Happy hour? We’ve been very merry for centuries

THEY’VE already done for the smokers and the Fun Police are now firing the opening broadsides against we drinkers. Trouble is, alcohol – the demon drink, as they would have it – has been with us for a long time and those of us who bend an elbow won’t have glasses prised from our fingers without a fight.

Stone Age man liked his suds. The Chinese crafted wine from honey, rice and fruit 9,000 years ago. Mankind has been on the lash for aeons.

Jesus got in on the act. He didn’t turn the Feast of Cana table water into fizzy now, did he? And what was in the flagons at the Last Supper? A lads’ night out on the fruit juice? Improbable.

Patrick McGovern, biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, maintains alcohol was so vital to ancient peoples that he calls our species homo imbibens.

He reckons key leaps, such as the advent of writing and the advance of farming, could be linked to alcohol.

Far-fetched? Is it so hard to imagine Ugg and Ogg sinking a few in a cave…

Ugg: ‘Made this round thing. Call it a wheel. Dunno what to do with it.’

Ogg, blowing off the froth: ‘I’ve got an idea!’

Even today, I find topers generally more sociable than the abstemious. Yet our ancient social lubricant is under threat as never before and I blame the likes of Adrian Chiles.

The BBC presenter was all over TV screens with Drinkers Like Me, claiming he’s not had a day without a swally since he was 15. Alcoholism is no joke. It’s a wrecker of marriages and lives and whether it’s a choice or an affliction has filled countless medical tomes.

But what does a scaremongering programme about the reckless 100units-a-week-drinking Chiles indulges in tell us? His boozing bears not the slightest resemblance to most people’s relationship with alcohol.

A glass of wine over dinner is a rare treat. Beers with friends on a rarer-still day off work? Bliss.

Yes, most of us have over-indulged now and then and some of my fondest memories are of nights that involved what the censorious would call binge-drinking. Still, the majority of us have the self-discipline to take or leave a drink and avoid inappropriate drunkenness.

BUT the Fun Police see a chance to boot down our front doors. ‘Drop the corkscrew! Move away from the bottle-opener!’ A reader listed the drinks that supermarket firm Aldi will not supply to Scottish customers via its website because of minimum pricing. None of the bottles on the list are the ones I see street drinkers passing around.

Seems the fist of the nanny state SNP has clouted middle-class wine drinkers and working-class spirit drinkers. Problem drinkers? Azzshh you werrre…

There’s evidence moderate drinking benefits physical and mental health and that we can, as Churchill put it, ‘get more out of alcohol than it takes out of us’.

Last word to Paul the Apostle, who counselled Saint Timothy: ‘Use a little wine for thy stomach.’

I’ll drink to that.