It is difficult if not impossible to produce a guide to safe drinking that will apply equally to the tall and short, the fat and thin, that will take into account the wide variations of the ability to metabolise alcohol that occur according to race and, to some extent, to the drinking culture and past drinking history that is the norm in someone’s peer group.

Obviously there is not only a difference between men and women but also between women before and after the menopause. Seasoned drinkers who don’t overdo the drinking develop a metabolic system that processes alcohol between a third and a quarter more efficiently and faster than the occasional drinker.

Life is riddled with experts who have to decide on matters of safety. An engineer will design a bridge strong enough to bear the heaviest lorry loaded with freight even though the majority of cars using it will be small family saloons.

Similarly public health officials and government administrators offer their advice on the safe amount to drink that will take in the most vulnerable, for example the short, overweight, nonmuscular premenopausal woman who is not used to drinking, doesn’t eat when drinking and tends to take all the rations for the week in a single night’s binge. As a result the advice has been ridiculed in those middle-class houses that have been told they are drinking at hazardous levels, a new term only recently employed by the state nannies.

Such meaningless and seemingly inappropriate advice can regrettably have the effect of detracting from the next recommendation from the Department of Health that could be important.

No one has refuted the findings that have shown there is a J shaped curve graph that plots alcohol consumption against survival. The teetotallers don’t do as well as the modest drinkers and the heavy drinkers do considerably worse than teetotallers.

The greatest advantage is achieved if women have one or two units a day and men can have one more. So-called regular light social drinkers do as well as teetotallers.

All the figures quoted in the guidelines can at best be very rough guides and there would be large numbers of exceptions to the rules. One change has been that most alcohol drinks are now served in larger glasses and wines and beers are apt to be stronger.

I will continue to take heart from the extensive epidemiological studies and will, until it is proved otherwise, entertain a slight suspicion that the recent heavy coverage given to the warning to the middle classes this week had political intent and was designed to persuade us to tolerate drunken inner-city binge drinkers even if we didn’t have to hug them as part of a hug-a-hoodie campaign.

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