WHETHER or not it was the hangovers that did it, we gathered on Tuesday, New Year's Day, to found the Beggarsdale Centre for Economically Viable Social Research (BCEVSR).

The idea is to save you and me, the taxpayers, huge sums of money by informing the monks living in exclusion in the great monasteries of Westminster and Whitehall of patently obvious developments in the real world.

Just how the idea was sparked is uncertain: it came from a conversation that followed the singing of Auld Lang Sine with our new mates from Crookedale. It was resolved to continue with clearer heads the following day.

What was under discussion was yet another report by Government appointed "experts" saying that young people are drinking too much. Young girls, in particular, were putting themselves at risk from diseases like cirrhosis of the liver.

Now this was just one of a flurry of reports in recent months in which the great and the good have spent huge amounts of time and money telling the nation what everyone knows but them.

Just a month before, a similar two-year study revealed the amazing fact that Britain has the worst transport system in Europe. BCEVSR could have told them that 10 years ago, had it existed.

Once upon a time, we had 600-odd men and women whose job it was to inform Government of the feelings of "the man in the street." They were called MPs. Now, no one listens to them (perhaps with good reason, for it is hard to understand their gobbledegook).

So the Government has to enlist the aforesaid experts to take a look outside the monastery walls. Well, now that BREVSR exists, they are no longer needed.

It may seem odd that a place like the Beggars' Arms, purveyor of Rams' Blood Ale (abv 5.5%), should embroil itself in the matter of young folk drinking too much: the YFC and rugby club lads have been known to down a gill or two.

But it has been mainly beer, and learning to drink real ale is a long and hard business. The Innkeeper, you see, refuses to stock some of these new alcopops that taste of lemonade but have a kick like a mule.

They can be sunk in a few minutes and, as it takes an hour before alcohol affects the brain, youngsters can be drunk before they experience the first twinge.

When the Chief Medical Officer of Health issued his report on young drinkers, the brewing industry immediately issued statements saying it was not their fault: they were just giving customers what they wanted.

That has, to me, a rather sinister correlation with the gun-makers of America who insist that selling guns to inner city youths has nothing to do with the huge number of gunshot deaths. It is the person who kills, not the gun, they say.

That tends to ignore that fact that youngsters are nuts on fashion. In the US, it is guns. Here, it is alcopops.

So in its first recommendation to the Monks of Westminster, BCEVSR is recommending that the sale of alcopops be banned. But this advice is free - so who's going to listen?

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.