PEOPLE can’t go anywhere these days without a drink in their hand. We have become a nation of habitual boozers and the social effects are at times appalling.

I don’t suppose it will happen, because the Government makes too much money out of alcohol taxes, but I am on the side of the British Medical Association when it says tough legal measures are needed to tackle the growing cost of drink-related harm in Britain. The marketing of booze is an insidious business, targeting the young through advertising and sports sponsorship. The England football team even has its own “official” beer. Make of that message what you will.

Quite rightly the BMA wants a review of 24-hour licensing laws. Continentals drink for pleasure, Brits drink to get ratted. One of our biggest exports is binge drinking teenagers who, not content with plastering our streets with vomit after late-night excesses, spend their holidays doing exactly the same in foreign resorts.

The British abroad are steadily bringing this country into disrepute by insulting local cultures, fighting and generally displaying an ignorance and stupidity that defies sense.

The alcohol industry spends £800 million a year in promoting drink in the UK. The intention is to normalise booze. To make it an essential part of everyday life. To grab ’em when they are young and suggestible.

Once upon a time parents took their kids to the seaside for the day. Now they simply pitch up at a pub with a beer garden play area. After all, family duties can’t be allowed to interfere with drinking.

Of course an advertising ban would have economic repercussions. But boozing has reached epidemic levels. We turn a blind eye to the excesses most of the time, leaving the police and emergency services with the unwholesome and often dangerous task of picking up the pieces.

It’s high time drunkenness was made socially unacceptable and penalties for the kind of idiocy we see on those television programs about cops on the streets at night were made much more severe. Drinking has become our new national sport.

It’s not a new issue, but it has got out of control and the long-term health costs alone mean something has got to be done now. How many of today’s binge drinkers will be tomorrow’s burden on the NHS with premature liver and kidney illnesses?

I like a shandy, like most of us. But drinking has become a badge of honour with the young and, no matter how they excuse themselves, the off licences and clubs and the mealy mouthed apologists from the drinks industry are more interested in profit than promoting responsible drinking.

KNOWING WHEN TO QUIT

TERRY Wogan might have caused a great weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst his loyal following of TOGS.

But you have to admire a man who has made his pile and knows when it’s the right time to quit. In Tel’s case that’s his popular breakfast radio program which has established a cult following, mainly with those of a certain age who enjoy waking up to Wogan’s whimsical humour.

Sir Terry, who will still be holding hands with Pudsey bear once a year and is getting a new weekend radio show, said he wanted to go before the BBC had to send in a team of executives to help him up the stairs.

Wrinkly old campaigners like Bruce Forsyth seem prepared to die with their boots on, ignoring the fact that they are losing their touch.

Eternal youth is not the gift of entertainers, any more than the rest of us. I got the message from Britain’s youth while shopping for some new clothes in M&S this week, replacing items terminally damaged in the great flood that was Keswick show on bank holiday Monday.

As I sorted through the jackets and trousers I overheard a young lad walking past with his girlfriend. “That’s just t’ old gadgies’ department,” he spoke unfeelingly. It was at that moment I knew Wogan was right to make his escape before people started commenting that the patter was getting out of date and the old brain wasn’t ticking over quite as quickly any more.

Terry’s old geezers should give his successor, Chris Evans, a fair hearing before they switch over to bland local radio in protest. Evans will be edgier, but I suspect he will soon establish his own style and bring in new listeners. Us old gadgies, in our M&S jumpers, will just have to accept that change happens. We don’t always have to embrace it, but sometimes we can get a nice surprise when we discover something fresh and different.

A MONSTER PROBLEM

LOUSY weather. Fed up tourists wandering the streets of Keswick, Ambleside and Windermere consuming fish and chips and patronising the vast array of shops that sell cagoules.

A monster. Now that’s what we need to fetch ’em in. And it looks as if there may be more than a smidgeon of fact about the fiction surrounding Bownessie, the beast of Windermere.

Later this month a search party, including a psychic, will trawl England’s longest lake to try and solve the mystery prompted by several sightings of a large creature. The latest report comes from hotelier Thomas Noblett, whose early morning swim was disturbed by a three foot wave of inexplicable origin.

All this has me wondering whatever happened to the Bassenthwaite Lake monster. Bassie was the subject of a claimed sighting and photograph in 1973, although my first thought was it looked more like a plastic duck seeking refuge from a charity duck race.

I recall investigations by a team of atomic scientists in the early 1960s and television reports of local anglers seeing a Loch Ness type beast, but nothing since.

Bass Lake is traditionally the home of the legendary Eachy — “a large humanoid being of gruesome and slimy appearance”. But that’s just an expenses-fiddling overfed MP, isn’t it?

Ecology experts say Bownessie might be a large eel or a Welsh catfish introduced by anglers. The Welsh get blamed for everything, although this time a new tourist attraction from the deep would not be unwelcome in times of recession and rotten weather in this so-called barbecue summer.

NO TITTERING AT THE BACK

PATHETIC, I know. A council in North Wales is preserving the sensitivities of canteen staff by renaming that most traditional of puds, Spotted Dick, “Spotted Richard.”

Okay, so they are tired of childishly suggestive humour. But a bit of harmless naughtiness makes the world go round. If Spotted Dick has met its politically correct match, what hope is there for Cumberland sausage? How on earth do we order that with propriety?

In my schooldays canteen staff were made of sterner stuff and would have told smutty children exactly where to get off. Have we really become such a dreary PC society, one in which boy scouts can’t use penknives and conkers are too hazardous, that a tired old Carry On-type joke puts people in a tizz and gets council jobsworths on the case? Once noted for our stiff upper lips, we really are becoming as soft as sponge puddings and as weak as custard these days.s