Off the Piss
At a time when the literal masonry of the UK appears to be crumbling, have we lost faith in our millennia-old national hard hat — the sauce?
Being English, as J.G. Ballard tells it, should automatically make you a subject for psychoanalysis — defending yourself behind a labyrinth of social codes and practices that you’d need a skilled anthropologist to decipher. Maybe it’s a survival instinct from living on a small, chilly island when personal space is at a premium, and sets us apart from our American or Australian cousins, who gained their sense of self through straddling nature’s frontier like a bucking bronco. Maybe it’s why England produces good actors; we learn to conceal our true feelings from those around us from as soon as we are cognitively able to do so. Our emotional illiteracy apparently others us from Europeans and amuses the Americans, so how have we coped in times of crisis before? In large part, what pulled us through is our problematic, boom-bust boozing — the pissed-upper lip.
From post-colonial patio chair-chucking after anti-climatic quarter finals, to Churchill directing our last stand on back-to-back Scotch and sodas, this is who we are, A.A. Gill told us; why would you want to ponce about in the grottoes of Dionysus when you can get trollied in the mead halls of Valhalla? Alcohol wards us from our true demon, social inadequacy, it’s our drug of choice, or it was, anyway. Younger generations withdrawing from drink is better documented elsewhere than here — increased health consciousness, bleak finances and a social media panopticon are all cited. As a man in the business end of his thirties I dealt with a recent ‘day party’ with whisky and ice; my hosts who were ten years my junior raved dry, microdosing Californian edibles. I didn’t understand it — about half the people my age who bought psychotropics from Camden Market came out with mild anxiety disorders. And how could you deal with this amount of people without a drink?
It’s almost impossible for a week to pass without some writing about non-alcoholism or pub closures, so here’s some more. Two polar celebrities who yet could have only come from these islands, Adele and Dapper Laughs, recently made the news, or in the case of the latter became a wellness creator sharing his abstinence journey. Adele confessed to thinking she had become a ‘borderline alcoholic’, whilst Vine’s reformed jape-ist thought that getting into the pub was such a coming-of-age event for his generation it was for years difficult to tell whether he had a problem. Where to amputate something that runs so deeply in our veins? We’re told younger generations don’t see drinking as essential. Even to me The Libertines’s middle aged return seems to be an artefact from a now fundamentally different, sloshier Xanadu — or their decade itself is now in the dock, a last burp of Baby Boomer youth revivalism that remembered none of the ideals, and we’re only just now coming to, with a head full of regret.
And it’s fair to say we’re not exactly tip-top as a country at the moment, either. Strikes, inflation, crumbling aerated infrastructure, and low stock internationally has likened our decade to the 1970s. But at least then we had Bowie and punk to express ourselves — perhaps we didn’t realise the soft power we still had, a national music industry that still had global privilege; do we even have that anymore? We’ve got Adele, our socials, and the pub — the informal space that gravitated us all together made the British Isles unique — after living abroad there’s something quite special about the communal armistice of wandering around a boozer like it’s your living room, after years of enforced table service. This is all meant to be on the decline, and will successive generations even want it anymore?
We’re not alone in being chilly, or even fond of the drink. I once asked my Dubliner uncle what to get my auntie for Christmas — he told me unironically that she likes alcohol. A Mexican told me that they also drink to get drunk, but they associate it with reward and occasion. To get drunk for the sake of it — like we do — is odd. Yankee chuggers have an Anglo-Saxon taste for getting fucked up, and beer has been an essential part of Australian identity — but would they be quite so lost without it? Adversarialism is built deeply into our drinking; the Gin Craze of the 18th century was state-stimulated by King Billy’s England to counter imports of French brandy, followed by a succession of panicky acts of parliament to control the consequential epidemic of alcoholism. The maritime tossing between release and regret. Our Last Orders bell culture — a wartime remnant to curtail drinking by munition workers — fueled our tendency to over consume with a time pressure, and explains our queasy euphoria of 7am pints at the Gatwick Red Lion.
We dealt with it, didn’t we, with Tony Blair’s 2003 Licensing Act? The relaxation of drinking laws in an attempt to instil a level of idyllic continental chill towards booze. A national panic concerning teenage drinking complemented a broader concern about moral decline in the 1990s, where Hooch and Two Dogs, up-marketed to Bacardi Breezers and Smirnoff Ice, helped sweeten the rite of passage to acceptably shitfaced adulthood. Getting trollied wasn’t tackled, just rebranded; All Bar Ones wanted women in on the act, and the imported lager boom fuelled lad culture. The beardy Brooklyn craft craze that replaced it offered a more authentic relationship with your beer, the tap room brewery was your behind-the-scenes ticket to the chocolate stout factory, as opposed to the glitzy car showroom of a metrosexual chain bar. You can replace the values all you like, but they still traded on the promise of a legendary night out — five, eight drinks, more? The only cap is how much you can handle.
Is there such a thing as a ‘borderline alcoholic’, or is this just being deprogrammed from what was unwittingly excessive British normative drinking behaviour? I’ve had a lot more discussions about what ‘normal drinking’ was after the pandemic, when most people experimented with stay-at-home boozing, and hopefully realised that being smashed alone in a flat isn’t always all that nice. As an expat I’ve accidentally imported my own personal bag-of-cans culture abroad, often taking home a couple of the excellent domestic tins to create a mental breakwater between work’s time and my own, only to worry — is anyone else doing this? Surely it’s fine? In part, alcohol has stayed legal because it is a much more quantifiable drug than pills or powders, but the trade off is that it does make you your own barman, bouncer and pub landlord. As we all seem to be spending more time alone, with less money to spend, it’s more likely only up to us to have a word with ourselves.
Perhaps it’s all good stuff, we are finally having a word with ourselves, and I’m being overly cynical about Dapper Laughs’ Damascene conversion to fully optimised teetotalism. Maybe we’re growing up; after all these centuries we’re riding an exponential mental health bell curve — more emotionally erudite, reaching ever beyond the need to up the gaussian blur on reality. Perhaps our national anxiety about losing our love of booze and counting the pub closures amounts to just not knowing when a party’s over. But maybe also, we’re left with an even more spiritual problem, one we’ve been avoiding all this time; what are we supposed to do with all this new found, high definition sobriety?
