IT IS TOO early for the obituaries, but here’s a modest three cheers from a columnist with no interest in football. I have never met David Beckham and don’t expect to, but I admire him. Beyond his footballing, I think he has shown real moral courage as a role model. Anyone who had suggested ten years ago that there would be a natural place in our sporting pantheon for a fellow who wore a sarong, experimented with pink nail varnish and funny hairstyles, sported male jewellery and agreed to an interview with the gay lifestyle magazine, Attitude, would have been laughed to scorn. That Beckham is plainly completely heterosexual made it seem all the more eccentric to risk the inevitable sneers about being a wuss. He went on to bring his family and babies into the picture, and to be portrayed as a loving father, a New Man and a gentle man. Yet here is someone whose primary audience is football supporters; whose primary stage is that most brutally laddish of institutions, the English football match; and whose intermediaries with the wider world are a hard-bitten and unsentimental cadre: Fleet Street sports reporters.

I’m not suggesting that Beckham sees himself as a one-man mission to civilise sporting culture: he and his wife had self-interested reasons to establish a distinctive brand. But the brand he chose says something to the world — to his world in particular — about his own tolerant instincts and his openness to difference, to experiment, to beauty and to style. It took guts to present this version of himself to his natural supporters. Plenty were ready to say: “We told you so.”

But it succeeded. This tells us something about the changing face of British popular culture which Beckham has done more than reflect: he has helped to symbolise and lead.

AT THE OPERA at Covent Garden on Tuesday, the guest of a chap of straight-down-the-middle — even rigorously — Tory habits of mind and behaviour (up from the country and staying at the Carlton Club), I decided that as we had good seats for (a marvellous) Marriage of Figaro, I really must not disgrace my old friend. So I wore a tie.

Well, talk about those Bateman The Man Who . . . cartoons! There was hardly a tie in the house. I felt like someone who’d wandered out of a 1950s magazine and into the 21st century. Even in the corporate boxes they were (expensively) tie-less. My host, who is in his seventies and includes field sports among his recreations in Who’s Who, turned up in a crimson, collarless linen shirt of faintly Oriental aspect. But it was I who was out of place.

I detest neckties. For more than a century these pointless things have exerted a malign stranglehold on male apparel and necks. Few other stylistic nuisances can have persisted so long, essentially unchanged, during the past thousand years. So hats off (gone before ties) to David Cameron. If this is the only change he leads in modern Britain, he will still deserve the title of moderniser.

NEXT IN MY catalogue of truths that we may overlook — physical exercise, could it be bad for us? I love exercise. I’ve trained thousands of miles for marathons; savoured the sweet pain of flogging myself to within an inch of my life. But as the ligaments in my right knee twinge, the obvious dawns.

Do we choose the Boeing 747 with the most flying hours because this will have strengthened its wings? Some bits of us may regenerate, and need use, but whether in motor car or human body, bearings wear. People running up escalators on the Tube might reflect that there are only so many stairs we will climb in our lives. Climb them all now and you may have to retire to a bungalow. I’ve seen trauma and sleep deprivation, too, burn a person out.

From doorstep canvassing I can identify a familiar phenomenon. She lives alone, looks after herself properly. She always had a little money though not too much. She takes a lively interest in the world, but her life has been ordered, even. Slight and unmuscular she never laboured under the hot sun, burnt the midnight oil or forced herself to victory on track or pitch. She never bore children, or if she did she had help in the house. She would never have dreamt of running up stairs. And — since you ask — she is 97.

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