I’m not going to say that I agree with everything in this article, but surely there’s something to be said for a little carefree hedonism:

What we do have is a society in which sometimes, and for a variety of reasons, people like to drink to get drunk. Not because they think that wine goes better with dinner than Ribena; not because they want to relax a little after a hard day’s white-collar work; not because they believe the studies about a glass of red being good for their hearts (but two pints of lager being very bad indeed); but because they want to get off the plane of existence that is normal, humdrum, everyday life, and into that parallel universe of inebriation. What’s wrong with doing that once in a while? Nothing. Indeed, there is a good deal that is very right about it. …

It is not the consequences of drunkenness that make it a modern bogeyman, but its simple out-of-controlness. For a political class hell-bent on micro-management of all aspects of everyday life, in thrall to etiquette, suspicious of spontaneity, and living by the code of ‘everything in moderation’, the image of the carefree drunk is one that it cannot comprehend, still less empathise with. For the rest of us, for whom the odd bender is not a political statement but a welcome fact of life, we should resist the temptation to buy into the cult of ‘responsible drinking’ and remember what we are doing in the pub in the first place.