“Were they the sons of tea-sippers who won the fields of Crecy and Agincourt or dyed the Danube’s shores with Gallic blood?” – a stirring defence of the lost art of drinking in this age of bizarre government policies of expanding drinking hours while simultaneously trying to (partially) ban one of the very things which goes hand in hand with a nice pint – or at least force people who want to drink and smoke (a decent proportion of regular pubgoers) to go to an establishment which doesn’t serve food, meaning they’ll get more pissed and more lary. Nice one.

“Drunkenness is an attribute of those who do not appreciate what they are consuming, not of those who do.” Too bloody right. If you drink watery, tasteless, overly fizzy British or American style lager or (shudder) sugar-laden alcopops rather than decent Belgian brews or (best of all) a hearty pint of rich, mahogany hued real ale, you’re automatically a soft-cock lightweight pissant. But it also makes you more of an antisocial wanker. Fact.