Tomorrow is Bacon Day and I am already salivating.

Since my diet changed more than a year ago I only allow myself bacon at the weekend.

“Eating a bacon sandwich will take half-an-hour off your life,” warned my wife, Maria.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get up half-an-hour earlier and then I won’t notice.”

Well, it makes sense to me.

We have been consuming bacon since Anglo Saxon times. The phrase “bringing home the bacon” goes back to 1104 when a couple so impressed the Prior of Little Dunmow with their marital devotion that he awarded them a flitch of bacon.

This became a local tradition and a flitch subsequently went to any married man who swore before the congregation and God that he had not quarrelled with his wife for a year and a day.

“No vicar, we’ve not quarrelled.”

“We have, so.”

“Shut up, woman. There’s bacon at stake.”

Bacon is a peculiarly British tradition and there is nothing finer than a bacon butty at breakfast. Yet medical research says it has the potential to be a killer.

More than 40 grams a day of red meat, processed meat, salami or bacon raises the risk of heart disease and cancer, scientists say.

Professor Sir David Speigelhalter from Cambridge University says that, if the studies are right, you would expect someone who eats a bacon sandwich every day to live, on average, two years less than someone who does not.

Which is like losing an hour of your life for every bacon sandwich you eat.

All right, so tomorrow I’ll get up an hour earlier.