Ideas
NS Essay - Drink and be damned
Published 07 February 2005
New laws won't reduce our frantic consumption of alcohol. Booze occupies a hole in our core sense of identity which used to be filled by music or politics
When I first started going to pubs, I was greatly impressed by the friend who consistently refused the injunction to drink up. I thought he was just being lairy, then realised that his indignation was genuine and deeply felt. When he heard the words "Can you start to make a move now, please", he would look puzzled - as if trying to retrace the chain of events that had given the pot-bellied barman dominion over him. Unable to come to terms with the pub's transformation into a place of censure, he would carry on as if it hadn't happened, ignoring the requests for his glass until some toady of a fellow customer weighed in on the publican's behalf.
Even now, I find it hard to understand how anyone who has suffered the indignity of being told to drink up by a stranger could set their stall on the side of The Law. However well-administered, our licensing restrictions constitute an offence against all of us. The whole notion of being "chucked out" by government edict at some arbitrary point in the evening feels undemocratic. As the day of reform approaches, we ought to welcome the logic of a system that allows local councils the power to decide each licence on a case-by-case basis. Councils should do this because it is right, not because they credit the old teacher's adage that "treating people like adults" will stop them behaving like children. They should accept that the refinement of the drunk's spirit is not within their gift.
Those who believe it is are assuming that the drunk is level-headed enough to recognise and return their investment of trust. Alcohol promotes that state of heightened indignation in which the whole world appears to be taking the piss. Being thrown out of a bar because it's closing time is no more or less aggravating, when you are in this frame of mind, than watching the tosser in front of you get served first because the barmaid fancies him. In either case, the British drunk's sense of being wronged will have preceded any provocation. This feeling is a part of his essential nature, resistant to any improvements in his external circumstances. If you put him in lads' Nirvana, as it's portrayed in the Carlsberg "takeaway" ad, he would be sure to row with the waitress - and she would take her revenge by selling his fortune-cookie-wrapped FA Cup ticket on eBay.
This self-defeating chippiness is one of many aspects of our national psyche that help to drive our love affair with drink, a relationship that has persisted with very few interruptions through many centuries of knowing better. This seems to lend support to the theory, widespread in the liberal press, that the current "epidemic" of binge drinking is just a trumped-up version of an ancient pastime. Look at the goings-on in 16th-century alehouses, chuckle at the similarities and conclude - hah! - the Drover's Arms circa 1550 was just like a Yates's Wine Lodge.
I respect and share this liberal distaste for the hype that makes it so hard to judge whether "boozed-up Britain" is anything more than an excuse for running pictures of young women slumped half naked in shop doorways. The salaciousness of so much of the coverage inclines you to dismiss whatever "findings" are presented in support of the idea of a "binge drinking crisis". Yet it's clear that people are getting drunk more than they used to. In every town and city, across all ages and classes, people are consuming booze in vast quantities while pretending not to understand what is meant by an alcohol unit.
Their knowing ignorance is mirrored by the government's indifference to another important yardstick. The incidence of death from liver failure has reportedly risen in Britain over 30 years by 959 per cent among men aged between 25 and 44 and by 924 per cent among women in the same age range. These figures were not publicised by the government even though it had commissioned the research. Fearful of the consequences of revealing the real extent of our drunkenness, the government invested in the image of a lout whose vices could be corrected by measures that did not affect the profits of the drinks industry. When those measures arrived, the raft of prohibitions aimed at "curbing" loutish behaviour was greeted with a sigh of resignation by all those who believe we are in the middle of a genuine health emergency.
The health professionals who take this threat seriously have argued that Tony Blair should raise the price of drink. For all its seductive simplicity, this proposal is founded on a misreading of the causes of the present malaise. Supply-side innovations such as alcopops and cheap beer have all played their part in incubating the epidemic. Those who believe they actually caused it should consider what they would do if a friend of theirs became an alcoholic. Would they blame Mr Patel for doing him a good deal on a case of Chenin Blanc? Or the pub at the end of his street for letting him drink until midnight twice a week?
One would hope they would at least try to explore the reasons for his malaise.
This line of inquiry would initially be met, one suspects, with a snort of derision and possibly two fingers in your face. Alcoholics are big on denial and tend to be bad witnesses to the pain they recast as an urge to "party". This word has long served as a euphemism for all kinds of addictive behaviour and it acquired a new resonance in the late 1980s when, for the first time in history, it meant what it said. An Ecstasy user who says he likes to party will be referring to the practice of staying up all night in a room bedecked with home-dyed parachute silk, where he will dance, talk and dispense love vibes from a home-made orgasmatron. The drunk's situation is somewhat different: he uses the word as a way of gaining credibility for any or all of the following behaviours: smashing windows, rowing with his girlfriend, boring someone into a stupor, crying, taking coke and then drinking more "to take the edge off it", rowing with a doorman, boasting, cavorting, refusing to pay the minicab driver's cleaning surcharge because "there's hardly any puke on them seats".
