I am a terrible drunk in Britain. I am every bad cliche about a British drinking woman you can think of. Bridget Jones on Chardonnay, Kat Slater on Bacardi Breezers, Jordan on vodka and Red Bull. I am wayward, difficult, attention-seeking, inclined to be mean to friends and cry noisily before kicking-out time. I'm rubbish at pacing my alcohol intake, and useless at not mixing my drinks. I have rows with minicab drivers and send text messages to people I really shouldn't on the way home, where I'm often sick.

But oh, you should see me drink abroad! Abroad, I'm a marvellous drunk! Hardly a 'drunk' at all, more a glorious, alcohol-enhanced individual! I'm convivial, funny, virtually fluent in my host nation's language (whatever that happens to be). I'm warm and accommodating. I hold court over your average harbourside taverna without actually boring anyone to tears or making anyone else feel excluded. It's like I have a whole other drinking persona, loosely based on witty, clever, socially desirable people like Nigella Lawson, which I slip into the moment I leave British airspace.

Well, all right. Maybe it's not exactly like that. But I am still definitely a lot better at drinking abroad, than I am in the UK. This is, I think, partly because drinking abroad is generally a very good thing. Wine tastes better when poured from carafes by languid waiters in lazy, hazy sun-baked pavement cafes; vodka and tonics are infinitely improved when you sip them while sitting on higgledy-piggledy wooden jetties, dangling your toes in the sea. But mostly, I think, it's because I first learnt to drink in France, which makes the continent my natural boozing environment. At 19 I went to live in Provence for a year, officially to complete my degree course, unofficially to meet French men and get the best tan ever. Now, when I arrived in unutterably chic Aix-en-Provence, I was a totally unaccomplished drinker. Despite growing up in a Devon backwater, where underage drinking was pretty much the law, I hadn't taken to it.

Bizarre as it now seems to me, I didn't like the loss of control and lucidity a good drink generally entails. However, within weeks of launching myself onto Aix's heady social scene, I had developed a serious taste for fermented grape, and a substantial tolerance to it. By the time I flew back home at the end of my year, I could do a bottle of my new favourite Listel Gris rosé a night, and think absolutely nothing of it. What was it about France that made drinking make sense for me, in a way it hadn't in Britain? Tricky to say. Cheapness was a contributing factor. I remember standing in what passed for a corner shop in Aix, and realising that your average serviceable vin was considerably cheaper per mil than Diet Coke.

I simultaneously developed a ginormous crush on the very handsome waiter who worked in the hippest bar in a two-mile radius of le centre ville, and who tended to refill my glass when I wasn't looking. Anyway. It all added up to quite a lot of accomplished drinking. Sadly, my new way with booze deserted me the moment I touched down at Gatwick again. After boasting wildly about my talent to every friend who'd ever seen me drink pathetically in the past, I hit the basement bars of Brighton for a live demonstration, and ended up in a gutter after two and a bit hours. Without the magic influence of France, apparently, I was the same incompetent boozer I'd always been. I guzzled awful house white with my messy English student friends, where France had encouraged me to gently sip good quality wine like all those chic femmes with their shiny hair and their neat Agnès B. I consumed an ill-advised kebab at closing time, where a night in Aix would always begin with a civilised, stomach-lining moules frîtes.

Now, I think there's a broader consequence to all this. It's my belief that precisely this could explain Britain's new generation of hard-living, binge-drinking women (quite a few of whom are me and my friends). You know the ones - you see them every evening, risking their fertility and sanity and livers in light, airy, palm-filled chain bars up and down the country, prior to being filmed by Trevor McDonald for a Tonight With special. Look, there they are, knocking back the vodka and slimlines, just asking to be Rohypnoled. And, assuming they manage to avoid that, they'll only go on to cost the country millions each year by being all tired and unproductive with their hangovers the next day. Bad women! So. The problem with these ladies, clearly, is that they're drinking here, when in fact, they should be drinking abroad, preferably in France, where the wine is cheaper and better, the working hours are shorter and less designed to force birds like me to hit the bottle in an attempt to escape stress, and nobody gets tired and emotional or cries noisily before closing time.

· Mimi Spencer is away