IT’S amazing how puritanical about booze British people can be - given that an estimated 60 per cent of the population (including me) regularly over-indulge in alcohol.
At the risk of offending those with a delicate disposition, let me confess that last Monday night (or early Tuesday morning, rather) when I came home after spending seven hours guzzling red wine, Guinness and Southern Comfort at my local pub, I promptly threw up all over my bedroom floor.
In truth, I have only just finished scrubbing and disinfecting the carpet as I write this.
Bingeing on booze and then vomiting isn’t smart and it isn’t clever - but I am not really ashamed of myself since it doesn't happen to me very often.

Besides, I was trying to cheer myself up as I've been down in the dumps recently and had taken a few days annual leave from work in a bid to get over myself.
Nor do I feel the need to apologize to anyone for vomming on the bedroom floor, since I live alone and no-one was upset by my actions, apart from myself.
I've often felt that the Romans had a much healthier attitude to over indulgence than we do. Any Roman family worth its salt in first century Britain would have an en-suite vomitarium in their villa.
The reason I mention booze in this column is that I really cannot understand why people made such a huge fuss about Andrew Flintoff getting sloshed and acting the fool in a pedalo in St Lucia following England’s Word Cup defeat to New Zealand.
OK, him hitting the bottle was less than ideal behaviour when there was a match the following day against Canada.
But then Flintoff isn’t a robot, He’s not one of those sportsmen who is dedicated to winning at all costs and takes sport way too seriously.
Too many athletes and sports people are like that. They become boringly obsessed, so demented by the desire to win that many of them slide into taking performance-enhancing drugs, which is much, much sadder than getting pissed occasionally.
But, as I say, Flintoff isn’t one of the new generation of sporting automata. He is a real man, aged 29, who likes to drink, a lot, like millions of other men and women in our country.
He is also a father, so we shouldn’t be surprised that he drinks. That is one of the reasons God invented alcohol – so that the strain of raising children could be made tolerable (just).
For Flintoff’s transgression at the beachside bar and in the pedalo out at sea at 4am, he was stripped of his vice-captaincy, fined £1,000, banished from the ground and dropped from the side that laboured to a victory against Canada.
England’s head coach Duncan Fletcher also publicly exposed Flintoff as a regular caner (as if we couldn’t have guessed that, after seeing him on TV celebrating England’s Ashes victory in London in 2005).
During that particular booze-a-thon the star was asked had he had any lunch and amusingly replied: “Yes, a cigar.�
But the press are especially hypocritical about sportsmen who like a drink or ten. Apart from doctors, I can’t think of any occupational group that abuses alcohol more than journalists.
“He’ll NEVER be skipper again,� screamed one redtop headline about Flintoff's most recent "shame". Frankly, I doubt that.
Disappointingly, Flintoff issued a grovelling apology, as seems to be demanded of anyone caught “letting the side down� these days.
I don’t know if he wrote the apology himself, but it has the tone of something scribbled down by a nervous PR fluff-head with an over-tight sphincter.
Flintoff said: “It was unnecessary high jinks and I have to accept the consequences… I know I shouldn’t have done what I did and I have to accept the punishment. Everyone has my assurance that I will be doing everything I possibly can to make up for this lapse.�
Oh, please. No-one died.
The only words of commonsense to come out of this farce came from Ian Botham who said he was amused by Flintoff’s antics and that there had been a “total over-reaction�. “The big mistake was getting caught,� added Botham. Quite right.

* APOLOGIES to regular readers that I've not been updating this column regularly in recent times. As I've hinted already, my head's been up my ***se (as folk are prone to say in New Brighton) for a week or so. Anyway, normal service has now been resumed.

* THANKS to Tim, who emailed from heaven knows where, and who stumbled on my blog when he Googled the singer Dorothy Squires.
I'd mentioned that I played some of her tracks at the party I held at my New Brighton flat back in January, you see. Tim wants to know which tracks by Miss Squires I played at that party. From memory, Tim, they were "I'll Be Walking Behind You (On Your Wedding Day) and "I Still Believe" - the pair of which would make fantastic opening and closing soundtracks for a feature film about obsessive love.

* TOMORROW - read my blog about male broodiness.

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