Used in moderation it can serve as a social lubricant and – particularly in its more expensive incarnations – as a source of sensory delight.

Taken to excess it can turn a normally mild-mannered person into a raging beast with no care for the consequences of their actions and no thought for the rights of others.

How else can you explain the scene I witnessed in my street just over a week ago?

A group of young men who had passed through the neighbourhood earlier in the evening were returning from a nearby watering hole.

They had apparently made friends and influenced people during the three-hour-long sojourn at the local nightspot and were being trailed up Brisbane St by a larger group.

The gist of it, as far as we could hear, was that the larger party was keen on pulping the smaller party.

It was remarkably like the opening scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the two groups of ape men confront each other – with appropriate screams, insults and the like – across the watering hole.

The highlight – or the lowlight depending on your point of view – came when one of the mental geniuses in the first group suddenly realised that odds of 11 to three were not a good match.

He set about searching for an equaliser and seized upon that great old Australian standby, the picket fence.

Attacking our neighbour’s gate with gusto, he managed to break the tops off two pickets before successfully removing a third.

It was at this point we referred the matter to the appropriate authorities.

The final outcome of the altercation is not known.

We didn’t find any bodies

on the footpath the following

morning.

Thinking about it over the next few days I realised the key issue here was alcohol.

I’m sure that all of the kids – and that is what they were – concerned, were decent enough most of the time.

A solid dose of booze, coupled with an Australian cultural tradition that seems to venerate teen and post-teen drunkenness as some kind of rite of passage, was what had turned them all into Tamworth incarnations of Mr Hyde.