I love pubs. I am, like my dad, a pub person. This is a state of mind, not a measure of alcoholism. I love specific pubs – my local, the ones I always frequent on holiday in Norfolk or visiting my sister in Devon, the one near my friend who is never in when she says she’ll be and so I have to have a place to wait – and I love pubs generally.

I love the peace you find when you go at peaceful times, like mid-afternoon on a weekday, and I love the crescendo of noise and activity that builds every evening and that culminates in Friday and Saturday night chaos. (I don’t go then, obviously. I stick to m’quiet afternoons nursing a bitter lemon, though I do still ramp to a half of shandy or cider as the week wears on. I mean I love the fact that the rhythm of pub life exists so reliably that you can confidently play in and out of it as dictated by your age, relationship status and/or extroversion).

I love that on Saturdays and Sundays beer gardens fill with families and that by Sunday night they have emptied and the bar has become a haven for quiet drinkers once more and the cycle will begin anew.

It is clearly non-pub persons, however, who have proposed new rules to minimise “vertical drinking” – ie standing up to have a drink. You can see the divergence in thinking and approach already. This is not “vertical drinking”. This........

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