It is a bit ironic that the introduction of 24-hour drinking in this country coincides with the emergence, in certain quarters, of a West Coast attitude to alcohol. I'm not talking about a penchant for sweet black and tans (very popular in Argyllshire), but the Californian terror of booze. Brits have been dining out for years on stories about uptight Americans being scandalised by the ordering of alcohol at lunch. There's a whole genre of anecdotes involving nip-tucked, cocaine-abusing media types daring to suggest their clean-living English equivalents might want to seek professional help because they automatically open a bottle of wine with dinner. Moreover, for every Gary Oldman who joins AA, there are ten Hollywood types enrolled on the programme because they've been drunk more than twice since graduation and think that's sufficient to constitute a "problem".
Five years ago all this was another world - the same world in which you were asked to go out on to the balcony if you wanted a cigarette (at a party!) and where the women got Botox and breast surgery as a matter of course. It all seemed wholly removed from the way we lived our lives. But not any more. First we got the cigarette fever, and now the fear of drink is upon us, affecting the way we think. I'm not talking about the girls photographed with their heads between their knees, or the boys who buy each other heart-stopping combinations of shorts for their 18th birthdays. I mean the nice middle-class types who no longer feel safe in their homes in possession of a corkscrew.
The fear of drink is new to those of us who were brought up to think of alcohol as a legitimate and harmless reward for getting through the day. My parents would sit down every evening with a gin and tonic, for starters, and it never occurred to them to consider the damage they were doing to their liver, mouth, or skin and brain function, let alone the negative effect it might have on their emotional well-being. Those days are gone. We're still drinking, all right, but we do it with a faint whiff of apology and one eye on the statistics. BC (Before California-isation), you wouldn't dream of canvassing opinion as to whether it was OK
to open another bottle, let alone make that self-justifying speech
about the wine being "pretty light" and (this is the ultimate drink guilt line) it being "ages since we've seen each other". BC, you would never have negotiated with your partner in advance about how much it was reasonable to drink. Age might have a bit to do with all this, but attitude is the main culprit.
We've been slowly persuaded that all alcohol is destructive and
that we would be a great deal better off without it. You wait. In ten years' time the professional classes will be mostly teetotal while the working classes will be dying of drink-related diseases in their mid-thirties, and both will be as misguided as each other.
