Online shopping and drinking – what could poshibly *hic* go wrong?

Fancy a drink? (Rex Features)

Do you fancy another one? Go on, just a small one. You don’t have to get up in the morning, after all.

No, I’m not talking about the demon drink (I’ll come to that shortly), but the fact that we love an internet purchase, not least when we’ve had a skinful. According to a new survey by, erm, internet-service comparison site broadbandchoices.co.uk, one in four of us has bought something online when under the influence of alcohol.

I must confess that I’m sightly surprised it’s not more, but perhaps I assume that everyone is an iPhone-toting lush like me. Obviously there are more teetotal technophobes out there than I realised. The compilers of the survey reckon that concert tickets were up there as one of the most popular things to buy pished. I’m much more likely to fall victim to a bit of late-night iTunes downloading, which results in a cold sweat as I check my purchased music playlist (Carly Rae Jepsen? Say it isn’t so. Oh god, not an entire album by Dodgy).

The other thing that seems like such a good idea when the gin is slipping down like the devil in velvet trousers is the buy-now-with-one-click option (it feels more like an instruction after one too many) on my Amazon Kindle app. On the one hand, I recently ended up with a digital copy of Goodnight Mister Tom, which I hadn’t read since my schooldays and made me cry like a baby when I read it last week, on the other, I binge bought a terrible teen-fiction trilogy. Drinking and downloading – it’s a dangerous thing.