Two-and-a-half pints of lager...

"Sorry sir, that's all I can serve you."

"What d'ya mean? I'm not driving, I can have a third pint!"

"Sorry, just a half. Otherwise you're drinking dangerously."

This is the world of the temperance fanatics, nannying fussbuckets and health fascists, a world where two-and-a-half pints of premium lager is 'binge drinking':

Drinking six units of alcohol on one single occasion at least monthly amounts to “heavy episodic drinking”, according to a recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has said 16% of the world’s population are now binge drinkers.

This is barking. Not only is there no evidence to support describing this as 'dangerous' but it completely undermines genuine efforts to promote a healthy attitude to drinking. But no-one faces up to these fussbuckets, says to them - 'sorry mate but that's plain stupid, now shut up and go away'.

This is a world where sitting down is bad for you, where you can't enjoy sitting in the sunshine and where using a harmless product like an e-cig is deemed bad simple because it looks like harmful smoking. And yet hardly a day passes by without another call for ad restrictions, price hikes, sales control, mandated packaging and outright bans - on salt, sugar, fats, fast food, cigars, lemonade, alcohol in any form, tanning beds, bacon and even fruit juice.

All the things people like - especially the things that working class people like - are to be controlled. We are to live a purposeful, sober, salad-filled life for the good of our health. Indeed government will mandate the times you can drink, the places you can smoke (are there many left) and the size of the portions you eat.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. Remember that the next time someone links 'binge drinking' to ten-year-old photographs of a girls lying pissed on a bench - two-and-a-half pints of lager, three glasses of white wine, two large vodka and cokes. That's the limit of the fun you're allowed on a Friday night if you aren't to fall foul of the health police.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. It's a bloody joke.

....