Who needs push-ups when poetry keeps you young?

I read, recently, that Himalayan pink salt slows down the ageing process and reinvigorates your sexual appetite. You can imagine what I took those claims with. But this week, I put my anti-ageing scepticism to one side and fully embraced new research from University College London, which says weekly involvement in the arts – stuff like going to galleries or concerts – lowers your biological age by about a year and produces similar benefits to those we get from regular physical exercise. Seven epigenetic clocks, which measure the changes in a person’s DNA as they get older, were used to process blood samples for the report. In other words, it’s proper research, not one of those studies you read about in the tabloids, where a menswear company has sponsored a survey to discover the UK’s most beloved lapel.

I stopped going to the gym, partly because conversation in the locker room convinced me I was becoming testosterone intolerant. I also felt that my general interaction with the gym crowd was hampered by my not having any anecdotes that involved Ibiza. I decided to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, so did my abs. My misanthropy, however, was becoming stunningly well defined. Thus, I switched to private lessons with a personal trainer. That was better but, as ever with physical exercise, there was always something more interesting to do. I remember having to tear myself away from WH Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems in order to get to a training session. It felt very counterintuitive and oddly selfish, taking a slot that someone who had no interest in Auden could have enthusiastically filled.

I worry that sounds elitist but, then again, I’ve got issues. Physical-fitness types parade the streets in their gym gear, often carrying tennis rackets or yoga mats, without a hint of embarrassment. If I was carrying Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems in public, I’d feel the need to conceal it in a bag. And if it was a bookshop bag, I’d still feel susceptible to muttered ridicule. Maybe this is a hangover from the day, some 45 years ago, when my 13-year-old nephew took me to one side and said, confidentially: “The family’s starting to worry about you. You and your Shakespeare badge.” I persevered with the badge but it had become a millstone. In the light of UCL’s research, however, wearing it would now give me the same kudos as wearing a casually buckled lifting belt.

Anyway, I chose to completely abandon physical exercise and I’ve never looked back – partly because my neck muscles have shortened through inactivity but mainly because I just knew poetry was better for me than press-ups. I sincerely believe that 30 minutes or so spent reading it physically changes me. I feel something similar to that post-exercise glow sporty types talk about. I don’t really understand endorphins, dopamine and all that – although my wife did suggest I had high levels of the latter when she caught me jumping up and down with excitement while watching sausages cook – but poetry does give me sort of a gym buzz and I get withdrawal symptoms if I go a day without reading it.

It’s not just poetry, of course. The research suggests that we should experience a variety of cultural activities, like the way circuit training targets different muscle groups. In addition to my daily poetry fix, I’ve recently – in the city just voted number one in the world for culture – seen Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera House, Jethro Tull at the London Palladium, a 25-minute sneak preview of the Manadolorian and Grogu movie, in Leicester Square, the new Iron Maiden documentary, Burning Ambition, at my local Vue, and Sherlock Holmes at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre. I also read a collection of criticism by the poet, Peter Riley, which felt like a full-on intellectual boot camp and left me stretched but definitely strengthened. I used Eurovision as a cool-down.

That level of art-based indulgence doesn’t come cheap, of course, and there is a legitimate question to be asked about the UCL research. Might those people at the opera be biologically younger because they are well-heeled, well-educated and therefore somewhat less damaged by the rough and tumble of everyday life than, say, the bloke walloping an old leather punchbag in the corner of a dingy gym?

I saw the filmmaker John Waters interviewed at the Southbank Centre. He said he tries to visit an exhibition of modern art at least once a week because that regular contact retunes his sensibilities in such a way that the whole world starts to feel like art and he sees beauty in the most ordinary things. That sounds like a pretty good anti-ageing formula to me.

Photograph by Lourdes Balduque/Getty Images