IT IS in mankind’s nature to worry about its offspring, particularly as the little rascals reach their teenage years. They’re not getting out enough. They’re out too late. They’re drinking too much. They’re not drinking enough.

The last-named fear was sparked this week with shock news that young persons are shunning alcohol in favour of the internet. They’re spending too much time online. They’re not spending enough time online.

The no-alcohol news caused the drinks industry to have a fit of the vapours but, after a couple of medicinal swift ones, it recovered enough to make this up: “These findings are further proof that education alongside strict enforcement on under-age sales are making the difference.” Yes, please don’t buy our products.

The problem is that if citizens don’t learn to drink when young they probably never will. This is a good thing in terms of crime figures, driving accidents and domestic abuse.

True, it may have a deleterious effect on character-building, social expressiveness and the birth rate, but I contend that each of these is over-rated and could do with being reined in anyway.

Outgoing persons may worry about the younglings spending too much time indoors staring at screens and having virtual relationships rather than real ones, which tend to be smellier.

Like many readers, I have visited the real world and didn’t much care for it. But it’s where you must position yourself if you want to earn a buck, find a spouse and experience an actual football match in all its foul-mouthed glory.

It’s important to add that young persons are also shunning drink because they can’t afford it. Britain is, famously, a low-wage economy, which is bad enough for adults. But the young really get it in the neck, with poverty being a sort of apprenticeship that all who did not attend private school are expected to serve.

According to the findings of think-tank Demos, persons aged 16 to 24 are less able to afford alcohol than 10 years ago. It’s a kind of progress, I guess.

I don’t know how anyone can afford to smoke and drink. When someone told me the price of a packet of fags recently, I spat a mouthful of Honey Nut Loops across the floor. Evening meal completely ruined.

Beyond the lack of funds, 66 per cent of young people in the Demos survey said alcohol was not important in their social lives. Possibly because they don’t have social lives. Two in five thought alcohol more important to their parents’ lives than their own.

We could be seeing a serious generational shift here. We’re raising pale, nerdy ratepayers of the future whose lack of charitable support for the alcohol business could put prices up for the older generation who, in turn, will have to cut down from a vat of sherry a day to an occasional nip, until they die off, taking the drinks industry with them.

We’re getting into the realms of fantasy here. Drink is no more going to disappear than are print newspapers or books, which similarly can impede clear thinking. That said, the Demos survey acknowledges that a “significant minority” of young people indulges in binge-drinking, a phenomenon observable with your own eyelobes if you’re brave enough to venture uptown on a Friday or Saturday night.

So, on the one hand, we have screen-addicted youngsters who may in future have to attend special wetting-out clinics where they’re taught how to drink. And, on the other hand, we have the more traditional mentalists who feel a need to get off their faces.

Who has not felt that need to escape the lunatic landscape known as reality? But that’s also possible online now. Both alcohol and the internet offer solutions to the perennial problem of coping with that bane of human existence: boredom.

But the internet is cheaper and, if you avoid English newspaper websites, doesn’t make you vomit. You won’t get into real fights, only keyboard posturing, and you will remain chaste of loin, thereby reducing the population problem.

As so often, we salute the nation’s young persons. To my mind, they are smarter, pleasanter and, evidently, more sober than previous generations. The future is in good hands. Hands that clack keyboards rather than clasp pints.

Right, that’s the end of the article. You can all go away now. No need to keep hanging around. Look, can a man not have a small restorative without folk shouting the odds about hypocrisy?