A prohibition of fun? It will never work for teenagers - look at me!

SO WHAT should a girl do to enjoy herself nowadays? Every week a new survey points out the toll taken on our bodies by alcohol and tobacco, the terrible twins that have been my pleasurable mainstays for around 50 years. Last week another survey revealed that not only are middle-aged women like myself world leaders when it comes to binge-drinking, but now, in the UK at least, even our children aged between 10 and 13 are leading the pack when it comes to substance abuse.

Whatever way you slice the argument,

there is no good news when it comes to either drink or smokes, other than the fact that they are so enjoyable.

The other morning I woke, having overdone it the night before, berating myself with my usual cry of, ‘Why do I do it?’ But of course at the time it was fun.

The second glass of white wine slipped down a treat before dinner, as we opened a new bottle at the table and kept topping up our glasses.

Later that evening I treated myself to the pre-bedtime cigarette I find hard to give up, even though I can quite easily get through the whole of the rest of the day without them.

It was all a pleasant buzzy blur of a night – lots of laughs and all that. At no point did I think about how I might feel the next day.

At no point did I conjure up that horrible nauseous feeling that comes with the first cup of strong coffee and which, as you get older, magnifies as the hours pass.

And I didn’t, not for a moment, consider the likely sorry leaden state that my brain would be in the next morning when I woke. So no wonder that our children are tempted by these drugs and why outlawing, as British prime minister Rishi Sunak wants to do with teenagers and tobacco, will never work.

If a grown woman like me makes the stupid choice of over-indulging while being well aware of the consequences, it’s not difficult to see why teenagers binge on bottles of cheap vodka and six-packs, and sucking on vapes if they can’t buy cigarettes.

It’s because it seems like great fun to them – and a prohibition of fun is never going to be an easy one to pull off.