The cretinous colonisation of British pubs by Parents on the P*** cannot be allowed to continue. Every weekend I now brave an assault course of badly behaved brats as they bowl belligerently around the boozer. Their garish guardians, the POPs, lull ineffectively, their lips stained with red wine as they loom over crayoned paper to make it look like today is about the kids. It’s not, you selfish slobs. It’s about you meeting up with mates. Just be honest. That’s what this is.

Which makes your smugness so unbearable. You want a p***-up. You don’t honestly believe that this is the best venue for an eight-year-old’s birthday party. You probably spend half the afternoon wondering if another kid’s parent is a solid pick for an extra-marital affair. Stop trying to cloak this in self-righteous virtue.

We go to the pub for a break from the relentless grind of reality, not to have yours forced upon us. The local is not your living room. The smoking area is not your back garden.

Before anyone accuses me of hating children, I’ve always been a big advocate for kids being allowed in pubs. I got the notion from my father when he was managing bars in West Yorkshire.

He said it’s important for children to visit pubs so that they learn how to behave. The theory goes that when they’re of drinking age, they won’t do stupid things that earn them a slap.

It should be a sort of training ground for children to learn how to act around adults. It should not be a Wacky Warehouse with the added stench of the crap wine that’s painted your teeth the colour of a dehydrated drunk’s bladder contents.

The first time I noticed this apocalyptic trend was in Wanstead, an East London village. I’d visit The Bull, a favourite of mine largely due to its bust of Winston Churchill, only to be bombarded with children whose shrieks competed with drunk dads’ slurred admonishments to be the most annoying sound in the western world.

It seems to have happened, or at least picked up pace, post-lockdown. Which leads me to think that these parents were dense enough during the height of restrictions to forget entirely how to act around strangers, slipping into a solipsism of truly antisocial proportions.

So there the POPs sit, thinking “aren’t we so wholesome?” as they flirt with self-inflicted narcolepsy. You’re not wholesome. You’re obnoxious. You’re selfish. Your kids would almost certainly prefer to be anywhere else if they knew that it was an option.

But they don’t. Because you’ve chosen to spawn a whole new scourge on pubs – an entire generation of walking headaches.

Will they know how to behave when they’re 18? Or will the future of pubs be full-grown men legging it around and whooping with abandon?

There’s one pub that’s safe from this idiocy where I live. Connolly’s stoically stands, a monument to the past.

A proper Irish boozer characterised by its regulars. It sponsors a local football team. Its design is play-pen proof, the bar being smack-bang in the centre of the main room, leaving no room for even the littlest of lads to run about. It’s perfect.

It has no need to transform itself into Snakes and Ladders on the Lash. But can we blame other pubs for doing so?

Eight pubs close a week. So you get demented decisions like banning anyone who’s not eating from an entire room (that’s for dining, don’t you know, if there are no seats in the drinking area you’ll have to sit outside in the rain).

Do one.

Seeing this desperate decline, predatory parents swooped. “Have some of this!” they may as well have sneered as they inflicted ill-disciplined kids on punters, spreading the burden of their loins.

Nobody put up a fight. Too polite are the punters. Too cash-strapped are the pubs.

Of course, being a childless millennial, the pushback I get on this is from some of the parents in my life.

You don’t understand, they plead. It’ll be different when you have kids, they claim. Until then you can’t criticise, they try. Let’s see you do a better job than them (“them” being flush-faced functioning alcoholics sliding down their chairs with kids out of sight in a room full of strangers).

One father who expressed such sentiments (in a beer garden no less) recently changed his mind on the very next visit to the very same pub. But his children are already grown-up and, crucially, well-behaved.

I can only hope that those engaging in this behaviour discover a capacity for self-reflection. That it sinks into their stunted brains how they, and their children, should behave around strangers and that their selfishness fades out of fashion.

I recently got a glimpse into that future which was also our past during a trip to Dublin (see the picture drenched in red lighting above). I’m unclear as to whether this was because the visit was early in the week or because this problem isn’t blighting Ireland’s capital in the way it is ours.

But what a treat it was to purchase a pint without the fear of a perforated eardrum.