The reason we drink is that we think it’s naughty

As we become ever more steeped in Protestant guilt over the next week or so, each additional glass of wine swelling the self-loathing, redemption is in sight. New Year’s Day looms in all its stark innocence, symbolising enforced abstinence, a return to purity and, for a few weeks at least, the weight of our sinfulness will be lifted. Only then, as we all know, around 7 January, when virtue becomes boring, a friend offers us a glass, we accept, and the whole contorted mindset starts again.

There is a single explanation for Britain’s problem with alcohol: we think it’s naughty. Why that theatrical pause before accepting a drink? The bitten bottom lip and, ‘Well I shouldn’t . . .’? For the pure delight of giving in. Only the question wasn’t ‘Shall we go and get his and hers tattoos?’ or ‘Why don’t we pop over to Amy Winehouse’s and see if she’s got any smack?’ It was, quite simply, ‘Red or white?’

Equating alcohol with transgression, British people have increasingly drunk in a taboo-breaking manner, and this has never been more apparent than in the last year, when it was revealed that Britain’s children have some of the worst alcohol-related problems in the world. Last month the schools watchdog Ofsted found that a fifth of ten- to 15-year-olds were regularly getting drunk, after researchers questioned 111,000 children for the survey. A few days later there was a new scare: the Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo claimed binge-drinking was now a middle-class problem, insisting that ‘serious and dramatic harm’ was taking place in people’s homes and, amusingly, highlighting Surrey as the worst offender. Guy Woodward, editor of the wine magazine Decanter, heading the counter attack, put into words what many of us were thinking. ‘The way the press — and the government — is talking, you’d be forgiven for thinking Surrey was turning into Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he said.