Britain and the Bottle

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Just as medieval Britons dreaded inexplicable plagues which cut through villages with the unsparing ruthlessness of a reaper’s scythe, the country continues to fear phenomena which baffle and threaten.

We have latched onto the “credit crunch” as a catch-all explanation for anything that can go wrong, but economic distress has not erased ongoing concern about binge drinking. The spectacle of young citizens attempting to recreate scenes from the fall of Rome in town centres after dark exerts an awful fascination.

The man with a traffic cone on each arm and his female companion who is dressed as a pterodactyl are the inheritors of a culture which produced the myths of Arthur, the Mabinogion, Shakespeare’s plays and the pneumatic tyre.

Clearly, the alcohol they have imbibed during the course of the evening has shaped their decisions.

It would not have seemed a good idea to attach a garlic-heavy kebab to the aerial of a BMW if they had spent the day drinking 7Up.

But easy access to mind-altering substances is not something new.

For centuries monks have brewed some of the strongest wine ever to splash onto a cassock, but there are few records of abbots riding in shopping trolleys at 3am.

The notion that making alcohol more expensive will impede binge drinking is hard to compute. The tragedy of drug use demonstrates that addicts are capable of marshalling enormous sums of cash to feed a lethal desire.

People are not compelled to drink past the point of incoherence because alcohol is cheap. Rather, our culture has created a situation in which there is a longing to shed responsibility, escape gnawing anxieties, and party like it is 1789 and the Bastille of pressure-cooker Britain is about to fall.

The answer to the question of why people do not drink in the relaxed fashion we see in France and Italy may be that our continental cousins actually live in more relaxed societies. Holidaymakers return to these shores with tales of happy families enjoying rhapsodic red wine at knockdown prices while children scamper like cheerful goats. The happiness and cohesion of the family has less to do with licensing laws than with the values and opportunities enjoyed by the unit.

Learning a craft was once a passport to steady and skilled employment. But the vanishing of traditional jobs has resulted in a society built upon neo-serfdom where failure to excel academically condemns workers to a succession of utterly uninspiring occupations.

A national conversation is needed about a new way of working, now that the old system is fundamentally broken.

This is a time of opportunity, and if the proprietors of vertical drinking establishments want to encourage this debate, they could buy some chairs, turn down the volume and serve tapas.