My nose may be the colour of a cochineal beetle, but it is a feature not a bug

I resent the commercially-coopted drinking culture in my current city of residence, where a couple of central streets are promoted as the official slough of iniquity where people enter in the evening and from which they are evicted in the wee hours when their wallets are empty, to stagger home or yack up in a bus-stop or start fights with lamp-posts and save their yacking-up activities for the back seats of taxis. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that self-destructive blacking-out alcoholic excess is like Christmas -- it should be an outlet for personal spontaneity rather than an empty commercialised ritual.

Vittore Carpaccio -- Courtenay Place at Sunrise (Berlin Gemäldegalerie)

Officially the City Council deplores the immaturity of our drinking culture, and has reacted to the scandalous scenes of staggering and up-yacking by instituting Liquor Ban Zones where public possession and consumption of alcohol are only legal in the bars on which these zones are centred (or in the fenced-off, partly-privatised sections of footpath in front of bars). No-one could possibly have anticipated that giving publicans a monopoly over the public consumption of alcohol would have increased the amount of staggering and up-yacking. Anyway, the Council periodically extends the area covered by these Liquor Bans, and more bars appear in the Slough, and there is more public drunkenness, and let's not squabble about what is cause and what is effect.

If the current NZ moral panic about the "obesity epidemic" gets any worse, I imagine that the City Council will introduce Food Ban Zones where eating in public is illegal unless performed in a fast-food restaurant.