questions I’d been dreading -about my allergy to exercise and addictions to nicotine, alcohol, red meat, butter and cream - the only one thought sufficiently relevant to appear among the 13 main indicators of life expectancy was, inevitably, about smoking.
But even this didn’t inquire how many cigarettes I smoked a day, asking merely: “Do you smoke tobacco now?” The alternative-choice answers were: “Yes, most or all days/ only occasionally/ no.” (In my case, they could have left that ‘s”off the end of ‘all days”.)
As for the rest, they wanted to know nothing about my boozing, diet or fitness regime (which consists of a short daily walk to the pub and the tobacconist).
Instead, they asked such surprising things as how many cars I own, how many people live with me and how we are related, how I would describe my usual walking pace (“brisk” - I like to get it over with) and: ‘In the last two years have you experienced any of the following conditions: serious illness, injury or assault to yourself or a close relative; death of a close relative; death of a spouse or partner; marital separation or divorce; financial difficulties.’
It was the car question that puzzled me most, until I worked out what I imagine to be the logic behind it: the more we own, the wealthier we are likely to be, and the rich live longer than the poor.
But though I have only one car - and the smoking question aside - I was beginning to think I might emerge from this test with a longer life expectancy than my boss hoped. Long enough, at least, to finish this column.
Indeed, this feeling turned to certainty when I reached questions nine, ten and 11. For all of these begin with the words: “Has your doctor ever told you that you have…” before going on to list a range of disorders from diabetes and cancer to heart attack, angina, stroke and high blood pressure. Now, the great thing about never seeing our doctors, no matter how ill we may feel, is that they can never tell us bad news - and speaking for myself, I haven’t had a medical examination for some 40 years. So, no, a doctor has never told me any of these scary things. Full marks and a long life to me!
If I just keep avoiding the surgery, and buy another couple of jalopies, I should be able to cancel out the harmful effects of my smoking and live for ever…
All right, I admit it, something may have gone wrong with my logic there. As the researchers are the first to admit, their 13 criteria - identified as the most reliable indicators from a range of 655 health, lifestyle and demographic measurements - cannot actually predict whether or not a given individual will live until 2020.
They can tell us only what percentage of others survived more than five years after giving similar answers to ours.
For a more reliable prediction, they would have to ask an almost infinite number of questions. A couple that spring to mind from this week’s news might be: “Are you tempted to volunteer as an Islamic State suicide bomber?” and “On stag nights, do you dress up as a traffic cone and lark about in the middle of the road?”
But, frivolity aside, this study offers fascinating insights, not least into the differences between men and women. True, it didn’t surprise me that the number of times a mother has been through childbirth affects her life-expectancy.
But isn’t it interesting that wealth, at least as measured by car ownership, has been found to be a significant factor in men’s longevity, but not in women’s? And why do nerves, anxiety, tension and depression knock time off a woman’s life expectancy, but not a man’s?
More striking still is the huge importance of a family life to our chances of living a long one - hence those questions about how many of our relatives live with us and whether we’ve suffered bereavement or divorce.
The Health Department is forever banging on about alcohol consumption, diet, physical exercise and obesity - and to be fair, I suppose these areas are meant to be covered by the test questions on diabetes, blood pressure etc.
But if ministers really want us to live longer lives (a big if, I grant you), shouldn’t they put more effort into rebuilding the institution of the family, the most effective welfare system known to man?
As for my own test results, blessed as I am with a loving wife - and sons who just won’t move out - I’m delighted to report that my chance of dying in the next five years is a mere 4.9 percent, giving me a 95.1 percent chance of making it.
Chain-smoking, heavy-drinking slob though I am, this means I’m marginally less likely to peg out before 2020 than the average man of my age.
Now, that’s what I call seriously amusing. No disrespect to the boss, of course, but yah boo sucks to him!
Daily Mail