Alcohol

Nice airport was more or less deserted. Two-and-a-half hours early for the easyJet flight to Gatwick, I had a leisurely cup of tea and a bun at a café kiosk before going through security, sharing a counter with a couple of young gay Frenchmen who were bickering respectfully over the timing of some future arrangement. I took out my 99p 1987 charity-shop paperback, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton, and began to read. I love Patrick Hamilton’s novels, but until that moment hadn’t bothered to try the later ones, which he wrote when his alcoholism had taken a grip and he couldn’t get out of bed, as they

Here I go again. I have stopped smoking. Until recently I had been smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, but it is now two weeks since I last had one. Initially I used e-cigarettes and nicotine lozenges to help me give up, but now I already feel I can manage without them. I think I may have conquered my addiction. I feel I could be free at last. But I hesitate to say so, because it is a feeling I have often had before. Like Mark Twain, I have often stopped smoking, but always after a period of time, even one as long as five years, I have taken it

To adapt Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous dictum on the failure of the Germans to tackle Hitler, ‘First they came for the smokers and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker…’ How right the smoking lobby was when it warned that once the health Nazis had banned smoking in enclosed public spaces they would target the rest of us. Red meat, cured meat, sugar – all are the subject of increasingly belligerent health campaigns. Today the Chief Medical Officer has upped the ante on alcohol.  No amount of alcohol intake is safe, she says. We risk cancer with every sip we take.   The recommended maximum for men

Even the name is pretentious. And something of a misnomer, too. After all, a canapé comes from the French word for ‘couch’ — the idea presumably being that a garnish of some kind or other sits on top of tiny slices of bread or small crackers in the same way that tasty people plonk themselves down on a sofa. Except that the whole business of dainty finger food — as liberated Victorians used to call it — has got so out of hand that wherever you fetch up, chefs are going to extremes to outdo each other. During the preamble to new year, I attended one bash at a swish

From Nigel Slater Q. With each passing year (I am nearly 60, for heaven’s sake), I am finding it increasingly difficult to lie convincingly. This is a particular problem when unwrapping presents. The grateful words flow from my lips like warm jam from a spoon but what appears on my face is ‘Seriously, how could you?’ Do you have any suggestions as to how I can make my facial expression match my words? I hate to appear ungrateful. A. This problem may be relieved with the easy expedient of alcohol. There is a reason people drink fizzy wines during the festive season — they produce a mild euphoria which masks

Is anything worse than the office Christmas party? It is almost always a horror show. Colleagues who are cheerful all year round turn into angry drunks. Usually benign bosses become second-rate pimps. The interesting become boring and the boring become interminable. The average office Christmas do tends to leave you wishing you didn’t have to come back to the grind next year. Why should it be so? Most of us like the people we work with— give or take — so a few hours of celebration should be fun. The problem, I think, is that office party organisers, who tend to be drawn from the management caste, can’t get themselves

The Indian summer was still fending off the mists and mellow fruitfulness. But the autumn term was about to begin; the season’s changes would soon be manifest. So it was a day for anecdote and recapitulation; for telling amusing August tales, behind which lurked deeper meanings. A couple of friends had been to the Palio, as everyone should, once. I remember being surprised that several hours of mediaeval pageantry could hold one’s attention, which it certainly did: but more than once? No one would watch Psycho twice. I also remember being surprised that the young of Siena would spend weeks rehearsing: hard to imagine that happening here. The spectacle ends

Nothing better sums up the out-of-touchness of public-health prigs than the debate about so-called binge drinking. To these teetotal, ciggie-dodging suits, for whom fun is the foulest of f-words, and who are such miserabilists that they’re made sad by the idea of happy hour, anything more than four units of booze a day for a bloke, and three for a lady, counts as binging.Four units is two pints of weak lager. Three units is a large glass of wine. Are these people for real? That’s lunch for many of us. On party nights most of us have more than that before we even don our glad rags and leave the house. Consider

With alcohol consumption falling every year for over a decade it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the myth that Britain is in the grips of a drinking epidemic, but where there’s a will there’s a way. One method is to focus on whichever group is drinking the most. Even though everybody is drinking less, some people are bound to be drinking more than others and that means scary headlines. Inconveniently for the doom-mongerers, the people who are drinking the most happen to be the middle-aged and middle-class. It would be a better story if the heaviest drinkers were the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe

Two months ago, I set myself the target of losing 11 pounds in time for the Spectator’s summer party on 1 July. To help achieve that, I swore off alcohol and, had I succeeded, my plan was to start drinking again at the party. I managed the weight loss, but didn’t make it to the party because it clashed with a board meeting of the educational charity I set up five years ago. The upshot is that I haven’t started drinking again and I’m debating whether to remain teetotal in perpetuity. Temperance has its advantages. I’ve experienced almost no headaches or stomach aches since I gave up the booze, although

Ninety-two readers (thank you!) sent accounts of their worst debacles on drink or drugs. I printed out each one and clipped it into a ring binder. Last Thursday afternoon I made a pot of tea, opened the file, and settled down for a good read. The first sentence of the first entry was: ‘Priggish as it sounds, I am ashamed of the lesbian orgy I initiated while off my nut on champagne.’ I read that — it was amazing — then I took a restoring sip of Rosie Lee and turned the page. The next one was from a soldier. His first sentence was: ‘Kabul was darker than a Pashtun’s

Down here in west Cornwall, the days are long and summer is on the wing. Like the Tories in Scotland, the tiny population of Cornish choughs continue to defy extinction, clinging on like crazy with their little red feet, simply refusing to die out. Six nests with chicks have been monitored this year, while the birds themselves enjoy a higher level of security and protection than a Russian mafioso. I am dying to see one, forever scanning the cliffs with my binoculars, trying and failing not to be a holiday cliché. Middle-aged woman in Breton top, bakes her own bread and stares at the sea for hours on end. Chough

The entries are crawling in on their hands and knees for the ‘drunkest I’ve ever been’ competition to win a place at the launch party for the Low life column collection. Gawd. Reading your accounts makes me feel as sober and upright by comparison as a sidesman in the Dutch Reformed Church, and that I have the Low life position on this magazine under false pretences. What we do have in common however, I think, is that we are terrible lightweights who can’t take drink like others can. For me, a single pint of strongish lager is a shape changer. Pass me a second and I couldn’t give two figs

The man in the pub’s solution to the ongoing panic about legal highs is to ban them. ‘Ban ‘em all! S’obvious, innit? I can’t believe politicians haven’t thought of it already. Yeah, go on, I’ll have another…’ Here’s the thing. It is obvious and politicians have thought of it already. The reason that it never went from the idea stage to the planning stage is that it isn’t as simple as that. Previous home secretaries such as David Blunkett and Charles Clarke didn’t baulk at the idea because they were lily-livered pussy cats with libertarian tendencies. They rejected it because it’s a bad idea, not just illiberal but also unworkable.

One of the many old temperance beliefs that linger on in the field of ‘public health’ is known as availability theory. Put simply, this theory says that if you make alcohol more available, people will drink more and there will be more alcohol-related problems. As a result, the temperance/public health lobby always wants shorter opening hours and fewer licences. The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t stand up in the real world. More licences can correlate with more drinking for the obvious reason that more shops will sell alcohol in areas of high demand (public health campaigners struggle with the ‘demand’ part of ‘supply and demand’), but increased