Alex Phillips: If you’ve had a hangover from hell, it’s quite apparent how poisonous the stuff can be, are we stacking up the tinnies to an early grave

If booze were invented today my hunch is that there is no way it would pass muster with Elf and Safety and the Hipster trend of drinking mysterious concoctions from jam jars in prohibition-themed speakeasies wouldn't be a voguish novelty but an underground movement where only the most Bohemian would congregate to get collectively punch drunk.

Were it not for the Biblical endorsement by one Lord Jesus Christ, who saw fit to turn water into wine, I wonder whether fermented grape juice would be granted the moral high ground above equally noxious narcotics that it presently enjoys.

After all, if you’ve had a hangover from hell, it’s quite apparent how poisonous the stuff can be. But perhaps more striking is quite how pernicious being under the influence is when it comes to public and personal health.

Drunkenness accounts for over a third of admittances to A&E, over a third of incidents of domestic violence and a third of all suicides. Alcohol causes at least twenty deaths a day in the UK.

Despite Government warnings, public health campaigns, sin taxes, age restrictions, tougher driving laws and an array of booze-free faux plonk, we are still chugging it back like sailors on leave, especially the Boomer Boozers.

Those aged between 45 and 64 are today most likely to drink, with 16 to 24 year olds the least. How times have changed. Yet if you are a problem drinker - and we must certainly try to find out what that means, it’s pretty hard to avoid the stuff.

There is almost an established cultural contempt for the brave friend who nobly states that they’ll only go out for one or two, or perhaps deign to not drink at all, heaven forfend!

Being trolleyed, squiffy, plastered, ratted, tiddley, blotto, hammered or wasted is so normalised it has been a regular trope in comedy from Dickens to Ab Fab while drinking is regularly promoted as a desirable lifestyle choice.

Given that critics of alcohol argue that it does as much physical harm as most A class drugs, the image of settling into an airport lounge with huge advertisements of a lovely syringe at 30 thousand feet makes you realise how prevalent a tipple as a standard of comfort has become.

But do we all really need to turn tee total? We’ve been knocking it back in the west since before the Romans even invented the Vomitorium, and I’m not one to besmirch a night on the lash or the joy of a well breathed Claret while watching Talking Pints. But how many of us really have an honest grip on our consumption? There’s one thing being a problem drinker and quite another having a problem with drink.

Dear Viewer, most of us do. From rubbish sleep, to expanding waistlines, dehydrated skin to dreadful moods, the midweek muzzy head to the weekend post-excess sofa coma, if we were to line up a conveyor belt of what we’ve knocked back during the course of the week, for a significant number of us, the litany of liquor would be pretty thought provoking. For others, it is deadly.

So what is the answer? What are the warning signs of being at the bottom of a bottle too often? And while we all have the capacity to say to ourselves put a cork in it, why is that so hard?

We all know a celebrity who has succumbed to a lethal habit and we probably have that one mate who becomes an unexploded landmine in Spoons, but what about ourselves?

Are we stacking up the tinnies to an early grave? Is that four pack killing your six pack? Are those beer goggles blinding you to the real truth about your guilty pleasure?

I’m Alex, I’m 37, and I love a good white burgundy with plenty of oak.Today, we really need to talk about alcohol.