On Monday night I was randomly channel flicking after the news when I hit a programme where Keith Allen was going to look for Keith Floyd to talk about how they were both called Keith. A whole programme. Poised with my thumb over the channel button I hovered briefly, interested to see how Floyd, who has been hunkered down in France for the last few years, was looking.

Allen arrived at Floyd’s house, walked in, through to the drawing room and ... Oh, my God! I sat up in my chair and leant forward. I had never seen a man looking so terrible. The voiceover said he was 65. I thought they’d made a mistake. He looked 85.

The poor old fellow was bloated and wan, his features barely discernible through the heavy make-up they’d used to hide the worst of it. He seemed to inhabit the space between Mickey Rourke’s grandfather and Shane MacGowan, if Shane hadn’t looked after himself so well.

He was drinking champagne and smoking a fag and making those two theoretical pleasures look as tragic as they can ever have looked.

I met Floyd only a couple of times, maybe ten years ago, and thought then that he must be 70. But I could not understand much of what he said and to be honest, drunkard though I am, cataclysmic booze-abuser though I have often been, alcoholism at that level makes me feel uncomfortable. All the grinning and nodding you have to do, and pretending to know what they’re talking about. You know how it is.

“He can’t possibly last the year,” I said aloud. “It’s a miracle he’s still alive.”

It turns out he wasn’t. Next day we learnt that Floyd had sat down with a glass of wine to watch the programme and by the time the opening credits rolled, he was dead. Of a heart attack, naturally. Although he also had bowel cancer, which goes very much with the territory, and was presumably why he looked quite as bad as he did.

In the aftermath of his death, everyone went on about what a great “luncher” he had been. Gin-flavoured tears of nostalgia welled. Just as they had when Keith Waterhouse died a couple of weeks before. So sad, to lose another bon viveur. Another man who knew the value of a fag and a glass of wine. Another man who had a “zest for life” — the sick cliché we always use to describe men who are killed by the way they live (whether that’s by drink and drugs and cigarettes or some dumb-arse dangerous sport).

The great Waterhouse was lucky enough to live out a decent term, of course, and his lunching did not prevent him creating a serious, lucrative and very possibly lasting body of work. Not so Floyd. Waterhouse was famous and beloved despite his drinking, Floyd because of it.

On the day after his death I got dozens of calls from the media asking me to comment. I said I couldn’t, I didn’t know the man. I don’t think I ever even saw him on the telly. I was at boarding school and university during Floyd’s long-ago heyday, and on the very rare occasions when life got so dull that I wanted to watch television it certainly wasn’t to listen to a drunk in a bow tie wibbling on about something I wasn’t remotely interested in. That’s what I went to lectures for.

But still they wanted me to say something. If not about Floyd himself then about his last lunch, about the joys of lunching, about the golden age of lunching. “Come on, Giles,” they seemed to be saying. “You’re a posh, sweary amateur presenter of food programmes who is frequently pissed on television ... you basically are Keith Floyd.”

And that gave me the heebie-jeebies. Because I don’t want to die at 65, puffy and befuddled and unfulfilled. I don’t want Floyd’s death and I don’t want his life either. I don’t want to be remembered as a boozer with a posh voice wearing a bow tie. It’s why I don’t wear a bow tie.

And that’s why I am no longer a celebrant of the art of “lunching”, like all these dipso losers they wheel out whenever an alcoholic dies, to talk nostalgically about the grand old days when going to a restaurant in the middle of the working day and getting off your face was considered an “art”.

Because it’s not, you know. It’s terribly, terribly sad. As a journalist, I caught the very end of it. I went for lunch with my boss on my first day at the Telegraph in 1993 and only after we’d finished the third bottle of rioja and ordered the fourth did I summon up the courage to ask if we were going to eat anything.

And that was how the next three or four years went. I remember very little. I was drunk all the time. All the time. I slept under my desk in the afternoon. I became very fat, and very unhappy. But I had to keep lunching. To lunch “properly” was a badge of honour that implied trustworthiness, honesty and decency. To stop after a couple of glasses was as bad as to be teetotal or to be gay or to be left-wing or to be a girl.

Oh yes, lunching wasn’t for girls. When the few lunchers that are left look back on the good old days, what they’re mostly remembering is a time when the only women in the office were the secretaries who held your calls while you slept it off. It was a man’s world, and men who lunched had several broken marriages and a handful of scattered, resentful, barely fathered children to show for it.

But then women came to the workplace, and they don’t lunch like that. They don’t live like that. And it made the men look bad. And lunching began to die out. And so did the lunchers. So many of my former bosses and colleagues. One fell down the stairs drunk after lunch, cracked his head, and died. Three that I can think of heart-attacked or stroked from booze and fags. Two lost limbs. A couple of transplants. Plus the fag-related cancers. And for what? For the honour of being one of the boys. One of the lunchers.

The pressure is still there in some quarters. With my foodie boots on I could “lunch” big and long and drunken, free, every day. I do it maybe once a month. I sit among fat, drunk men who smell of fags, bons viveurs to a man, and if I try to leave early to see my girlfriend, or stop after a couple of glasses so I can work in the afternoon, they all go “wooooo” and make limp-wrist gestures. I’m letting down the men as badly as if I were deserting a trench at Ypres.

Inside, these men are great and talented and fun and wise, but they have fallen for the lunching myth. They have not done half the things they could have done, or been half the men they might have. They’ll lose everything, they will die young and ugly, and they can’t even choose where.

And the day afterwards their friends will get together and plough through a big, fatty lunch, hoon down a pack of fags, raise a giant glass of alcohol, and say: “It’s what he would have wanted.”

But it isn’t. Not if he had really thought about it.

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