Drink - Shane Watson offers an alcoholic breakdown
Published 11 July 2005
In modern Britain most drinkers are either Caroles or Charlottes - or Tonys
Carole Caplin is back in the press, having made some "indiscreet" observations about the Blairs to an undercover reporter. Obviously the News of the World and we, the public, were hoping for juicy tales of three-way massages in the PM's office, but Caplin's big bombshell is that Tony is drinking too much. She qualified this by explaining that he was not "an alcoholic", nor even a "drinker", but that he could do with giving it up, particularly when under stress.
Caplin's estimation of what constitutes a person who needs to cut back would be different from, say, Johnny Vegas's. I happen to have a copy of her book, LifeSmart, in which she writes that you should drink alcohol no more than twice a week, and then only two glasses, with food, lots of water, and a paramedic standing by. (I added the paramedic bit, but the gist is that you might as well play catch with a test tube of plutonium.) Her ideas are those of a new breed who look at a glass of wine and see only sugar, acidity, cellulite, broken veins and "mucus-based problems". At the other end of the scale is good old Charlotte Church, who claims to down a Cheeky Vimto (two shots of port mixed with a bottle of WKD Original Vodka Blue)
followed by ten double vodkas whenever she's "out on the lash".
This got me thinking. There is no such thing as a typical drinker in 21st-century Britain. You are either a Carole (super-conscious of the detrimental physical affects of alcohol) or a Charlotte (binge drinker), or perhaps a Tony (someone who drinks moderately but pretty much all the time). Aside from these three basic types are your Kates (drinking, smoking party animals), your Bests (alcoholics) and your alcohol-dependants-in-denial (me, if the definition is anyone who would rather miss a party than get through it sober.)
Carole Caplin, as it happens, identifies six categories of alcohol-dependent people in LifeSmart. First are those who are lonely and/or struggling with children on their own. Then there are women who have been unable to bear children. Third are married couples with children, who are high achievers, and who work and play hard (I think we know who Caplin is talking about here). Next are students and young adults whose existence revolves around pubs. Her fifth category is a bit vague - something to do with workaholics who feel they don't get recognition. But the sixth makes some sense: men and women who married young, have had children by the age of
30, and are "desperate to break out of the confines of their lives".
To this list, I would add people who get nervous out on dates; people who think they are boring; people who think other people are boring; and people who really, really like a drink and just don't know when to say no. That's most of us covered.
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