Drunk but legends, right?

It is a strange and almost unbelievable fact that I was brought up in a family that almost never touched alcohol.

My great-grandmother was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and I'd like to think she came out with that catchy slogan, "Lips that touch strong liquor shall never touch mine" when accosted by tipsy young men.

In those booze-sodden days there was a pub on every corner in every small town: there was a reason the temperance movement caught on.

My grandmother and her sisters in their turn seldom touched the stuff; a sherry on a special occasion such as Christmas, possibly sherry in a trifle, and a shandy at a family wedding would have been the strength of it, and even that was a daring gesture.

My mother never drank. She couldn't tolerate alcohol. And so you have a picture of the females in my family, who had their reasons.

Two great-uncles of that family struggled with alcohol and lost the battle for many pointless years.

But on the whole it was a cup of tea and biscuits when the women got together, and a few beers when their husbands could scoot round the back of the house, away from the aunts' censorious eyes.

The idea that you had to get drunk to have a good time was, then, foreign to us, and the word "boozer" described a man in the same tone of voice as you might say "serial killer".

But this was leavened by my father, who'd visit with a strange odour wafting about his person, a combination of cigarettes and alcohol, both sinful, with protestations of devotion, and a soppy smile.

This, I was scornfully told, was due to booze. What was one to make of it?

Or of my mother scrounging interesting-shaped whiskey bottles to keep orange cordial in?

Let's make one thing clear: this abstinence and all that disapproval did me no good when I grew up and met alcohol, as we all do.

I made as big a fool of myself as everyone else does, but luckily, and it was only through luck, I lived through it.

Imagine how my old rellies would have greeted the Fanzones in Wellington and Auckland for the World Cup, then, organised around the idea that people would naturally want to get down to what my mother scornfully called boozing.

As one small gesture against the rapid tide of change, a Baptist Church in Newtown offered a big-screen viewing to anyone who fancied dropping in for tea and coffee.

I was tempted to take a pack of chocolate biscuits along for old time's sake, but wasn't sure I could handle so much wildness.

And yet - isn't our attitude confused? If drinking is what you do around big sporting events, why do some All Blacks have to perform public mea culpas for going out drinking like everyone else who is male, fit and healthy? They are unwise, but isn't anybody who drinks too much unwise?

Much more disturbing is the amount young people are regularly drinking, without the excuse of a big event in the background.

It's every Friday and Saturday night for hospital emergency departments, wiping up the puke of kids who can't remember where they were the night before, still less what they did or who they were with.

Some drank lethal amounts, said Wellington Hospital emergency department charge nurse Lee Allsop, who was unimpressed with last weekend's efforts.

Admissions for extreme drunkenness weren't up during the World Cup quarter-final, possibly thanks to an improvised field hospital handling lesser cases, but many young people who did end up in her care, she said, had reached a "life-threatening level of intoxication".

People such as Ms Allsop, waiting at the bottom of the cliff, must be appalled at what they see.

But outside hospital, these episodes become tales of hilarious daring. We lament and encourage in the same breath.