Emma Dent on Scottish drinking habits

These figures will do nothing to help the persisting Scottish image of being the "sick man of Europe" (maybe that should be the "most inebriated" or "most hungover man").

I had just come back from a wedding in Scotland over the bank holiday weekend and thought back to the levels of booze consumed on that occasion.

To be fair, the guests did not seem any more sloshed than they have been at any wedding I have been to south of the border (certainly they were no more worse for wear than the bloke who offered us a swig of his supermarket value label red wine at 11.30 the following morning in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens).

What was surprisingly easy to avoid, though, despite the rather large amount of wine consumed, was the temptation to spark up a cigarette.

The complete absence of friends who have ever smoked kept me nicotine free. Clearly a technique to remember. Let's see if it works next time.

Another story that caught my eye was about the new chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority Professor Lisa Jardine suggesting sex education should include lessons on infertility.

I can see her point. Although women today are bombarded with media stories about the difficulties of getting pregnant, we are still brought up to assume we will be able to conceive easily enough.

We certainly are not warned how horrendously difficult and expensive it can get if medical treatment is needed.

But surely teaching young girls they might not, after all, be able to get pregnant might be opening a whole can of teenage pregnancy worms? I knew several girls at school who started to assume they could not have children after blithely being contraceptive free for some time. Turned out they had just got lucky and along came the babies before we had started doing A-levels.