Keith Richards has no business being alive. Nor, for that matter, has Steve Tyler. Or any of the members of Motley Crue and quite a few other bands, well-known for hard living and hard playing. Pete Townsend did his best but sadly he is not in their class. So why is it then, that for all their thoroughly reprehensible lifestyle and frequently outrageous public behaviour, disapproval frequently morphs into secret admiration and envy?

I've struggled with this conundrum for years. I haven't the remotest inclination to indulge in hard drugs: in terms of "me", I'm far too much of a control-freak. By a long way, my drug of choice is alcohol -- but that's between me and my doctors and my wife, thank you very much! And yet, when I read about the sexual shenanigans, decadence and shameless hedonism of people from Tommy Lee and Jack Nicholson to the relatively safe (& therefore boring!) Bill Wyman and Rod Stewart, I know I am not alone in feeling more than a slight twinge of envy. Dammit, if they could do it and survive, apparently happily, why the hell didn't I at least give it a try?

Hangovers caused by too much Younger's Tartan or cheap Spanish plonk (mid-1960s student years, when 30p bought a litre of industrial-quality wine labelled "Spanish Red": brutally effective but you hated yourself in the morning -- and everybody else) just don't count. Nor does embarrassing your wife and making a complete tit of yourself at parties after drinking far too much of the punch that was much stronger than you thought. Even though it was you that concocted the bloody punch in the first place.

He does also have some distinctly unlikable, violent personal traits and nobody in their right mind could possibly want to be anything like Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty. But by and large, the world of entertainment is heavily-populated by ageing, formerly disreputable performers who really should be dead. I suspect that in continuing to survive and prosper, they irritate the hell out of all the moralising and preaching professional "researchers" and "scientists", whose pronouncements and advice is regularly pitched at us by the Department of Health and their surrogates -- ASH (Action on Smoking & Health), Alcohol Concern and others. (Oh come on now -- you didn't seriously think they actually were 'independent', did you? Where did you think their funding came from?)

I think it's the very fact that they broke the rules and did all the sorts of things that our parents told us would make us social outcasts or lose us friends, kill us or make us go blind (or was that just me?) or bring shame on the family -- and yet, the ungrateful swine, they survived!! To make it worse, the contemporary reports and their own, admittedly sometimes vague recollections do consistently indicate that they had a bloody good time as they indulged their decadent appetites, often in the company of others similarly inclined. There was a rumour that Keith Richards actually died 21 years ago but he has such a temper that even Mick Jagger has been too frightened to tell him.

If they had all died much younger, being heroically suicidal as they played "chase the dragon" or "chase the chemical", in the style of Keith Moon for example, there would not be the same level of admiration. I'm glad they didn't though. In many ways, we have a lot to learn medically, as well as socially, spiritually and morally, from their durability. I've absolutely no idea what it is but I'm still not too old to learn -- I'm ready, willing, more than capable and very, very eager to start learning.

Now, to help me get started, does anybody know where can I get hold of some top quality...