The Auld Alliance goes a wee bit sour

The noise woke me up at around 2.30. When I looked out of our living room window I could see a large group of youths, jumping up and down, drinking from bottles of wine and yelling loudly at each other. They were outside the entrance to some flats farther along the street. When I looked out a few minutes later a police van was moving away from the scene and I thought things would quieten down. But no, the racket continued as reinforcements of partygoers arrived while neighbours were leaning out of windows complaining about the noise.

After the visit of another van - perhaps from the city council - things did indeed quieten down a bit and people began to drift away. For a few moments I had the distinctly unlibertarian thought that Jack McConnell's puritan government is right: the state should discourage drinking by the young; Scots can't handle booze; the pubs must shut at 10 like in the old days. If only we were more like our continental neighbours where children learn to consume alcohol in a civilised manner and not run around annoying the neighbourhood in the middle of the night.

But then I noticed something rather odd. It slowly dawned on me that, generally speaking, in my experience, gangs of drunken Scots youths don't usually consume bottles of red wine and they very rarely shout at one another at three in the morning in fluent French!