Sorry, but opening bars until 4am will do nothing to stop binge drinking...

FEW people know the full details of my most drunken night in Aix-en-Provence and it is better that way. I was a 20-year-old student spending a year in the French city and, on the night in question, absurd quantities of beer, red wine and pastis swilled around in my belly.

Fortunately drink has never made me violent but, taken in unwise enough measures, it can make me spectacularly ill. Quite how ill I was that night, exactly where and the effect it had on my ability to see myself safely back to my lodgings are the stuff of my quailing flashbacks, not yours.

It is fair to say, though, that any local passing the figure slumped insensible in a doorway early one April morning in 1988 would have had a pretty good idea he was British.

Indeed, the idiotic aplomb with which my behaviour played to the national stereotype of the British binge drinker was among the most mortifying features of the sorry episode.

There was then and there is now nothing unusual about casualties of over-consumption littering the clubland streets of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester or even, as we’ll come to later, Bristol.

Not in Aix. There young people in bars were as likely to be drinking coffee or Perrier as wine. Not at their tables would you see huge pitchers of beer banging down, hear vast orders of booze being bellowed at bar staff or sense any urgency to get wrecked. Only at British ones. The reason my French coning temporaries were able to sit back, relax and exude Gallic cool is they are blessed with what we call a European drinking culture. What we mean by that is they have the sense to savour the good things about alcohol while stopping short of the bad.

On our side of the Channel the culture is more geared to zooming through the good things in a blur of thirst that we may maximise potential for the fullest exploration of the bad.

This includes the illness and insensibility I mentioned earlier, but also belligerence, violence, hospitalisations, panic attacks, paranoia, catastrophically poor judgments leading in some cases to sexual impropriety and vulnerability... and, not forgetting the horrific hangover to follow. Well, it’s our culture, innit?

Widening

I learned what I needed to know about what doing my bit for our drinking culture does to me a long time ago and make a special effort not to remind myself whenever I am on nights out. But I cannot help noticing on these nights out the scale of the gulf which persists between our approach to alcohol and that of our continental neighbours – or that it appears to be widening.

Happily, this week brings news of a plan to narrow it and make young Scottish drinkers more like the cool and sophisticated French ones I failed so abysmally to emulate that night in 1988.

The plan comes from Glasgow’s licensing board and it is to allow nightclubs to open longer into the small hours than they can at present. Yes, instead of chucking everyone out at 3am, the clubs would have until 4am to clear the bar – thus making its customers more like European drinkers.

If you are not quite on board yet with how on earth giving Glasgow clubbers an hour longer to pour over-priced booze down their throats will make them more European in their drinking habits then I am right there with you on the quayside.

But, says licensing board chairman Matt Kerr, there is ‘a strong view’ among those in the trade that closing the clubs later will avoid the rush to consume alcohol which follows last orders. Avoiding this unseemly haste for a final guzzle will make us more, er, French.

And if the final guzzle is merely deferred for an hour, as it inevitably will be, is the answer to keep the clubs open until 5am? How about they never close? How European could we be then?

The motivation among club owners for selling more flam- sambucas longer into the night to ever more heedless customers does not have to be guessed at. But the credulity of Glasgow licensing board chiefs really is a marvel.

Young Glasgow people preload at home before hitting the pubs because getting drunk is cheaper that way.

When closing time comes at the pubs, they drink up and queue to get into clubs, paying for entry and spending more than they did in the pubs on booze they probably enjoy less. Only their inebriation and the pressure of peers keeps the cycle going.

Chucking out time, in truth, saves many of them from themselves.

Violence

There is nothing remotely European about any of this. Keeping the clubs open for another hour will only make it more British.

The hour was 2.35am in Bristol, incidentally, when cricketer Ben Stokes was arrested outside a nightclub after knocking two men cold with his fists. And, although a jury acquitted him of affray this week, the spectacle of the violence captured on CCTV was deeply disturbing.

Stokes could not say exactly how much he had drunk but, by his own admission, it certainly included two or three pints of lager, five or six vodka and lemonades and an unspecified number of ‘Jagerbombs’ – a potent mixture of shots of liqueur with a high-energy drink.

The French, I suspect, would need no names to know which land he was from.