The death of the great Scottish pint? Aye, ok then, barkeep

Anyway, that’s all there is, so Stone Age Queen and her baby-daddy get it down them, glugging the slop straight from the wood pot. Ten minutes later, they’re the first people on Earth to get steaming. Now all they have to do is invent the kebab for the perfect night out.

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May the ancient gods bless her. She’d accidentally discovered fermentation.

This, incidentally, is genuinely how anthropologists think humans started drinking beer.

Fast forward 10,000 years and there’s still five bottles of Covid lager under my stairs that will go off like an atomic bomb and take out my eyes if I open one.

I brewed this during the original lockdown. When I cracked the top off the first bottle it exploded, showering me, the kids, my missus and the kitchen. It came out quite treacly, so the place looked like an anti-vax Dirty Protest.

Beer - sweet, soothing, delicious beer - will be still with humanity in another 10,000 years. It’ll be with us until we die out.

When the last human sits on a darkening Earth, as sentient Alexas prepare to replace us, their final act will be to blow the head off a coldie and embrace extinction with a good beer-buzz.

I’ve left all other alcoholic beauties behind but beer. Over the years I’ve had dalliances with everything from cider (an illicit, illegal park-based rendezvous, 1985), to Pernod (a short affair at the school disco, Christmas 1986), and Southern Comfort and Lime (a long but toxic student relationship, 1988-1991).

After I allegedly grew up, I remained much too fond of Lady Alcohol and the charms of her arms for some considerable time. White wine and vodka-tonics were my passion of choice on nights out - sometimes upped to champagne and absinthe if I was reading a French novel.

By aged 40, however, I realised that: A, this wasn’t cool; and B, I couldn’t do hangovers anymore. So bye-bye spirits.

You know those folk who claim they’re vegetarians but regular have sausages hanging out of their mouths? Well, that’s similar to what I called "my new-found abstemiousness" and white wine.

Sauvignon Blanc was just hefty water, except made with grapes, and grapes are fruit, and fruit is healthy.

Skip forward five years - into the foothills of middle-age and the throes of the worst existential crisis of my life at the looming inevitability of my own eventual death - and I decided to junk wine too.

Now you’ll only see bubbles in my hand at Christmas, Hogmanay or my birthday as a treat. Well, Halloween too, but that’s it - and only because I throw a damn good Halloween party. So genuinely, I only drink wine about six times a year. Pinky promise.

However, I didn’t - wouldn’t and couldn’t - embrace outright Calvinism. There’d be no goodbye to beer. I strongly identify with Homer Simpson and his devotion to the cult of the Reeb (that’s beer backwards - a covert term I employed as a teen to avoid the prying ears of parents).

So believe me. I’ll die on the hill named Beer. Ice Cold in Alex remains my favourite film - simply for the drinking scenes.

However, I don’t really have much affinity for the pint glass. Snob, that I can sometimes be, it’s always stuck me as rather ugly. Aesthetics matter.

So there’s a palaver on-going that leaves me un-palavered, about the "death of the pint’". Trials were done where bars removed pint glasses to see if this reduced how much alcohol punters put away. The biggest measures available were a half-pint or a two-thirds sort of schoonery-thing like the Aussies drink.

Unsurprisingly, quaffing fell. That’s good, right? Nevertheless, the experiment met with wailing about "woke scientists banning our precious pint’" Honestly, once you hear "woke", you’re in goon-land.

What's wrong with beer in smaller measures? (Image: PA)

Personally, as long as it’s good beer, ice-cold, and you’re not robbing me (like those smiling gangsters in London bars), I’m content. In fact, I kind of like small glasses.

I certainly don’t think a wee glass somehow strips me of all masculinity. If that’s your worry, you’ve probably got other - much tinier - matters on your mind.

I lived in the Netherlands for a good while in the 2000s. I covered the Lockerbie trial, held just outside lovely Utrecht. The city became my home-from-home. When I first asked for a pint, the barman’s weary look taught me I was still a tourist.

The Dutch drink fluitjes ("flutes", about a third of a pint) and vassjes ("vases", about half a pint). In fact, most nationalities don’t go as big as the pint, apart from those demented Bavarians with their massive steins that you could carry a baby around in.

I liked the Dutch style. Being somewhat poncey, I thought smaller glasses looked cooler than big, old clunky pint-pots. And the booze stays colder - a winner for me.

Also pints can be a bit "bleuurgh" sometimes. Too much. Less is more. My tipple these days is a small bottle of Leffe or Duvel. Those Belgians know what they’re doing, and they created the perfect glasses for their great beers - wee goblets, not daft pimply pints.

I’m not one for tradition either. So what if we’ve always drank pints? If we always did what our ancestors did we’d still be sticking kids up chimneys and doing lines of snuff.

So I don’t much care about the Death of the Pint. I’m never going to leave the last of my lovers. But now I’m 50-something-or-other-I-don’t-want-to-talk-about, cutting down on seeing her might help remove what appears to be a fat man’s belly around my once-svelte waist.

So, a fluitje of your finest pilsner, please barkeep.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs and foreign and domestic politics.