Boy, I could fair murder a schooner. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Well, it could be how common or garden beer imbibers speak in the not too distant future.

Reports suggest the schooner could soon be the vessel of choice for those unable or unwilling to have the proper pint favoured hitherto by normal persons. Indeed, spurred by new drink-driving laws, the schooner — which holds two thirds of a pint — is already making headway.

According to one leading wholesaler of glassware for Glasgow hostelries, in the past year orders of schooners have gone from zero to more than 1,000-per-month.

If I were me, I’d expect a head of frothy outrage to form in my mind. But, in truth, I’m pretty relaxed about it (reader’s voice: “Aye, relaxed as a newt by the sounds of it”). True, a strong streak of tradition permeates my psyche, but I can see where people are coming from with this schooner malarkey.

The idea is that you might be able to have one of these and still be able to drive home. Accordingly, bars report that they’re getting customers back who’d given up having a swift, post-work pint because of the legislation.

They could, of course, have opted for a half-pint but, without wishing to reopen the whole independence debate, the only people who drink half-pints (at least without accompanying nips) are the English, and, even then, not the northern English, who will soon be merged into Greater Scotia anyway.

But schooners are the inn-thing, so to say. The trouble is: they could mark you out as a drink-driver. My own approach has long been never to drink and drive at all. Everyone who loves a pint will recall these admittedly infrequent occasions in which they have felt light-headed after just the one. That might apply even to a schooner which, by the sounds of things, is merely a one-drink glass.

If you have more leisure, and are planning to deploy your lower limbs for getting home, then perhaps the pint would be preferred. And by pint, as professors of grammar well know, I am speaking in the plural.

Mind you, I don’t drink as much beer as I used to, partly because of the satanic calories, but also because I’m much more aware now of the dangers of drink-walking.

Indeed, until recently, I swore off beer and all alcohol after a perambulatory incident in which, trying to remember where I’d put my house, I took a shortcut through some woodland and fell down a badly positioned embankment.

Being of an artificially induced positive disposition, I was fairly contented to roll some 20 or 30 feet until my face came to a halt against the trunk of a downy birch. No skin off my nose. Or not much. After dozing off for ten minutes, I resumed my search for home where, on account of all the mud and foliage adhering to my person, I was coldly informed that I looked like Worzel Gummidge.

No man can withstand that sort of rigorous analysis without taking a hard look at his life. Accordingly, with one hand on a copy of The Lord of the Rings and the other raised in open-palmed solemnity, I made the following vow: I would never roll down any embankments again. Not at night-time anyway.

Oh, and I gave up beer. Several years later, I was re-corrupted by non-alcoholic beer, which is good these days and which almost made me weep, so much had I missed the taste of ale. Soon, I returned to the real McCoy but — if you’ll let me get back to my point instead of shoving me down embankments of deviation — it had to be in pint glasses.

This is so even where the beer is German or Belgian and measured in centipedes or some such Euro-nonsense. Still, I’m happy for people to choose a schooner, as long as they don’t sit near me.

As for driving, the truth is that beer and transport simply do not mix. You can’t drive. Buses don’t have lavatories. And, as we have seen, walking is dangerous because your stupid feet tend to bung you down bosky slopes.

Some solutions: drink locally, go non-alcoholic or hail a cab. But don’t be like a pickled former colleague who told a cabbie to take her home and, when asked “What address?”, replied: “How the hell should I know?”