EVERY now and then our body clock plays a trick on us and we find ourselves arriving an hour, or even a day early for an appointment.

It’s a minor inconvenience, but on Monday morning I started to wonder if I had gone fast-forward through the whole of March and landed smack bang in the middle of April 1.

The reason was a set of headlines in the dailies – predictably enough on the health pages – which were as odd as anything I have ever seen.

Here’s a flavour of them. People are making themselves deaf because they’re taking too many painkillers. A dentist is dealing with more cases of gum damage and aching jaws because people are grinding their teeth in worry. Predictably enough, the main sufferers are bankers and financial consultants.

Finally, there was the tale of how the Scottish government is encouraging its citizens to dance along to their favourite tune as they do the housework as a form of exercise.

I confess that when I read this last one, I had a vision of Gordon Brown, Hoover in hand, doing the Highland fling – and decided enough was enough.

The stories show our obsession with health matters and why salesmen of fad diets, miracle cures and short cuts to perfect health will never be short of gullible customers or ready cash – because when we’re not panicking over scare stories about the deadly properties of everyday food and drink, we like nothing better than to read about how being healthy can be effortless.

The problem is that the really good advice about health and wellbeing is pretty boring.

If you get some daily exercise, cut down on fatty foods, treat alcohol with caution and keep away from tobacco, you really won’t go far wrong. Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of thing that sells newspapers.

It is also the kind of pill we find hard to swallow because it involves exercising willpower. In other words, it tells us that we are responsible, generally speaking, for whether we feel fit and well or sick and sorry.

This brings me to a serious point. Another unchanging factor in our national wellbeing is the NHS, that incredible institution that we rely on every day and which politicians miraculously discover at election time.

This week, we had the news that one in three primary care trusts are in the red – despite the vast sums of money expended on the NHS in the past two decades. One-third of public expenditure is now health-related.

It is a hard fact, but a lot of that expenditure is avoidable. We can avoid it if we take more responsibility for our own health.

Smoking costs the NHS £5bn a year, alcohol abuse £3bn, obesity-related illnesses £2bn.

This can’t go on and it won’t for much longer.

Like all public services, the NHS faces unparalleled financial pressures in the next ten years. Budgets will be cut or face zero growth.

One estimate puts the necessary savings at between £15bn and £20bn over five years.

That kind of money can’t be saved unless we have a fundamental rethink about how we want the NHS to look after us, and how we look after ourselves. If we don’t change, the incredible advances we have seen in life-saving surgery, research and technology will stop and the whole principle of a service free at point of delivery will be in jeopardy.

We’ll be waking up to headlines about health services that are a good deal scarier than the ones I have mentioned. Then – if I could borrow a phrase from the Bible – it won’t just be a few worried bankers who will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.