Sometime last week I was sat on the local Esporta couch drinking a coffee and watching Sky news. As you commonly find these days the TV was muted but with hesitant subtitles crawling along the base of the screen – either created by some very clever piece of software or furiously tapping touch typist. I am going with the former on account of the phonetic errors you could only imagine being made by software.

The focus of the news was what appeared to be a press statement by Oprah Winfrey, which turned out to be a press conference headed by Oprah. The focus of the conference was the fact that several girls within the Oprah school of excellence had been allegedly sexually abused by a 'dorm matron'. During the course of the conference you got a sense that there was little doubt that the girls claims were true although it did not seem anything legal was under way. It also soon became apparent that the school in question was based in Africa and the school seemed exclusively for young black African girls. My apologies if I am mistaken.

Oprah was front and centre for a long time, I guess it was a slow news day. I sat there for the majority of my lunch hour watching Oprah's confidently earnest face while reading the subtitled dialogue. There was much about how they were going to make things right, had fired everyone, felt tortured and let down, rehired and changed policy and were offering counselling to the girls.

And then she moved onto the killer statement. Which was to declare that her faith dictated she believed everything happens for a reason and that this will somehow make these girls better people.

I think given a choice these girls would probably have preferred to become better people by some route other than sexual abuse, and by the way this happening for a reason? Are we saying god sanctioned the sexual abuse so that they could achieve better grades and succeed in life? Because if that is the case there is something really wrong with whichever faith sits close to the Oprah heart and questionable moral barometer - considering that Oprah Winfrey is a hugely influential female media star watched by a nation with over 600 million American natives, 540 million of which claim the same spiritual faith.

So ... today I was sitting at home waiting for the effects of an allergic reaction to wear off when the BBC's latest scare campaign presented itself on the TV. This hot on the heels of last weeks 'we are all going to die from cancer especially you meat eaters'. This weeks headline was that everyone is an alcoholic and about to die from an illness that is not detectable until your liver functions start to stutter and you begin vomiting blood. Of course they had a blood vomiting citizen on hand to interview, identity hidden to protect her daughter, who was also in frame although blurred while merrily playing on some swings.

Then we switched to the anti drinking lobbyists, who universally seemed haunted and under nourished. They earnestly announced that they consider the best course of action to resolve a nations alcoholism is to raise drinking taxes. As alcohol in this modern day is cheaper that it was twenty years ago.

Of course they were very selective on which drinks they showed as being cheaper, of which obviously did not include Guinness nor Magners nor Bulmers, nor any lager. They were also very elusive about where they got their alcohol from. Aunty Beeb did manage to have the presenter talking over a white table of vague advertisement free bottles with no specific labels on view. But with a blood red wine spilt and laced between the bottles.

Having studied alcoholism to benchmark my own drinking habits and assist the good lady Priddeesh with a recent study project, I can confidently state that if you take the clinical definition of an 'alcoholic' and apply it to your average Joan or Jo Blow then indeed a vast majority of this countries population are alcoholic. But that is of course missing the point. We may be drinking more but most of us are not drinking from a compulsive need to quench an all consuming addiction.

We are drinking because of a a psychological reaction. A reaction to the incessant static of a misdirected government struggling to manage a society falling apart at its violent seams. We drink as a reaction to the administrative and decision making incompetence of these same governmental institutions that are run by over educated socially inept civil servants. Who increasingly seem to be led and dictated to by the good old US of A who universally hold faith before all else and present people like Oprah as moral lynchpins for their own culture.