Your intrepid columnist slaves this week, blasted by an incessant Red Sea sun, researching latest tit-bits for digestion with your Saturday morning breakfast.

And today's dispatch, sad to report, is strong enough to curdle your cornflakes.

"Zee Ingleesh," reveals Neder, my beachside, spice-shop-owning informant, "are, 'ow you say, drunken crayzee!"

Now, Neder's descendents have links to wild-partying stock and he knows his orgies. Long before his rare Egyptian orthodox Christian Church was founded, his Old Testament forebears worshipped north of his spice shop and south of Mount Sinai.

Here, Moses with an armful of commandments threw up his hands in horror as his wayward wilderness wanderers danced in gay drunken abandon before that infamous Golden Calf (Exodus 32).

They did this having lost sight of God and his ways, turning to false idols, not too unlike this season's present beachful of boozy beauties worshipping golden bodies of a more personal kind. Us 'Ingleesh' are apparently 'crayzee' because we – especially the young - lie about in gutters with undies and everything else on show.

Back home the problem's the same, is it not? Our politicians shout "Double the bar bill!" while do-gooding liberals advise, "Give 'em education', and everybody else stands around wailing and gnashing teeth knowing lolly and lessons ain't really the answer.

Perhaps the Sinai solution might help. A bit radical. Thousands who drank on rebelled and died of plague and other unhealthy things, not unlike our own horrendous NHS fatality figures on alcohol.

However the millions who went back to God and his life-giving ways survived and prospered.