My freedom to open a second bottle of wine without getting permission, without having to read the content information on the bottle, may not rank very high in the roster of human rights. But it is a freedom I treasure.

The day I never consume more than three alcoholic units, because Nanny forbids it, something important in me will die. Call it my independence. Call it my free, wine-guzzling spirit. “O for a beaker full of the warm south,” wrote Keats in Ode to a Nightingale, “full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.” If he ordered a beaker of Hippocrene in 2007, he would be asked if he wanted the 175ml or the 250ml beaker and, if the latter, advised that two beakers was the maximum daily intake recommended by the Department of Health.