Drink

I seem to be less approving of drink than of drugs. Which is odd, as I rather enjoy both.




Were you at all drunk yesterday? Or over the weekend? I would certainly expect so bearing in mind that it's summer (despite the omnipresent rain) and your weekend will have been free of care. So can I safely assume that you had a typically British weekend and that your memories of it are somewhat hazy? Good...

It has been commented on that the British drink as if someone might suddenly take it away from them, and I am hard pressed to find any evidence to refute this. What does puzzle me is why we follow the same routine almost every weekend and with such little variation despite the fact that we invariably end up embarrassing either ourselves or our friends and are usually guilty of committing at least one act on a night out guaranteed to ensure one is left feeling foolish and awkward in the weeks to come.

However, if you were to talk to the person sitting nearest you right now about their weekend, I have little doubt that they will tell you what a fantastic time they had, wax boastfully as to the quantity of drink that they consumed, and perhaps even regale you with an outrageous tale of what happened when they/their friend/their pet finished their 12th pint and then ran into a policeman/former spouse/Lord Lucan. God knows, I'm pretty sure I would even though the events of the weekend passed are pretty much a blur to me. This is despite the fact that I felt dreadful for most of Saturday, remedied this by starting drinking in the early evening thus guaranteeing further nausea on Sunday which saw me becoming a permanent fixture on the sofa alongside a large bottle of Coca-Cola and a permanently babbling (though for the most part vacantly stared at) TV.

Realistically, rather than feeling satisfied at a weekend spent either drunk or recovering, I suppose I should be filled with mortification at a weekend wasted, with nothing achieved other than a Friday night spent ranting incoherent rubbish at Abby and Claire, the majority of which I can't even remember (I’d apologise, but I suspect that they may feel equal measure of mild embarrassment for having done exactly the same...). I'm not though (although this is the first time I've actually thought about this in any detail and I have to say, thus far I'm a little perturbed and may even go so far as to not get drunk this coming weekend) and I suspect that you would be surprised at me if I was.

Alcohol has always played a large part in British life and culture. Like the rest of Europe, we made use of brewing technology at a very early stage in history. In pre-Roman times, drinking water was a dangerous thing to do as one was at risk of catching all manner of interesting diseases due to the lack of sanitation. Happily, the brewing process killed off any bacteria in the water thus ensuring that those who drank beer had a higher survival rate than those who stuck to untreated water. Natural selection being what it is, Britain gradually became an island whose inhabitants were quite merrily (not to mention merry) accustomed to downing pint after pint of beer.

As a side note, in the Far East they got round the problem of impure water by adding leaves to it and boiling it, thus producing tea. I am given to believe that there is not such a hard drinking culture in the East and I'd be intrigued to know whether anyone has looked into whether there is any connection between this and the historical points mentioned above.

And our drinking culture has actually served us rather well historically. It kept the peasantry drunk and satisfied during the Middle Ages, thus allowing them to endure any number of upheavals caused by kings and kingmakers during this turbulent time. It also ensured that none of them strung enough thoughts together to realise just what an unutterably shitty deal they were getting out of life, a much understated value of alcohol. In the time of the British Empire, our adversaries (the ones that we didn't obliterate anyway) commented with amazement on the fact that our soldiers fought with such valor and tenacity for their daily pay, of which by far the most important component was a pint of rum. Yes, each man daily drank a pint of rum, a concept that even the hardest drinkers among you should regard with a measure of respect and amazement.

It is only recently that alcohol has started to become a hindrance to our status as a world player. Whilst keeping ones workers permanently pissed was considered advantageous when they were mill workers, labourers, soldiers, and subsistence farmers, it is less useful when trying to operate high-tech machinery, enter huge swathes of data into complicated computer systems, or work in any sort of high pressure business environment.
If one couples this with the reluctance to train people to any particular level of specialisation (presumably a hangover from our empire days where the upper classes preferred their subjects to be competent but not too bright so as not to highlight the failings of the upper class itself) then we can see that perhaps the government has one or two things to think about as they start making their plans for the new parliament.

This is not to say that I am becoming anti-alcohol; anyone who has ever been out with me will confirm that I have a long and meaningful love affair with all manner of wine and spirits. However, I do find it fascinating how we as a culture treat alcohol compared to the other drugs available for recreation. Alcohol, had it just been discovered, would almost certainly be criminalised as a class A drug due to the long term damage it causes to Liver, brain, heart etc, not to mention it's potential for overdose and addiction.

And addiction is what I am really driving at here. We shudder with horror at the thought of a heroin addict going through messy and painful withdrawal, and perhaps feel a sense of disdain at their lack of willpower for allowing themselves to get addicted in the first place. Okay, fine; I challenge you to give up alcohol for a year. Any takers? Come on, it's only a year! We expect drug users to give up their drugs for the rest of their lives, all I'm asking of you is a single year of not drinking alcohol, surely that's not too much to ask? But it is, isn't it? I don't imagine for a moment that I could give up drinking at this point in my life, and I salute anyone who thinks that they could.

I'm going to stop short of saying that we are a nation of people hopelessly addicted to a drug and that we are unable and unwilling to break that addiction (although the only reason I back away from saying something like that is due to my own unease at thinking in such terms even though this does seem to be the case). What I will finish on is by asking you to imagine a British society without alcohol and consider whether it would be better, and whether we would have nearly as much fun at weekends.