Will Self...

Five hundred of Britain's top liver specialists are calling for health warnings to be put on alcohol containers - and I am in complete agreement with them. Of course, during my own drinking days as a fully paid-up member of the crapulent libertarians' club, I would have slurred disgust at the very notion. "Nanny state," I would have cried. "Pathetic, pointless, counterproductive ..." And so on ... and on ... and doubtless on - one of the less attractive sideeffects of intoxication being the tendency to repeat things ad nauseam.

Truth to tell, I don't think it's people - such as myself - who actually are alcoholic who need to be warned about how much we're drinking. When I drank I knew, at least up until the point where I blacked out.

It was even the basis of a sick joke I had with one of my drinking buddies. "How did it go last night?" one of us would ask, and the other would mock-heroically reply from the tip-tilting deck of yet another oceanic hangover, "Oh, I s'pose I had the unrecommended 22 units last night."

Our shared guilt about the amount we drank had to be offset with feigned bravado. But whether rich enough to order Kristal at the Cafe Royal, or homeless and slugging Night Train under Hungerford Bridge, the alcoholic counts his drinks because he depends on the stuff to the exclusion of all ordinary needs - food, sex, the the acceptance of society.

Yet it isn't these kind of drinkers that the liver doctors are worried about. Professor Ian Gilmore, of the Royal College of Physicians, has said that he believes only half the patients doctors see with cirrhosis are alcoholic. In the past 30 years there has been an eightfold increase in deaths from the disease among men aged 35-44, and a sevenfold increase for women.

I don't believe that these statistics are unrelated to the "liberalisation" of the licensing laws in our country. People who may not be alcohol-dependent in the ways we conventionally understand are scaling that great mountain of booze simply because it's there. In the past 20 years one of the great shibboleths of the British middle class has been that while our own drinking patterns have been quite destructive, involving chug-a-lugging, bladder-busting quantities of beer and slamming down the spirits, our continental cousins have it right with their gentle drip-feed of fine wine.

Nowadays the middle class think they are fine as long as they control their appellation. Not so. The truth is that France has its own drunks - they're called clochards - and its own problem with cirrhosis.

A French doctor once told me that while, officially, there are no alcoholics in France, every adult has to be detoxed from alcohol when they enter hospital. Oh, and the French have the highest European per capita consumption of benzodiazepines (like alcohol in pill form), surely a not unrelated fact.

Bigger measures and more booze for more of the time and you get more liver disease, whatever class you come from and whatever your tipple. The case for more information for those drinkers who are not aware of how much they are downing is inescapable.

This isn't a killjoy policy, it's good sense. Thirty years ago drink-driving was almost socially acceptable and drug addicts were prescribed maintenance doses of heroin. Attitudes change and legislation either moves to accommodate the fact or seeks to mould it. Both are acceptable as long as the time lag isn't too great either way.

Money and the single mum

Good to see the Ceres-like figure of Ms Dynamite blazoned across the press, and I wish her all good things for her looming confinement. I am a great fan of the London rapper, not least because she puts paid to so many stereotypes about black British youth with a single, well-aimed quip or cleverly coined couplet.

However, the sad fact is that the quality that allows her to escape yet another pernicious pigeonhole - the one occupied by unmarried mothers from ethnic minorities - isn't her verbal facility, but that universal language: hard cash.

Uneasy bedfellows: Idi Amin and Papa Blair

IDI Amin and Tony Blair are not exactly comparable figures, but in one respect at least they are uneasy bedfellows. Both have been reduced to a rhetorical appeal to history in order to avoid their contemporary excoriation.

In a recent interview the hideous Amin speaks of regretting nothing and looking to posterity for his vindication, while Papa Blair also looks to history to be his judge. Truly Blair is a man for all reasons; if he isn't tending towards Amin's messianic pole, then he's irresistibly attracted to the opposite one occupied by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, where all is titbeating honesty and the need to confess weakness.

I wish Blair would make up his mind as to what sort of man he is, but I suspect the truth is that he's so dizzy with spinning he doesn't even know himself.

The real villains of our rail chaos

My piece a fortnight ago on the Hatfield crash and its aftermath drew a wide-ranging and highly informed response from readers.

Lest we lose sight of the real villains of the piece, one correspondent reminded me that John MacGregor, the Tory minister who did the dirty privatising deed, worked for merchant bankers Hill Samuel before the 1979 election.

They continued to contribute to his pension fund for the 11 years he was a minister. Two months after leaving office, MacGregor was back working for Hill Samuel. While he was at the Ministry of Transport one of the banks handling privatisation contracts was, surprise, surprise - Hill Samuel.

Even while we continue to criticise the Government for its febrile policies on transport, we'd do well not to forget how these things were done under the old Tory regime.

He came, he conquered

One man who would doubtless have found the idea of an alcohol health warning absurd was the great writer Norman Lewis, who died this week at the prodigious age of 95.

Lewis attributed his longevity to a mandatory bottle of red wine a day, but I suspect he lived so long because he remained both curious about, and engaged with, this teeming world of ours. His obituarists have been quick to point how singularly unrewarded Lewis's career was, despite the fact that as well as writing numerous novels, he was the author of some acknowledged travel writing classics. But my view is that only pets ever really win prizes - literary or otherwise - and whatever else he was, Lewis wasn't one of those.

What he was, in fact, was a Londoner. Although always keen to stress his Welsh origins, he grew up in Enfield.

His autobiography, I Came, I Saw, gives a marvellous account of what it was like to be a child during the period when the great sprawl of London suburbia was under way, the newly minted semis ranged along muddy lanes, and cows grazed beneath street lamps.

I urge you read it; Lewis can have no finer memorial.