This Saturday I intend to binge drink. I will go to a pub with some friends and we shall drink alcohol with no concern for the consequences. We shall order pint after pint and consume them at a steady rate until the landlord requests they we leave. Im the process we shall converse, often loudly, about all manner of things, some intellectual in nature but mostly base and puerile. If there are no ladies present we may even talk about breasts. Those present will have their own reasons for being there, maybe to recover from a hectic week or, in my case, the desperate need for human company other than my housemate (who does an excellent job of being human company, lest you think otherwise, but can only do so much), but the overriding reason will be because getting pissed with your mates is a tremendously enjoyable activity.
And this is what the powers-that-be seem to be forgetting with this absurd crackdown on Britain’s drinking problem. The problem is not that drinks are too cheap (on the whole we’ll be paying £2.50 a pint and would drink the same if it were a quid), nor that the pubs and bars have late licenses (I’ve started getting to the pub at nine rather than seven as I used to). The problem is some of the people who drink are idiots, and correct me if I’m wrong but idiots have been drinking to excess as long as there have been idiots.
Then there’s the historical precedent. As a teenager in the historical tourist destination of Winchester in 1990 I used to walk home from the pub through a veritable war zone. As a student at Birmingham Uni in the mid-late 90s there’d be fights for the three taxies that served the town centre after 2am. That’s just in my adult life but I’m sure I’m right in saying that the pub brawl is one of those quaint English traditions that makes us what we are. In other countries the local idiots shoot each other or band together to invade their neighbours. Here they get pissed and stagger around looking for someone to punch. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant – it’s been going on since the invention of beer. It is not a new problem.
Going out and getting lashed is an intrinsic part of being British. It’s what we do best and it’s what makes us good people. If we stopped drinking we be a collection of reserved nerds. With alcohol we’re confident, chatty, beautiful people who want to have a good time very loudly. Excepting the idiots, of course. All our national heroes were drunks, from Winston Churchill to Oliver Reed. It’s the great leveler, the only thing that breaks through the class barriers and makes us equal. Nowhere else are social rules so upheld as in a pub, upheld by the implicit threat of violence. I’ve found the safest places to be are hard-drinking pubs where that threat is palpable. No-one’s ever going to start anything there and so everyone has a good time.
There’s an area of Birmingham, Broad Street, where the kind of binge drinking the government is so concerned about tends to happen. Here you will find the young and stupid all dressed up with plenty of places to go offering cheap drinks and late hours. Navigating this road after 10pm while sober is an eye opening experience as you literally swim through an ocean of female flesh. It’s a mecca for the idiots and no doubt a nightmare to police, but it serves a very important purpose. It keeps the morons in one place where they can drink, fight and fuck well away from me. It’s been like this since I first came to Brum in 1995 and was probably like this ever since it was redeveloped. As it happens, the rest of Birmingham is quite pleasant of an evening. Yes there are other areas that get a bit manic and it’s still impossible to get a taxi out of town after midnight, but on the whole you can get pissed with your mates and have a good time.
What’s my point here. Yes, I know it’s not healthy, yes I know it causes problems, and yes I’m being slightly defensive. My point is that what is being described as the “British disease” of “binge drinking” is, on the whole, something we’ve been doing for a very long time and is, on the whole, not a problem. The problem is the tossers who use it as a means and excuse to cause trouble, and in my view they’re just not doing it correctly. They’re not obeying the rules of drinking to excess which ensure that everyone has a good time and no-one gets hurt. Perhaps this is the problem, that rather then teaching our children about the dangers of alcohol we should be showing them how it’s done properly.
Ah, whatever…
For my next trick I shall attempt to defend the smoking of cigarettes in pubs as intrinsic to the fabric and well-being of society, and my argument will probably be “because I bloody well want to”.
While I intend to do all the same stuff you describe (because we’ll be doing together) I don’t consider that binge drinking. The aim of the evening is not to pack down as much random alcohol as possible, simply in order to get vomitously drunk before being kicked out. It’s to socialise – talking about breasts (although I suspect Spider-Man 2 might edge them out this week, geeks that we are), listening to how the path of Dan’s life has brought him back to us, and yes even going for a balti at Bombay Spice afterwards.
Many pub chains, of the Branigans, Walkabouts, etc variety, are designed to discourage people from talking. In a nutshell – turn up the music so it drowns out conversation, remove most of the furniture so there’s no where to sit, promote sales lots of sweet sticky drinks that mask the taste of alcohol. Result? Bags of cash in the till, loads of pissed-up idiots in the streets.
