There is an argument to be made in favour of really heroic drinking, and after a week that brought the publication of an authorised biography of the Queen Mother as well as the death of Keith Floyd — who expired after a delicious, boozy, cigarettey lunch in the late-summer sunshine, during which he declared he felt better than he had for ages — it feels the right time to make it.

Obviously, it’s terribly sad that Floyd died, and he was only 65, and he was about to go through his fourth divorce and lose his house in the south of France, and he was a bankrupt, and so on and so forth. But how marvellous to go through life eating and drinking and being raffish, and to die gently during a postprandial snooze. Compare and contrast with the alternative: going gaga, becoming incontinent and ending your days, agonisingly slowly, in a hospital bed or a “home”. Who wouldn’t rather go out with a bang?

We’re all supposed to think that alcohol is evil and responsible for all society’s ills, but that isn’t true. There are, as ever, nuances. I don’t especially enjoy the sight of feral youths off their heads on cheap vodka, but to suggest, as the government has for years now, that people sicking up in the street before attacking each other is representative of how normal people drink is disingenuous. Non-murderous, non-feral people are much jollier with a couple of cocktails inside them, and anyone who suggests otherwise — as the comedian Frank Skinner, a recovering alcoholic, recently did in The Times — is floating about on a strange planet. Hats off to Skinner for remaining sober since 1986, but to claim that everyone would be much happier if no one drank at all is loony and tiresomely moralistic.

And yet the idea that anyone who enjoys a big fat glass of red with their supper is basically a functioning alcoholic is slowly gaining ground. There are raised eyebrows if you have wine at lunch in a restaurant. But why bother going to lunch in a restaurant and not avail yourself of the wine list? I’d rather sit at home with a bowl of soup. Alcoholic refreshments make everyone funnier, nicer and more interesting. Obviously this is a bummer if the people in question are in fact alcoholics whose livers are about to explode — but most people aren’t.

Every woman I know who has small children cracks open the wine as soon as they’ve gone to bed. It doesn’t mean they down the whole bottle in one, but that they might have a couple of glasses in front of the telly before getting on with the next load of laundry. Unit-wise, it probably doesn’t work, but I can’t see the harm.

Similarly, it seems to be that pretty much everyone who lives in the countryside really likes a drink or six. Again, so what? They're up in the morning getting ready for the day’s work, they’ve caused no one any harm, and if dinner with the dull neighbours is alleviated by copious amounts of wine, well, there you go.

The Queen Mother, who is often singled out for her devotion to Dubonnet and gin, was of a generation and class that was permanently half cut: the quantities of alcohol, and the frequency with which they were consumed, would probably kill the more self-consciously “healthy” among us. But it had absolutely no discernible negative effect on her trajectory or on her admirable conduct during the war (both of them) or on her sense of duty or on — well, anything at all. It just jollied things up.

In 1921, on her first visit to Paris, with a friend called — fabulously — Diamond Hardinge, she went to Ciro’s nightclub and danced until 2am, when she “staggered out”. At a house party in 1923, she “danced till nearly 4! Home at 4.30. Ate biscuits & sherry. Bed 5”. By 1924, “dancing and jazz had become widespread passions”, says William Shawcross in his biography of her, “and with dancing came more drinking”.

Back in Paris with her husband in 1924, “they danced in rather risqué nightclubs, including Les Néants, where ‘we drank off a coffin, surrounded by skeletons & exchanging very vulgar badinage with a man carrying a huge Bone’ ”. By 1925, now pregnant with the present Queen, the duchess wrote to her husband: “The sight of wine simply turns me up. Isn’t it extraordinary? It will be a tragedy if I never recover my drinking powers.” “She need not have worried,” Shawcross dryly notes.

By 1933, Elizabeth, then 33, had for some years been patron of a drinking club called the Windsor Wets’ Club, “a secret group of like-minded tipplers intent on raising their collective spirits”. Their motto was: “Aqua vitae non aqua pura” (“Brandy, not water”). “The great thing was,” she later said, “that being a secret society we had to have a secret sign, and this was to raise the glass to other members without being seen by disapprovers.” The duchess had graciously agreed to be the club’s patron: “You may rest assured that your patroness will be with you to the last glass.”

And so it goes on. “I gave a cocktail party for 200 bishops from overseas — by the time 8 o’clock came they were in cracking form”, after “tossing down martini after martini”. In her eighties, she would refer to a log cabin on her Scottish estate as “the old Bull and Bush”.

Shawcross’s biography barely alludes to HM’s reputed racism or anti-Semitism — presumably because the Windsors nixed any mention of it. But interestingly — chin-chin! — they clearly thought that all this quaffing was perfectly okay to write about, which indeed it is.

The late theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once tallied up one evening’s worth of drinks consumed by Ernest Hemingway’s Colonel Cantwell, hero of Across the River and into the Trees. The colonel is out on a date. He drinks three double dry martinis and a double gin and Campari before heading for Harry’s Bar, where he meets the girl. They share eight double dry martinis before dinner at the Gritti (one bottle of Capri bianco, one of valpolicella and two of Roederer brut ’42). Later, in a gondola, they drink a bottle of Perrier-Jouët. Quick solo nightcap: bottle of valpolicella. There is no indication that the colonel’s consumption is in any way unusual or debilitating. I know: entirely reprehensible, wicked, irresponsible. I’ll drink to that, nonetheless.

+ A Brazilian company is selling “cellulite-busting tights” and leggings at £15 a pop. It’s the micro-crystals, innit. Apparently they emit heat on contact with skin, which supposedly improves blood flow and therefore “drains” away “toxins and fat”. There’s a sister product, the Scala pants, which melt away your front bottom. Or something. Hooray!

Except I’m not entirely understanding why slapping yourself on the legs, or having a hot bath, or indeed moving about a bit, wouldn’t have a similar, bloodflow-increasing effect. Mostly, I’m not understanding how people fall for this guff. The pants and tights are for sale in John Lewis — which is rather like hearing that your great-aunt has intimate piercings — and, according to a spokesman, “have the potential to break records as one of the fastest-selling products John Lewis has ever stocked”.

Here’s the truth about cellulite: you’re stuck with it. Nobody can make it go away — but it’s okay because everyone, from Kate Moss down, has it. Having cellulite makes you perfectly normal. Buying magical nylon pants with crystals in doesn’t.

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