In the 1990s, all the signs pointed to a mass rejection of alcohol by people who had got enough distance on it to see it for the crude and antisocial drug it is. In Manchester, where I lived in the earlier part of the decade, the streets, apart from the odd contretemps at the door of the Hacienda, were trouble-free - a pleasure to walk down at any time of night. You didn't need taxi marshals or extra police to cope with the drifting bands of loved-up teens and twentysomethings. These measures have been introduced since the citizens regained their taste for drink. By all accounts, the city centre is now impassable to those using it for purposes other than drinking to get drunk.
So what happened? What caused the population to fall off the wagon? Some have blamed the drinks manufacturers' rush to develop new products in the wake of the Ecstasy crisis. But though alcopops undeniably created a lucrative new market among younger drinkers, alcohol sales have risen across the board. For all their sophistication, the marketing campaigns could not have succeeded if we weren't all gasping for something that would help ameliorate a vast sense of alienation from our social selves.
What none of the analysis mentions is the obvious: that people get drunk to cover up their self-consciousness. It seems we are scared of letting our friends and lovers see us as we are. I heard one twentysomething woman cheerfully recounting a first date that ended early when the guy threw up. She was unfazed, declaring herself delighted that she had "managed to outdrink him".
In The Subject of Addiction, the psychoanalyst Rik Loose suggests that the addict is demanding "a solution to the problem of desire". Unable to face the prospect of rejection or loss - the terrifying possibility of wanting and not getting - he retreats from the risky business of forging real connections and plumps for a way of being that is sufficient unto itself. Revelling in an illusion of oneness and completion, he forgets, for a minute, about the feeling he is trying to cover up. I say "feeling" although really it is a kind of nothing which is none the less more painful than the somethings that trouble the rest of us.
To imagine it, look at a cartoon by the American comic artist Robert Crumb, which shows his wife, an ex-addict, with a huge hole punched through her middle. To her great surprise, this appears in the weeks after she's sworn off the booze. Expecting to feel rather better than she had in her old life, she is disappointed until she realises that this void at the heart of her being is the truth she has been too frightened to confront. "I never noticed it before," she says. "I always kept it full up." This phrase calls to mind a British drinker, manically trying to fill her hole with alcohol-fuelled high jinks. Like Crumb's wife, she is terrified that if she stops, someone will point at the vacuum she has in lieu of a sense of self, and laugh. It is to this dilemma that the adverts allude when they promise to pump her full of life until she is a fully fleshed-out being, brimming with "Latin spirit".
Yet there was a time when people gained a sense of identity from their engagement with popular culture. They might have taken in the odd film, but their most meaningful relationships were likely to be with pop singers and musicians. On the radio the other evening, an old Jam fan was describing the feelings of validation he had got from listening to songs that addressed the "important things in life". At that point in our cultural history, in the 1970s and 1980s, music was the focus of the big night out. Drink was used to help you enjoy the mosh pit or the dance floor - it was never an end in itself.
Before he died last October, John Peel was said to be worried that Radio 1 executives were planning to move his show to the 1am-3am slot. Without wanting to believe it, he perceived quite rightly that his skills were becoming redundant at a time when discrimination looks like a kind of bad faith. Today's music is heard rather than listened to. The whoop of recognition with which the drunk greets a familiar song is a reflex response rather than a refection of his real preferences. They could be playing a tune on dustbin lids; if he'd heard it before, he would be beating out the rhythm with a rolled-up safe-sex poster on his mate's backside. "Da da da. Oh, I love this one."
If culture was once the source of much of the material people used to plug their holes, it is now much more likely to offer experiences that widen and deepen the chasm within. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that its products are necessarily bad. The problem I am describing has nothing to with quality, but with that certain sustaining something which used to be present in politics, when it was more about who you were than what you did. We still have our passions, but these days fewer of them have the potential to become part of our DNA.
One response to this shortfall is to resort to hype in the hope that our empty enthusiasms can be talked up, in the style of the Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe, into something worth tattooing on your forearm. The other is to take up the drinks manufacturers' offer of a lovey-sexy new you, ready for immediate use and perhaps with the optional attachment of an Optic, to save the valuable drinking time you waste on the way to the pub. This self-sustaining organism will do very nicely until one of her friends demands a conversation with the person behind the front of boozy bonhomie. Asked how she's really doing, Bacardi Breezer Girl will say "brilliant-thanks-really-great", then break down and ask her mate to please have a look at her hole. It must have got bigger during the "party".
Later, if she finds it hard to credit how someone of her intelligence could have fallen into this trap, we should tell her not to worry. Every one of us has been suckered in one way or another by the false promise of consumer society. We have all scrambled for hole-filling products with the addict's sense of urgency, no better than she at deferring gratification. We have also invested in an illusion of wholeness that we believe will be delivered by the kinky boots or the dream home in the sun. As long as we are similarly deluded, it ill behoves us to criticise our fellow citizens for pursuing this idea to its logical conclusion. The Daily Mail's campaign against "violent, drink-sodden mobs" betrays a well-founded fear that the addict's anguish might cause the rest of us to question the efficacy of other self-administered kicks.
Few of us are ready to join Robert Crumb's wife in embracing our holes. "She's crankier, but I like her better," he says, offering a good summation of the post-addiction way of being that might one day be available to us. As things stand, we are buoyed up by beer and blather to a point where we probably wouldn't notice if we lost a limb.
Some distance away from recovery, we have the opportunity to prepare for a journey that begins the first time we say no.
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