The news that heavy drinking can give a boost to a young ­person’s career path does not come as much of a surprise to many of my generation of 60-somethings.

We’ve been well aware that, unhealthy as alcohol can be, when it comes to a leg up the professional ladder, there have been many times when that extra glass or two has helped.

Norwegian sociologist Willy Pedersen tracked the lives of 3,000 people aged 13 to 31 and concluded in his newly published book The Beauty And Pain Of Drugs that there is a direct correlation between alcohol consumption and career and social success.

Of course it depends what kind of a profession you are embarking on, but if teamwork, braggadocio and a certain amount of self-confidence are required, alcohol can be a great prop.

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I was an example of a young woman who would regularly drink what would nowadays be considered an exceptional amount of alcohol, but back then, it was quite normal.

In the early 1980s when I began my journalistic career as a junior on ­Tatler magazine, bottles of wine were as common around the office as the Tipp-Ex we used to white out our typing errors.

Even as a lowly member of the team, I would regularly swap a sandwich at my desk for lunch round the corner with fellow colleagues – which at the time included critic Craig Brown and author Mary Killen – and tuck into a plate of spaghetti bolognese and a glass of gut-rot red wine. It cost very little and my weekly luncheon vouchers would pay for the odd glass.

Then, after returning to the office for an afternoon’s work, somebody would frequently produce a bottle of wine to be shared before we headed off to some art gallery opening or book launch where we would guzzle yet glasses before dinner.

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That’s just how it was.

At that stage sharing a drink was less to do with any conscious idea of progressing at work and all about simply having fun.

But it wasn’t long before a different element crept in and drinking became part of my work. As I was promoted, I would be deputed to take people who might be useful out to lunch or drinks; contributors, potential sources and interviewees.

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Alcohol was definitely an element of the deal. In fact I don’t remember a working lunch where we didn’t drink.

And as I recall it wasn’t single glasses – we would share a bottle, sometimes .

The disinhibiting effect of alcohol was a huge help in making a connection with a stranger over the lunch hour when after a few, conversation would become far easier.

Often I would walk back through the streets of Soho, slightly wobbly but with a rosy-hued view of the experience, convinced that I had made a professional conquest and that the interview for instance, was in the bag. Very frequently this was not the case.

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As a young female journalist I was used by my editor, the glamorous Mark Boxer, to lure in unsuspecting male interviewees, often larger-than-life characters who we hoped would provide lively copy for the magazine: the notorious Lord Antony Lambton who was rumoured to put budgerigars in his guests Wellington boots; or my first interviewee, Luis ‘The Bounder’ Basualdo, an Argentinian polo player with a track record of relationships with wealthy women, including Christina Onassis.

Drinking with them was definitely a part of the experience. I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to have these meetings with only a Virgin Mary to fuel me.

Drinking was also, back then, a way to demonstrate you were a hardy type particularly when I swapped the world of glossy magazines for national newspapers.

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Lunchtime O’Booze was the name given to Private Eye’s caricatured hapless hack, but it could have applied to much of the period I spent at the Sunday Telegraph near the end of the 1980s.

I had met one of the paper’s executives at a party (yes, drink was involved) who then nominated me for the job as the new Women’s Page Editor.

The paper had just moved from Fleet Street to the sterile, newly built offices in the Legotown that was the East London Docklands and drinking spots were hard to come by. Many of the news team would flee back to their old watering haunts in Fleet Street for lunch and not return for hours or even the rest of the day. But I was not part of that gang.

Led by the news editor they would parade past my desk chanting ‘women’s ghetto, women’s ghetto,’ as I and my two rather genteel and older colleagues sat quietly working on stories like where to find the best white shirt.

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After a few months I was asked to work on a new Sunday supplement with one of my ­tormentors. I was very aware he considered me a feeble girl who wouldn’t know a news story if it fell on my head and I realised this state of affairs had to be addressed.

He gloomily took me to lunch in a Chinese restaurant in ­Limehouse, expecting a total lightweight in the drinks department but I knew that if we were to work together, I was going to have to, if not match him glass for glass, make a pretty good fist of it.

I think we drank four bottles of red wine between us. The job was done. We became and remained firm friends.

I tell this story not to boast of my strong head, but how alcohol was built into my career progression. Journalism, along with the entertainment and restaurant industry, was a particularly heavy drinking profession and although there were people who didn’t drink much, or at all, they were certainly in the minority.

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It was one of the reasons why clubs such as The Groucho and Soho House came into existence.

The old-school gentlemen’s clubs – The Garrick, The Beefsteak, The Savile – had long been places well-connected and powerful figures could use for a spot of convivial drinking. But women weren’t allowed.

N ow there were a fair few of us in the work arena, becoming powerful ourselves, there was a boom in places women could also ­congregate for a drink late into the night.

Film directors, publishers, ­gallerists, artists, writers, advertising honchos would mingle together in the crowded bars as we tumbled in after dinner for a final drink.

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We didn’t think we were deliberately furthering our careers. We weren’t consciously networking in any kind of a calculated way, but that kind of alcohol-driven socialising was a key component in who we would get to know.

Nowadays much is made of binge drinking, but neither I nor most of my contemporaries would call ourselves binge ­drinkers. Our boozing wasn’t about going on benders and ­getting hammered on a weekend with a gang of friends, but embedded as a regular feature in our working week.

It was only in the 1990s that my relationship with drink and work altered. Once I became a magazine editor – first of GQ magazine and then Vogue – my workplace drinking changed.

At GQ, where the writers and staff were primarily male, I might have a glass of wine at lunch and join in occasional evening drinks, but I didn’t carry on carousing with them into the night.

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I thought that they would have fun without the boss around, I didn’t need to show that I could keep up with anyone’s alcohol habit any .

During my Vogue years, where I was immersed in a world peopled with weight-obsessed females, there was no culture of heavy drinking. It wasn’t only that staff wanted to avoid the added calories of alcohol, but also that many were mothers who just wanted to rush through the working day to get home to their children.

I remember having to urge my young female commissioning editors to go out and meet people. And it’s no accident that the person who invariably had the highest expenses bill featuring wine and cocktails at lunch was one of the few men on the team.

Of course there was alcohol around – a prosecco-based Mimosa at San Lorenzo for lunch perhaps, a glass of champagne at a Sloane Street shop opening – but few people drank heavily and certainly not during the early days of their career.

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The working culture nowadays is dramatically different and is undoubtedly healthier for our livers. So much interaction takes place at arm’s length, behind a screen rather than over a shared bottle of Merlot. The digital world has made physical meetings non-essential, while the increased pressures on our day mean there is simply less time for a long, wine-laden lunch even if there was any desire for it, which I doubt there is.

Even so I’m pleased I experienced the ‘old days’, where there was always time for just another one, where a few glasses could help oil the wheels of social activity, where the lubricant of alcohol could often lead to unexpected meetings and conversations with people who influenced your life.

Yes, there were the hangovers, but they were certainly worth it.