Pete, your points are good illustrations, but I hasten to emphasise to prudent readers that there is nothing magically protective about about being drunk when you fall. I personally knew a thoroughly worthy gentleman with an unfortunately excessive taste for tipple, who fell over backwards on a flight of steps on the way home while under the influence. He fatally broke his neck on a step.

I have heard of many explanations for how drunks manage to survive the many hazards that beset them, falls in particular, and many such arguments have merit in particular cases. However my own feeling is that the frequency of their survival is  rather a function of the overrepresentation of drunks in undignified and dangerous situations, so that a disproportionately large number of miraculous survivors happen to have been drunk. Sober people more frequently tend to survive non--miraculously.

Note that I said "survivors"; I did not say that they survived in good health or even good spirit (if you will excuse the term). I read an interview a few years ago with an Australian who had, by some peculiar accident, as yet unexplained, diverged from the Antipodean national standards of sobriety, and presumably had done so to a spectacular degree. I base this speculation on the fact that he, on encountering a gentle-natured King Brown snake, captured it by hand and only got bitten some time later, being driven in a car. I cannot remember who his companions were, and I don't know whether he can either, but apparently one of them was sober enough to get him to hospital in time for treatment that saved his life.

Bearing in mind the nature of King Brown venom, that was in itself a spectacular feat.

Score one for booze, do I hear you cry? Well, make that 0.49 at most. Neurological damage left him permanently paraplegic in various ways. I cannot remember the medical details, but I vividly remember his being quoted to the effect that it did not seem fair that he should suffer the rest of his life just for this one error.

I am hard put for any suitably compassionate response, or indeed any sensible response whatsoever, but the bottom line is that I hope they did not hurt the snake, which had after all displayed the greatest dignity and self constraint of any participant in the narrative.

Of course one treats such interviews with reserve, but...