Perhaps you could go the whole hog, Pete and have a complete Vocational Qualification. A GNVQ in Consuming Alcohol. You could have lectures from drunk academics (wait a minute, sounds like my History of Ideas unit at Uni), a unit on dealing with the improving effect alcohol has on the appearence of the opposite sex, science/maths modules that helps folk calculate the cheapest way to get drunk in any given hostelry through a cash to alcohol percentage ratio thang. I for one would have signed up for the drunk chat up lines seminar when I was free and single. Perhaps I could have saved myself a great deal of time and embarrassment, ahhh but would it have been so much fun? You’ll have to ask Dave Metcalfe, he witnessed much of this from me while down in Pompey.
Absolutely right Pete. We have been binge drinking in this country since a long time before that scary term was invented…and not just here either. When I lived in small-town northern Spain most of the bars were open all night Saturday, and a couple of them until 7AM. One of these late bars was known as the ‘violent bar’ because all the aggressively-inclined young folk would gather there, and at 6AM sharp(seemingly on some kind of signal invisible to the uninitiated) put down their drinks and launch into a good old-fashioned pub brawl. We used to retreat to the safety of the other side of the square and watch them throw dustbin lids at each other with great force and inaccuracy. It looked like ‘Jeux Sans Frontieres’ for drunks. At least it did to me, but you have to remember, I was very, very drunk…
Limited drinking hours were always the excuse for stacking up a few pints before closing time, but today it seems the stacking starts when the bar opens?
I’m with Jez on this one. Alcohol has a positive effect in removing social barriers to conversation, though sometimes this is at the expense of listening as well as talking! Pubs should encourage discussion, not drown it with music (I am basically deaf in a high ambient noise environment and I would guess I am not alone in this respect).
It’s been a long time since I was seriously drunk and I really don’t want to revisit the experience. I’m simply getting old.
As to Broad Street, in the 1950s it was the dullest street in Brum and it wasn’t much better in the “swinging” sixties – the fact that Lee Longland is still tehre is quite remarkable. Of course in those days Birmingham was lacking in almost any form of social outlet. Maybe the flowering of Broad Street was a necessary diversion.
I’ve been involved in ‘binge drinking’ in it’s current newsworthy sense a few times. The crush, the noise, the rivers of booze, the shouts of disappointment from people not being allowed entry. And this was a Monday! (Student night). I wouldn’t like to see what it’s like on a Friday. The places I was taken to, the local Walkabout and Liquid (a Hanley club) there was nothing to do but drink. You can barely see, you can’t hear anything said to you, what’s the point?
In the words of Randy Newman – Don’t turn on the light, ’cause I don’t wanna see!
“Perhaps this is the problem, that rather then teaching our children about the dangers of alcohol we should be showing them how it’s done properly.”
I’m in the biz, and we do. It’s called “safer drinking” or “harm minimisation” if you want a nice broad term that can be applied to drugs also.
I’m a great one for getting very ddrunnk myself (it’s refreshing!) but it’s not binge drinking like the pros do it. Unless you wake up in casualty the next morning, missing an eye from having collapsed on some railings, surrounded by nurses who won’t treat you because you kept trying to punch them the night before, having alienated all of your friends and been tossed out of your gaff, you can’t really say you’re binge drinking properly …
that said, most of the drinks ed. for kids is aimed at binge drinking because of the danger of fatal alcohol poisoning, which takes an annual toll of the young and foolish. The fighting’s a bit of a side issue — they’re trying to combat it because of the one-punch-deaths, another regular but depressing statistic in the binge-drinking world.
Alexi Sayle once recommended the development of a special “drunk’s car” for the commited drink driver. I seem to remember it would be the size of a reliant robin, coated in 3 ft of foam padding, had a top speed of 5 mph and had a large rotating illuminated sign on top which said simply “drunk”.
I know a bit about Binge Drinking I did it once and the binge lasted for over thirty years. Having been interested in all things DNA I can safely say that I had a massive predisposition towards the stuff going by the latest evidence. I got to say that I enjoyed most of it in my early twenties but as one consultant once said to me “drink enough and you will become an alcoholic”, but being the “idiot” I am, I carried on regardless……. Have fun.
Another Birmingham University drunk! (in recovery)Read about my recovery at my blog
You Sir are a wise man. I love booze. Cider for preference mmmmmmm, and my liver throbs.
It sounds fair enough to me. Once you cause trouble, that’s when you draw the line.
Yes! How right are you?! Binge drinking is not a new problem, ‘idiots’ just need to be taught how its done properly from a young age! But at the end of the day binge drinking is fun! And while i’m young i shall continue to do so EVERY saturday night! We’re British, we’re fun, intelligent humorous people….let our alcohol embedded culture remain!! xxxxxx