THE New York Times's 52 Places Traveller was in Glasgow recently to write a review of the city.

Our Dear Green Place was chosen as one of the newspaper's hottest places to visit in 2018 and the extremely fortunate woman tasked with visiting all 52 came to us last month with the resulting article now online.

So how did we fare? Well. The piece is a flattering profile of the Ayrshire travel writer who gave her a tour round the city and out to Conic Hill in Balmaha but we learn only a little about Glasgow.

Why? The journalist seems to have gotten drunk at a gin tasting class (having also visited the new Glasgow Distillery Company) and forgotten most of what she'd seen.

The NYT has no small circulation so the takeaway for readers is that the best of Glasgow is booze. Visit, drink, fall over. A lost weekend indeed.

It gets a bit tiresome, this persistent view of Glasgow as a hard drinking city and little else. At the end of the article it is put forward that Edinburgh is a better bet for tourists.

I was mulling this over the other night while sitting in Kelvingrove Park. It was a beautiful evening and plenty of people had picnics. Plenty of people also had bottles of wine, some trying to hide them in a nod to byelaws making outdoor drinking illegal, and plenty not giving two hoots.

In 1996 when the byelaws were first introduced, the then-chairman of the city's licensing board, James Coleman, said he made no distinction between a person in the West End drinking beaujolais and a person in the East End popping open the tonic wine.

"If you want to drink your cheeky wee beaujolais," he said. "You will have to go to one of the areas we are happy to license in the City Centre."

Mr Coleman was ensuring that the outdoor booze ban was not to seen as a class issue, that it was not targetting one specific demographic.

The law from 1996 was amended in 2008 to be tightened. There's no Continental-style drinking here as there is in Edinburgh because Glasgow can't be trusted.

And that impacts negatively on how we view alcohol and how others view us.

While the weather's been nice, the illicit outdoor drinking has been even more noticeable.

The other week in the Botanic gardens there was a motley collection of taps-aff gentlemen with Buckfast, a group of swells passing round wine and some young ladies with what looked to be a gin liqueur but it was hard to be certain a distance.

Were any of them going radge? No, just sitting peacefully enjoying themselves and the rare extended appearance of the sun.

Should the police have come patrolling through, they would all have been open to a fine.

It's so shameful, so embarrassing, that in Glasgow we can't be trusted to have a beer on a sunny day.

I'm not undermining the gross impact alcohol has on Glasgow and on Scotland. Studies have shown that the more places selling alcohol in a community, the higher the crime rates. The NHS is burdened by alcohol related illnesses. The courts are clogged with people who were overly refreshed at the time of their crime.

But the public booze ban is just such a stark marker of the difference in the profile of our two cities. Will one day we be allowed our cheeky beaujolais? Here's hoping. And before the New York Times comes back for another visit.