Trust one who knows: ignorance is to bliss as drunk is to capable

Call no man happy, even when he's just returned from holiday in the south of France. Experto credite - trust one who's been there. Sorry to be the doom-monger again. It was not my intention when I left. Indeed, it was precisely in order to lighten this column and bring sunshine to its long-suffering devotees that I slipped across the Channel in the first place. For myself I don't do holidays. Holidays give me headaches. But a man with a column has responsibilities. Reader, I went for you.

Call no man happy, even when he's just returned from holiday in the south of France. Experto credite - trust one who's been there. Sorry to be the doom-monger again. It was not my intention when I left. Indeed, it was precisely in order to lighten this column and bring sunshine to its long-suffering devotees that I slipped across the Channel in the first place. For myself I don't do holidays. Holidays give me headaches. But a man with a column has responsibilities. Reader, I went for you.

And might have had sunny stories to relate, had all memory of them not been wiped out by what I found when I got home. Ruination. Again. The minute my back's turned. As with Moses, so with me. Moses didn't dare take a break, knowing that those to whom he'd given the Law would be dancing to garage as soon as he left, and I can't risk an absence lest the nation return like a dog to its vomit while I'm gone.

No, no, nothing to do with young Blair found returning to his in a gutter in Leicester Square. That was the good news. Like everyone else, I have now re-plighted my troth to the Prime Minister, believing that he cannot be all bad who has a son who makes a mess without the assistance of Alastair Campbell. Drunk and incapable, unadvised and spontaneous - a Blair child - at last! Not one of us, not a male one of us at least, doesn't feel a twinge of nostalgic regret that the gutter is no longer where we routinely wake up. Remember the spinning pit? Remember the blood-red throbbing hexahedral mincer through which first the left and then the right side of your brain passed, like tagliatelle? Remember waking to the discovery that you had no speech, that a ton of wet cement had been dumped in your mouth in the night?

Experto credite - trust one who's been there. I went through university drunk and incapable, both as a student and as a teacher. Partly peer pressure, of course. You see everybody else drunk and incapable and you don't want to be left out. Add sibling rivalry to peer pressure and it's not hard to understand how Euan Blair must have felt, coming home to baby Leo throwing up in his mother's lap twice a night and being kissed for it.

Not much incapable throwing-up in France, not in Cannes anyway, though the street parties celebrating victory over Italy went on all night. In the end, after watching people driving up and down the Croisette for six hours, waving the Tricolour, singing the Marseillaise and honking their horns, you begin to long for a bit of stupefaction English style. That's something the English know - that if you want a celebration to end on a high note you have to drink yourself into the gutter. Otherwise where's the point? Honk honk, le jour de gloire est arrivé, yawn yawn. Call no man happy, even when his country has just become the champions of Europe.

And call no woman happy, either, let her every finger be weighted down with gold. Such sadness in those Riviera faces, desperate to retain the unlined puffer-fish expressionlessness of youth. Not just face-lifts, not just a discreet tuck here and there to tighten sagging skin - that startled look, as though an unseen person is pulling at your neck from behind and you are too polite to notice, I am familiar with. New to me were the lips filled with fat taken from the behind. Waste not, want not. In principle it makes sense, and I speak as a dedicated arse man from way back, but an arse where an arse should be is one thing; an arse in the middle of the face is quite another. That bum-filled lips would lend a woman a bruised, not to say disconsolate, not to say disgusted appearance, you would have thought someone might have anticipated. But that, it seems, is how French women choose to look.

See what lightness I could have brought you from the Midi, had reports of Jeremy Paxman's address to the Ledbury Poetry Festival not been awaiting me on my return. For yes, it was that, and not the spectacle of teenagers (or "millionaire novelists") returning to their vomit, that dashed my spirits. As I understand it, what Paxman did at Ledbury was to attack the teaching of literature for its faddish over-interpretativeness - so far, so good - but then blunder into that minefield of philistinism that the unthinking call "pleasure", by suggesting we read Winnie-the-Pooh "for the sheer enjoyment of it".

I yield to no man in admiration for Paxman's intellectual rigour. Were a politician to advance the sheer-enjoyment argument - "Just enjoy, just take pleasure in our policies, yours not to reason why, yours just to like and die" - who better than Paxman to nail him for mental laziness, for presumption and for trying to get away with the sophistry that ignorance is bliss. If there is one thing Jeremy Paxman knows for a certainty, it is that knowledge is freedom, that we fail to examine what moves us, fail to take a hand in what pleases us, at our peril. As on Newsnight, so at the Ledbury Poetry Festival: literature is not Cannes, a place we go when we want a rest from self-awareness.

Call no man happy until he enjoys only what deserves to be enjoyed, and is master of his pleasures. Else he wears his arse in his face.