Drink: Cause and Solution

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you" - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Any Englishman entering a New York bar would soon find himself in familiar territory. Sure, the décor might be a little different – no piss-stained carpet here – but as the glasses chink expectantly above the warm hubbub, the joyous gleam on the bright faces crowding the room could be found anywhere in the world. Down the dregs, however, and a different vision unfolds: despite a celebrated alcoholic heritage taking in speakeasies, Spring Break and the smooth, smooth syrup of Snoop Dogg, these days, a mere 64% of adult Americans admit to taking a taste. To put this in perspective, a 2009 survey in the UK found that 69% of British males had imbibed alcohol in the past week alone, with just 14% of adults overall declaring themselves teetotal. Drinking is deeply ingrained in British culture; despite the heroic efforts of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the same simply cannot be said of the States.

You don’t have to look far for evidence to back this up. In America, you can have sex way before you can drink – if you make the momentous decision to bring a baby into the world, don’t even think about wetting it’s head until you hit 21. There’ll be no champagne corks popping when you graduate high school; no beers in the trunk when you get your first driving license (at 14 if you live in South Dakota). Should you enlist and get sent overseas at 18, drink will offer no solace from the horror of war – you guys are trusted with a rifle before your government will let you get your hands on a Bud.

I can assure you that this isn’t an attitude shared on this side of the Atlantic. I’ve sat with groups of regular, respectable middle-class people as they laugh themselves hoarse over memories of drunkenness past, gleefully bringing up vomit-flecked tales of projectile puerility as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Worst of all? I’ve laughed along with them – and have plenty of my own stories to share as well. So twisted is our approach to binge drinking that we don’t see an issue in the standard pre-teen ritual of necking 3-litre bottles of cider in the park, or in the staggering fact that many newsagents sell super-strength lager at half the price of a milkshake. Rest assured we are different: but why?

Here’s a clue: say the word ‘Plymouth’ to an American and it conjures up images of proud protestant pilgrims; in Britain, it’s a particularly lethal brand of gin. The puritans departed these shores for a reason; we’re a hopeless case. In the new colonies, however, their influence was unrivalled, and old habits have made a point of dying hard ever since. Prohibition, which itself had its roots in the conservative Christianity of the South, was only repealed in Mississippi in 1966 – some dry counties even exist to this day. Nowadays, the last remnants of temperance and our cyrrotic legacy face off across the pond: neither of us have got it right. There is a difference between drinking and having a drink, and both of us would, in our respective ways, do well to learn it.

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A friend from Leeds once told me: “Teddy, an Englishman never outgrows an open bar”.

I’m not a fan of stating hard and fast generalizations regarding large groups of people, but this one holds. In my experience with this strange sub-species of human, I have never seen one refuse a drink. Even if that person would very much like to. Even if that person knows that one more will definitively pickle their liver, get them thrown out of the house, put in jail, and have them spewing sick like lesser deities spew water in the fountains of Versailles.

There are some types of domesticated animals that will never refuse food. If you drop a cement mixer full of oats in front of a horse, the beast would gladly eat itself to death. Such is the unique British pre-disposition to booze. If you don’t believe me, try it some time. Find any random Britisher on the street and offer to by him a drink. He will be unable to refuse. When he has finished that drink, buy him another. Continue this process until your new friend is on the floor of the bar, wallowing in a pool of his own excrement and slurring his favourite football songs while imploring random passerbys to “join in on the chorus”. Feel free to leave him there with your phone number written on a cocktail napkin. Not only will he not hold this against you, he will consider you a lifelong friend.

I’m not criticizing binge drinking. I support almost all vices that make lives of quiet desperation a little brighter, if only for short periods of time. It does, however, strike me as absolutely fucking insane that British people, from adolescents to oldsters, can’t seem to control their drinking, given that when sober, they spend so much time self-flagellating on the issue. Barely a month passes in Britain without someone issuing a report blaming binge drinking for the downfall of society. Binge drinking is making people die earlier; binge drinking has strained the NHS to its breaking point; Millions of pounds of government spending is sucked into a black hole created by drunken vandalism and ‘anti-social behavor'. By drinking you not only let yourself down, you let down your countrymen, your queen and your god.

So why don’t people do anything about it? They make token attempts, through legislation, and those wonderfully socialist TV and poster campaigns that feature jarring scenes of violence with quotes likes: “It was supposed to be my stag night, instead, we murdered a cabbie”. But no one is actually bothered enough by the physical, mental, and institutional toll of binge drinking to simply stop going to the pub, or deny themselves a round at last call. The reason, I suspect, is that despite all the rhetoric about the evils of alcohol, the only true ‘anti-social’ behavior that a brit can ever engage in, is not sharing a pint with his countrymen. This will always be one of his most charming and damning qualities.