There is something romantic, cavalier and quixotic about drinking on a train. Someone else is driving, time is suspended, seating – if you’re lucky and on the right rail franchise – is comfortable, and beautiful scenery scrolls by outside. The usual stipulations against drinking in public are suspended when on a train, as are the parallel concerns about calories. Quite randomly, hours after the Bolly-would saga unfolded, a photo appeared in my timeline of an open bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape on a train table bound for Cornwall with the words: “Tastes better when served by someone else at 125mph.” 

Well, quite. Drinking on a train is entirely different to the sense-deadening desperation of boozing before or during a flight (where cabin pressure and recycled air numb the tastebuds, hence the popularity of highly spiced Bloody Marys). On a train you can be Daniel Craig and Eva Green in Casino Royale, or Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint in North by Northwest, though a quaffing companion is not strictly necessary. 

On a plane you’re just a bored, pickled sardine in a tube, even in first class. On a bus, you’re a derelict Rab C Nesbitt and in a taxi you’re an alcoholic vulgarian (especially if it’s a shared Uber Pool car). In your own car, of course, you’re a potentially lethal liability and a criminal. But on a train, a drink is at the very least a well-earned reward for getting through the working day, at the very best a rubicund-bubbled prelude to an adventure.

I’m old enough to remember the days of British Rail and its curly buffet-car sandwiches, when I’m pretty sure that the alcohol available in railway stations was limited to ghastly concourse pubs, and the stuff was pretty much impossible to find on board, except in luxury services that might have a dining car. The profit motive of privatisation and the liberalisation of licensing laws – which led to a more celebratory, less buttoned-up attitude to booze all round – in the 1990s undoubtedly added to the ease of getting squiffed on a train.