Why do the British drink so much?

I first met alcohol in the late 1980s. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and

I, aged nine or 10, were up alone. We trawled the

lounge for abandoned cans. I remember being methodical: pick one up, give it a shake to see if there’s anything inside and, if there is, drink! I can still taste the stale, metallic tang of Heineken on my tongue. Just mind the ones with cigarette butts in.

But it was at university that booze and I became properly acquainted. My memory of my first week is of social anxiety offset by cheap alcohol – a harbinger of the next four years. At one ball, I drank so much free wine that I vomited the stud out of my nose and down the sink. My diary entry that night consisted of four oversized words scrawled in turquoise pen: “drunk + sick / Freshers’ Ball”. But that was how it was: sometimes you were the one bundling people into a taxi, sometimes you were the one being bundled.