Gordon McLauchlan: Now, just listen to me! Well, perhaps not.

I'm intrigued that so many people give themselves away so artlessly when they talk. I know someone - a journalist, God-save-us - who says again and again, "Think outside the square," proving that she doesn't.

Someone else said to me the other day, admittedly informally while we were chatting about something, "That's the tall poppy syndrome," and I nearly replied: "That's not a thought, that's a catch-cry. People traffic in catch-cries to save themselves the onerous task of thinking for themselves." But I let it go and retained a friendship.

Another time this week I was discussing with a friend the confusion that follows the constant stream of "new research shows that ..." stories that flow nowadays from the media. Eggs, I read somewhere, do not give you "bad" cholesterol after all but provide the sort that builds brain tissue. So, I said, get smart and eat eggs and get smart.

The friend agreed she was totally confused because she had had her diet studied as the result of a high cholesterol reading and was told she fried too much food. She had retorted that she fried it in olive oil. Still bad unless you have no more that two tablespoons a day was the reply.

Well, hell, in response to the much-promoted "Mediterranean diet," I've been dipping bread in olive oil instead of spreading it with that lethal substance known as butter. I have this dinkum oil dribbling down my chin as I dream of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean where, nutritionists keep braying, no one ever dies, where hearts keep going forever and cells never multiply malignly.

I've sneered at that fat lady who prepares fat food for other fat people on television as I've splashed pure, pristine, virgin, pollution-free, organic, unsullied, first-pressing, southern slopes (Northern Hemisphere) olive oil over my crisp salad in which only the blue cheese seems to threaten my chance of seeing in the 22nd century.

"Well," said my friend, "you are deluded. The latest goss among the health fascists is reportedly no more than two tablespoons of olive oil a day."

That was a good cliche-free conversation but when I mentioned the subject to another acquaintance, she shook her head at my confusion and said, "Listen to your body." She repeated this dreadful piece of nonsense as though it had answered one of life's great questions.

Now I've always believed you can know too much about your body. I went to a health exhibition once and watched, hypnotised, an artificial heart-lung device that worked its intricate machinery 60 or 70 times a minute. Its fragility was terrifying and the likelihood of it lasting for the old three-score and 10 seemed impossibly remote. Since then, I've dismissed the matter of the cardiac-respiratory system from my mind.

But, when having dinner with Management, I remarked how fatuous it was for our mutual friend to prattle, "Listen to your body, Listen to your body." Management took umbrage at my slagging off a friend and turned churlish on me, although I wouldn't put it quite like that to her face.

"I wish you would listen to your body," she said. "I hear it and the message too often is, 'Cut back on the baked beans'."

"Very funny."

"Try listening to your body sometimes late at night when you're asleep."

I can't stand it when people laugh at their own jokes.

At that moment fate struck a blow. The heavy cabernet I was enjoying so much was rich in tannin and a sneeze gathered in deep caverns at the back of my nose - sucking most of the oxygen from the restaurant, as Management put it later. Have you ever been at the airport when a 747 did a turn and you got caught in the slipstream?

It was that loud. It had almost that much thrust.

"Now we're all listening to your body," gloated Management, "and we don't like what we hear."

One of the problems with the red wine sneeze is it repeats itself, sometimes four or five times. I still believe that was a fatuous line about listening to your body, but the will to argue had gone out of me and, given the chance by a for-a-change merciful Management, I moved on to chat about the glory of her dress.