Given the incredible naivety of your question, I certainly hope so. The government are obsessed with denying that we are a nation of rosy cheeked piss heads. There are bars which are laid out like cafes to pretend they don't really serve booze. Even shit holes like Weatherspoons are trying this on - as if they can really lay claim to providing meals. If you are going to serve salmon fillet, salad and chips for £1.50 by getting a kid who's just failed his GCSEs to put colour coded blobs into a microwave then I would seriously consider sticking to the booze or at least changing the picture on the menu to hint at spots and Chlamydia. And what is the purpose of the current obsession about hiding drink in bars, anyway? Chips are also simultaneously popular and unhealthy but you don't walk into a chip shop and find them disguised as stationery items.

If you are lying face down in your own urine and the X-factor is absorbing the full extent of your emotive response to the world around you then yes, drink less. But nobody is going to spontaneously combust after two glasses of wine just because the government want more fucking work out of you.

A lack of alcohol is equally dangerous in a society where we are increasingly pressured to do terrible, mundane jobs ever more quickly. Without a measure of lubrication we wouldn't be deluded enough to stay at our desks; and I hear scant mention of the effect this would have on the economy. Admittedly, the people you see knacking each other in, in town centres on a Saturday night, delay evolution for us all. But if you will run the country down until it manufactures fuck all and becomes only a toadying service industry to twats richer than ourselves, then frustrations will out. It’s not the unemployed rioting on weekends; its the people with the jobs which are unsustainable without sufficient alcohol to maintain the process, for the profit, as fucking usual, of those who will never have to be in that position.

There is a greater threat to mental health in this country from the incessantly mundane world of office administration than the most face shaving 70 per cent proof absinthe. And most people take far more than five units a day of typing shit that nobody wants to read.

My advice would be to stop trying to make yourself into a perfect human being and asking stupid, contradictory questions just so that Gordon Brown can tell you call centres are good, and go and have a bottle on me...and all who sail in me.

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