In my student days, I spent an academic year living in Spain as part of the EU's Erasmus programme - a scheme to encourage some of the continent's young people to get to know each other's countries. In the flat I shared with four Spanish students, part of this turned out to be learning to appreciate the host country's drinking games.
Not that it was easy. One involved flipping a coin from the edge of a table into a shot glass of beer in the centre. If you succeeded on your turn, you got to do a shot of beer; if you failed, as has happened most often, you simply went without. It was no way to get drunk.
Someone would generally order a litre of gin and tonic later, but it is amazing what difference a decade makes. This evening sees a nationwide drink-off, as the organisers of a macro-botellón use email and text messages to encourage young people to go out on the streets and drink to see which city has the most drinkers.
In some ways it is entirely baffling - round here, we call that Friday night, plus organising a piss up does fall into that category of things you don't really need the internet for. There also seems to be rather inevitable result that since the challenge is for a city to get the most people drinking (rather than having the people who drink the most), raw population size would seem to be an advantage. Our money's on Madrid.
Still, it is proving a worry in Spain, as police leave is cancelled, concern grows over underage drinking and statistics point to rising alcohol consumption.
One consolation for them is that drinking is not yet at the level of young Britons. Perhaps someone somewhere is still planning to start the night by flipping a coin into a shot glass of beer.
