‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” It is quite easy to hear an echo of Sir Toby Belch’s memorable question from Twelfth Night in the reaction of some of us liberal-minded folk to recent attempts to clamp down on our pleasures by any number of modern Malvolios.

These do, I feel sure, include the dour spoilsport-in-chief Gordon Brown, but he has to keep his mouth buttoned – for the present at any rate – to avoid scaring off too many voters.

No such consideration holds back the Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, who wants to see a minimum 50p charge per unit of alcohol in order to combat the effects of “passive drinking”. (Yes, that notion of passive suffering – so useful when it came to ending people’s freedom to smoke – is being introduced stealthily into the alcohol debate.) Then there is the Scottish GP David Walker who made headlines this month with his call for a tax on chocolate at a British Medical Association conference in the north. He claimed (and I don’t think we need to have much doubt that he is right): “Chocolate is a major player in obesity and obesity-related conditions.”

He added: “My point is that it is not unusual for a person to eat a 225g bag of something like Minstrels while watching their favourite soap opera, and that’s just short of 1,2000 calories – more than half the recommended daily intake for men and women.”

Actually, in my experience this is unusual, but then I don’t hail from the land of the deep-fried Mars bar As it happens, I do not eat chocolate, except in minuscule amounts such as may be found, say, in the coating of a coffee bean served with an espresso. Cakes and ale are off-limits for me dietwise, too. I have not had a pint of beer for nearly five years. I don’t miss it, and my waistline certainly doesn’t.

I try to avoid condemning others for their pleasures in these areas, since there is nothing more tiresome than a sinner reformed (as Jonathan Aitken demonstrates with his every uttererance). But there are times when condemnation is hard to resist. One such time is now.

As we approach Easter, the shops are full of teetering piles of chocolate eggs, and newspapers and magazine of advertisements encouraging people to buy them in ever greater quantities.

One jumped out at me from the pages of the Daily Telegraph the other day. It was from the supermarket chain Morrison’s, offering a range of eggs, stuffed with every variety of confectionery. All were at half price. A restriction, however, was that no customer could buy more than ten of them. This was presumably to prevent smaller shopkeepers, who don’t have the buying clout of Morrison’s, snapping them up to sell.

The buying power of giants can also be seen on the booze front, where it is having a dreadful effect on the future of the British pub. I am thinking of the 99p pints of Greene King beer and other offers available in JD Wetherspoon boozers.

While many other pubs stand empty (including lots owned by Greene King itself) Wetherspoon houses are packed nightly. I have noticed this in pubs all over the region. A particularly obvious phenomenon is what might be called the binge drinking of rosé wine (a mere £4.99 at bottle at present) by young women. I watched a group knock back a couple of bottles a head in Northampton recently.

What with this company’s offering on spirits (“Double up for £1”), you do begin to wonder whether Sir Liam Donaldson isn’t right.

Please don’t let Wetherspoon spoil things for all of us. . .