After almost 30 years of atrocious slacking (and just in time for Christmas) the Office for National Statistics has updated the way it measures our measures - which is to say, its methods of judging whether our glasses are half empty or just twice as big - which is to say, how they tell how pissed we're getting. Adjustments have been made and units recalibrated, because apparently, since the days of Blue Nun and third-degree fondue burns, alcohol has got more ... well, alcoholic. Beer is more beery - so you can be, too. Wine is much more winey - so you can be infinitely more annoying and smear tear-diluted mascara down as many toilet walls as possible, greeting the following morning like an anguished fairy princess with the usual vague sensation of rose petals scattering through your interior landscape, bruised knees and a great deal of hair in the back of your throat.

And your glass probably is bigger. According to the ONS. And it's really full. So what might once have been 1.5 units may now be three. Which could well mean you're drinking more. And if you're a woman, you're drinking even more than that - almost twice as much. This has, of course, led the Wine and Spirit Trade Association and the Portman Group to purr about (surely commercially disastrous) plagues of total abstinence and restraint, while Dawn Primarolo (try saying that when you're half cut) promises the government will "work with the alcohol industry to ensure everyone is able to estimate how much they are drinking".

That's the government who opened up the licensing hours and turned our nocturnal city centres into Sodom and Gomorrah Meets the Poseidon Adventure on Ice - that same government is now saying the alcohol industry will help us count our units. Because there's nothing like being truly rat-arsed for helping you to count, behave responsibly and remember not to greet your next beloved by wanging a breast over each of his eyes and then trying to samba down one of his thighs, accompanied by music only you can hear.

I haven't drunk alcohol in around 17 years, but I do remember how it goes - and now it's just so much fun to watch Brits self-medicating. Especially at this very special time of year - holly, migraines, in-laws, that bloody partridge up a gum tree, spewing its ring. We work hideously long hours, our weather is getting worse, our savings may be worthless by next Tuesday and our individual debt repayments would each sustain a Latin American state, we are distantly, hopelessly at war, we're tired of God but confused about praying to Dawkins - of course we find it tricky to relax. So we medicate with prescribed medication, we medicate with illegal medication and we chug down a licensed drug that makes the government millions every month. (Lucky coincidence, here - after all, would we ever vote for any of them, if we weren't either mashed or hung over?)

And now that women have (sort of) broken into all sorts of formerly male preserves, we can all be affronted when they drink like men, too. Although, of course, when men flash their buttocks, regurgitate their kebabs, stab their best mates and contract interesting infections with strangers, that's still regarded as a display of manly dash. Ladies in similar positions are frowned upon, photographed from low angles by the tabloids and blamed when they get assaulted. Plus, we're all aware that God, Intelligent Design, Blind Chance and/or Dawkins also weighed in against female drinking with a number of design flaws. Along with cellulite and involuntary mid-life goatees, women have been burdened with what we might call a rather slapdash ability to metabolise alcohol. We fare badly as longterm heavy drinkers, we suffer more than men in binges. Just nip down to your local park and check out those early morning alfresco imbibers - you'll find they're men. They're almost always men. Perhaps sick, dirty, homeless, maybe even unbalanced men, but still alive. The women die.

Still, let's not end on a downer. Off you skip, slap on those luminous antlers and your posh, wipe-clean frock and hit that office Christmas party. Obviously, I won't be doing the same - not because I don't drink, but because I'm self-employed. My office parties are rubbish: you can get tired of faxing yourself photocopies of your own genitals. But I will mention, before you sink that first Covonia and blackcurrant, that you can, and even I can, drink water all night and get high on the mood in the room. Letting go is a state of mind, available for free - no hangovers, nothing you don't remember, nothing you want to forget, no ugly sex with people you dislike. I'll leave you to decide if that's a problem.

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