At risk of sounding like Glenda Slagg, don’tcha just hate those mealy mouthed drink aware advertisements which are crawling all over the Tube? You know: “Party this weekend – it was a party, right?”. Because we all need to feel just that little bit worse right now.
What people seem to forget is that bingeing Britain is not a modern phenomenon. But until the temperance movement came along and encouraged everyone to die of cholera, no-one used to worry about it. Dr Johnson recalled that in his youth all the respectable people of Lichfield got drunk every night and no-one thought the worse of them for it. And at least when they went in for warnings, the eighteenth century did it in style, whatever Kingsley Amis said about gin being for pussies.
Admittedly, drink does promote all sorts of social evils, not least the chance of ending up looking like a guest on the Jeremy Kyle show. Yet it has also served a democratic purpose.
The taverns of eighteenth century London were considered dangerously promiscuous places. Not in the traditional sense, but because they offered anyone, of any class, the chance to read a newspaper and express an opinion. Cesar de Saussure was astonished to see a street porter call for his drink and his paper “as easily as a lord”.
Satire and sedition flourished through human communication, and one wonders whether there is a sinister subtext to a campaign which encourages us to stay at home with a cup of tea. If drinking is to be stigmatized in the same manner as smoking, how long before we come to resemble the characters in Forster’s dystopian The Machine Stops – alone in our cells, passively clicking and consuming, believing that our interactions are meaningful but unaware that power has been devolved elsewhere? If the Tories do work up a bit of sedition of their own in a few minutes, why not make a meaningful political gesture and pop out for a drink?
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