NO ONE, I suspect, is really all that surprised at the news last week of yet another report telling us that teenagers are drinking less – unless, of course, you happen to be family to one of the young people who still binge drinks.

We already know that young people, of all ages, are drinking less, just as we know they’re dating less and having less sex. The pattern has been there in so many studies that the young of today have been labelled Generation Dry. This latest report from an WHO study conducted by the University of St Andrews revealed that since 2002, shows how steep the decline has been: weekly drinking among 15-year-olds in Scotland has declined from 41% to 11% in girls and from 41% to 14% among boys.

Statistics like these should be a straightforward cause of celebration, but curiously that’s not exactly what’s happens. Such reports bring out the worst in middle-aged boozers, who tend to be rather baffled, and still get to dominate debate. Cue a nostalgia-splurge of stories of youths misspent chucking up in gardens or passing out on friends’ sofas.

Nothing, apart, perhaps, from gender identity and sexual harassment issues, brings home the generational divide quite like booze. What’s clear is that Generation X and the Baby Boomers don’t really know what to make of this Generation Dry. Often they’re the parents, so they’re keen that their kids keep themselves safe around alcohol. But at the same time, they are still knocking back the units themselves, and up for defending their habits. Today’s forty and fiftysomethings like to think they’re the ones who know what pleasure is, and believe that, yes, it does live at the bottom of a jar. Some may have gone sober, or done Dry January, or even taken that two-day-break a week recommended by Public Health England for the middle-aged, but alcohol for them is still a love affair.

So, rather than celebrate the shift, the middle-aged are inclined to examine it with a certain amount of puzzlement, as if these youngsters were strange aliens who were doing something that doesn’t quite make sense. We caricature them as the “new puritans”. We’ve swapped fretting about their drinking and fornication, for worrying that they’re on their screens the whole time and not going out and getting drunk and laid.

No one really knows why the kids are drinking less, but it’s happening – and not just in Scotland, but the world over. Of course, theories abound. Maybe it’s the negative public health messages. Maybe it’s that the kids are spending so much time on their screens. Maybe it’s because our culture has been so awash with stories of sexual assault and harassment that demonstrate how drinking, particularly male drinking, is at the heart of too much abuse.

One of those perils-of-alcohol stories emerged just last week, when beer-drinking was brought up at the Senate hearing in the United States looking into the allegations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Professor Christine Blasey Ford while they were at high school. Among the key questions was whether Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's Supreme Court judge nominee, was inebriated and whether he had passed out that night. "I liked beer,” said Kavanaugh. “I still like beer, but I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out.”

The story has a ring of familiarity. We’ve heard it all before, in countless cases of assault. The accused was drunk. It has been a refrain over the past few years. That’s not to say that we have come to see alcohol itself as the problem or cause or assault, but that we are no longer ignoring the way the two frequently come together.

This shift in drinking habits, whatever its reason, is something to celebrate, not fret over. The kids are all right. On some levels they’re doing better than we were. On others they’re not. You would think we would be glad for these youngsters, who seem to have a much more sensible relationship to alcohol. But instead, a lot of time we shake our heads over them. Perhaps every middle-aged cohort does this. They shake their heads. If it’s not over what the kids are doing, it’s what they aren’t. They shake their heads when, really, what they should be doing is learning from them. Isn’t it time, we too took on board the very same lessons in alcohol we try to teach them?

THESE days, it seems, we have a new metaphor for the art of getting out of a sticky legal situation by employing an expensive celebrity lawyer. I suggest we adopt the headline from The Sun for their article on how David Beckham got out of a fine for speeding, at nearly 60mph in a 40 mph zone. “Bend the Law Like Beckham,” it said. It is, of course, not really a good look, for a celebrity to have such a catchphrase attached to his name. Especially given that probably there are some people out there thinking that were they in a similar situation they too would love to “bend it” too. No wonder there are road safety campaigners all over the place calling him out. He ought to fix his public image fast, because right now he is only looking arrogant and entitled. Even his Mr Loophole, after all, said that since he admitted he was speeding, he should have “from a moral standpoint”, been convicted. Time for a grovel? It should be. But, no, even as his lawyer was in court, he was posting an angry selfie of himself stuck in London traffic.