Rantings...

What's the point? No really, what is it? Most mornings, I have to draw on hidden reserves of strength just to get out of the bed in the flat that I cannot afford, in the neighbourhood I don't even like because it is plagued by gun crime and knife crime and every other sort of crime.

And, as I sit on the bus because the CityRail isn't working, the traffic emitting the carbon dioxide that will one day return as a tsunami to wipe out the grandchildren I won't have because I am probably infertile, I think of the chavs and the hoodies having underage sex outside the window and also of the al-Qa'eda plot to finish me off and I think that, if it doesn't, I will probably just develop a lifestyle cancer and the health service will refuse to pay for the drugs to cure me of it.And a solitary tear falls from my eye.

And when I finally get to work - where I must toil for hours to pay for the benefit scroungers who are sitting on their obese bottoms watching The Oprah Winfrey Show - I open the newspaper and I discover that the country called Australia cannot even manage to binge-drink properly.

Well, that's it, I think. We're going to the dogs. We're over.

If you missed the story (and you may have done, because, for some strange reason, most newspapers decided to hide it on page 765), it is my sad duty to report that, according to this year's Economist Pocket World in Figures, we are not one of the world's biggest beer-drinking countries.

There is not even a derisory nod to us on its list. In terms of litres of lager per head, the Japanese drink more beer than us. Mexicans drink more beer than us. Vene-bloody-zuelans drink more beer than us.

This is absolutely shocking news. And it just gets worse: neither do we feature in the list of nationalities that smoke the most.

In Lebanon, they're puffing away. Seems that, in South Korea, they can't get enough of nicotine. But us? Pah! We don't even smoke enough fags to scrape into the top 22. It wasn't like this in my day.

This book - which makes for extremely uncomfortable reading - also says that the number of people getting divorced has fallen. Male suicide rates have gone down.

Not very many of us are being murdered. We have one of the highest life expectancies in the world.

More tourists want to come here than almost anywhere else in the world. What are they: insane?