This from today’s Mirror:

‘The average person will down more than 5,800 pints of beer or lager in their lifetime, researchers revealed yesterday. We will also drain 8,700 glasses of wine, 2,900 bottles of cider, 800 shots of spirits and 1,452 flutes of champagne between the ages of 18 and 79’.

I’m 63 already, and I have to say that such figures worry me: for with eighteen years still to go, I am miles ahead of the pack. Not only that, but as a former researcher, and knowing that this is only an average – there are many folks around who drink a minute proportion of those totals. I am thus forced to the unsettling conclusion that, way in front of even me, there must be millions of Brits out there drinking like it was March 1945 in the Fuhrerbunker.

Some time ago, I calculated that 1 in 7 of those who voted after 6 pm on Election night last year exercised their democratic right in the sort of condition that would get them banned for life had they been caught in charge of a motor vehicle. While that goes a long way to explaining why so many people, in the context of Gordon Brown, still voted Labour, I’m now wondering if I may have understated the figure. The only sensible conclusion from these Mirror statistics is that all over Britain, people are staggering about, colliding with each other, apologising in a slurred manner, and then going off together for another session, at the end of which they have a new best friend.

But beyond the shock-horror headlines, there are two gems in this study. First, it costs us under a grand a year to achieve this state of tertiary inebriation on a regular basis; and second, we only have 730 hangovers in a lifetime. Once again, it is apparent that God got his retribution calculations very badly wrong.

£1000 per annum is about £2.80 a day. How many of us even know what we spend on everything in a day down to the last £2.80 – especially after thirteen pints of Old Spangled Scrotum? More than that falls out of my pockets just going to the car and back.

And as for the hangover rate, well – it’s the kind of punishment that would have a right-wing Tory turning puce: in a given lifetime, that’s less than ten a year. To be precise, one every 39.5 days. If, during my advertising career, I’d been handed a product and told that, for the price of under three quid a day and one headache a month, a person could alter their mind favourably on a regular basis, I would’ve gone to great lengths to win the account.

One more thing caught my eye: the pathetic performance put up by the spirits sector: a miserable 800 shots. And to think, the Scots imagine that they can make independence work based on that level of export sales. They must be drunk, 24/7.