Drink - Victoria Moore is fighting denial
I am thoroughly sick of life and, worse, life seems thoroughly sick of me. Gin and tonic, barman. Make it good and strong.
It was in his travel book Labels that Evelyn Waugh noted that "every true-born Briton lives under a fixed persecution mania that someone is always trying to prevent him from getting a drink. Of course, this is true, but the significant thing is how little they have succeeded." Quite so. In fact, it has merely added quiet, bulldog determination to the demeanour of every man and woman who ever raises a glass. And now the government, with its 24-hour licensing strategy, is trying to take it away from us.
But the hang-loose reformers have not realised that this sense of denial is very important to us. We are a nation of losers, daily beetling to our workplaces where we devote long hours to serving corporate masters, damaging our eyesight and breaking our spirits in front of shining screens, in exchange for no thanks or encouragement and little financial recompense. When the day's dull tasks have reduced us to little more than a husk, we are donated the freedom to return through drabness and suburbia to another little room, with a different flickering screen (PlayStation, Sky Digital, terrestrial television, take your pick) and an exhaustion of domestic tasks undone.
But hold. In between these two wastelands of human existence lies a mirage of glittering, open water. Bars! Pubs! Restaurants! Here may a man purchase with the hard coins of his labour an hour or three of pipe dreaming. This he calls his life, and it bears the same relationship to such a thing as a session with even the best sort of King's Cross hooker does to a proper sort of passion. However good the taste, a drink in itself is, well, just a drink. And drunkenness is fun, but it quickly wears off, leaving mind and body buffeted and weak, and the poor drunkard calling himself a fool.
And this is why, for the poor, put-upon Englishman, the restriction on alcohol is tangibly vital to his self-esteem and why the government is quite wrong to be planning 24-hour opening. It is precisely because the consumption of alcohol is regulated that even the smallest drink is a rare and minxy delight. Restriction allows the Englishman, you see, to win. Each day, he may claim his small victory over his employers, the state and that dementing beast common sense simply by entering a bar, selecting his wine, ale or spirit, paying for it and knocking it back - satiating his thirst and desire for rebellion both at once.
This meagre yet crucial pleasure is classless. The homeless man in the stinking sleeping bag on a piece of rotting cardboard feels the same way as the cheap- but smart-suited worker and the richly clothed banker. Those reluctant to hand over money to the vagrant in case it is wasted on drunkenness rather than something more sensible (Such as what? Half a new T-shirt? One-fifth of a night in a decent bed? A better piece of cardboard?) are always reminded that what they are giving, with their money, is choice. This understates the point. What the beggar buys when he buys his can of Special Brew is life itself: the right to say, "Up yours, I can still do this, so welcome happy oblivion, goodbye harsh world".
Quite obviously, then, the idea that we may wish to be allowed to drink 24 hours a day is extremely silly. We will lose the glinty mischief found in a new bottle of wine ordered as the clocks strike 11, mourn the lost hours spent foraging the deepest crevices of Soho in search of a fresh supply of contraband alcohol, and cry for the injustice felt when time is called and we conceive an urgent attachment to the glasses of liquor from which we are about to be cruelly ripped. All this will die.
Gin and tonic, barman, pour it very quickly: time is running out.
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