United Kingdom: Drink is written in our culture – so why are Brits so pious about alcohol?

Source: The Telegraph

Hannah Betts

31 May 2016

Booze has oiled the cogs of the Westminster machine for centuries. From Sir Robert Walpole letting his wig slip and Churchill’s epic imbibing, to Nigel “don’t do TV after more than five pints” Farage, drink has played a far more consistent role than, say, mere democracy.

Mrs Thatcher would uncoil with a scotch and soda, Mr Blair with a G&T – followed by half a bottle of vino. Even among the joyless reaches of the Brown regime, drink had a mellowing effect. According to a new book, Order, Order! The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking by Ben Wright – which looks set to be a corker. – the dourest of Scots felt obliged to pretend to be a beer drinker, but harboured a private penchant for champagne, and could knock back a glass in one great gulp.

Damian McBride, Brown’s former press guru, remembers that matters could get a tad out of hand at No 11. “Downing Street shares a lot of staircases,” he says in the book. “And occasionally, in heavy drink after those Christmas parties, people walking down the stairs would hammer on the [Blair] wall, shouting: ‘When are you going to f— off?'”

It is a scene that makes one lament the passing of The Thick of It, and is topped only by a revelation from Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary. Her husband’s drinking habits, in ascending order of alcoholic potency, comprised “an opener”, followed by “a brightener, a lifter, a tincture, a large gin and tonic without the tonic, a snifter, a snort, a snorter and a snorterino – which more or less emptied the bottle in one go”.

Here was a man who knew how to live! As someone who has renounced the mother’s ruin – two years dry come September, gods willing – I miss the language of booze as much as the stuff itself.

Where Denis had his opener, so I would have “something to take the edge off”; for his brightener, I opted for a “sharpener”; a “stiffener” in place of his lifter. Although I never succumbed to what a friend refers to as the “dressing drink”, and what young people term “pre-loading”, or would never have got out the door.

If the mother of parliaments finds its fuel in booze, that is because the country it governs no less depends on such sustenance. Drink is written into our culture. Over a thousand years before the Pickwickians’ brandy-and-hot-water, Orwell’s stout or Mumsnet’s “wine o’clock”, the Venerable Bede was using the image of a sparrow flying through a mead-hall to illustrate the human condition, so central and bolstering was carousing deemed to it.

It is a passion reflected in our fondness for dramas such as The Archers, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Mike Leigh’s gloriously awful Abigail’s Party. Pubs, bars and drunken gatherings provide not only opportunities for characters to cross paths, but a means by which emotion can be revealed, as the stiff upper-lip gives way to slobber-festooned maw.

Yet our attitudes to alcohol are changing – and rightly. People refer to our culture as “alcogenic” – that is, one in which drunkenness is normalised. It isn’t; it is alcophiliac. There is no part of life in which drink is not considered the norm. Cinemas lay on liquor were once there was only popcorn. Motorway service stations provide it. Even the school fete requires a licence.

In my youth, sales were restricted to certain hours and outlets. Today, merely to enter a supermarket is to stagger around an obstacle course of boozing incentivising bogofs. Drink is how we sedate ourselves in order to cope with work, parenthood and basic human interaction, less about joie de vivre than it is basic self-medication.

The furore over the recent lowering of the weekly alcohol limit – down from 21 to 14 units for men – reflects concern over society’s spiralling dependence. Because, put bluntly, our addiction is killing us. The number of females aged 34 and under dying from alcohol-related conditions has more than doubled since the Eighties, while among professional women of every age the figure is up by a quarter.

In renouncing booze, one renounces many things – the easy camaraderie of the bar stool, a stereotypical notion of masculinity for male abstainers, and – yes, to some extent – Britishness. The fact that I no longer drink (and, worse, don’t eat meat) marks me out as a whinger; worse – a foreigner.

Were I to post any of my musings about loving alcohol and also my sobriety on the worthy online forum Soberistas.com, the answer would come back that I was “heading for a relapse”. I’m not. Not drinking has brought me confidence, contentment and stability after 40 years’ whirling mania. It is a daily revelation of what life can be if one is present for it. Nevertheless, it is, well, dry – moderate, quiet – a different kind of love to the ecstasies of the bottle.

Its language reflects this quietness. AA has spawned a rich rhetoric of phrases to keep its millions off the wagon. “One day at a time”;  “Keep coming back”; “We’re only as sick as our secrets”. My personal favourite is: “It’s not a drinking disease, but a thinking disease”, which I abbreviate to the ironic but no less pertinent: “Don’t think!” (I also admire: “We’re all here because we’re not all there.”)

However, such mantras lack the bravura of a “stiffener,” being “ratted,” “smashed,” or “plastered”. Those who lack the booze as muse also lack the linguistic flourishes. I sometimes ponder what the collective noun for a bunch of temperate types should be. A moderation of? A coherence? A recovery?

Perhaps Telegraph readers could come up with their suggestions.

Interesting charts: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/health/drink-is-written-in-our-culture—so-why-are-brits-so-pious-abou/