We only drink to be naughty

The reason we drink is that we think it’s naughty

Celia Walden

15 December 2007

It's silly to see booze as sinful

Equating alcohol with transgression, British people have increasingly drunk in a taboo-breaking manner, and this has never been more apparent than in the last year, when it was revealed that Britain’s children have some of the worst alcohol-related problems in the world. Last month the schools watchdog Ofsted found that a fifth of ten- to 15-year-olds were regularly getting drunk, after researchers questioned 111,000 children for the survey. A few days later there was a new scare: the Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo claimed binge-drinking was now a middle-class problem, insisting that ‘serious and dramatic harm’ was taking place in people’s homes and, amusingly, highlighting Surrey as the worst offender. Guy Woodward, editor of the wine magazine Decanter, heading the counter attack, put into words what many of us were thinking. ‘The way the press — and the government — is talking, you’d be forgiven for thinking Surrey was turning into Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he said. Although the story was ultimately derided and rejected by the (largely middle-class) press, the instance did serve to remind many of us that our attitudes to alcohol are neither normal nor healthy.

The government, unaware and ill-equipped to deal with this crisis, is focusing its efforts on the young, calling for laws to raise the current legal drinking age of six within the home. This will do nothing to help, and may even make matters worse. It’s our most basic, anti-puritan reflex that needs changing: we used to be all buttoned up, now we’re all unbuttoned. The illusion transcends class, age and now, thanks to a fictional culture made endemic by television programmes like Sex and the City, sex.

The reaction against puritanical attitudes to drink in Anglo-Protestant countries is now taking a similar course to that against sexual repression: a demonstrative defiance of convention that quickly morphs into its own convention. Unlike French and Italian women — for whom drink is an enjoyable accompaniment to food, not a wild libertarian statement — British women feel pressured by the gender war into outdoing men. And there is no reason why they should not try (although their waistlines will not share much of the glory). Watch a group of women being delivered their first bottle of Chardonnay in a Soho bar. Eyes narrowed, they huddle around the table, thrillingly courting sin, hoping all the while that they bear some resemblance to Carrie & Co. Unhappily for them, the image itself, packaged so shinily and wittily by the US, is a lie. Manhattan women are far too concerned with their figures to drink, but British women blithely persevere in subscribing to the image nevertheless.

Even in Russia — a country in which 36,000 people die of alcohol-related diseases every year — girls don’t drink like we do. Asked whether they actually enjoy drinking alcohol, however, our girls will become fiercely defensive, claiming to cherish the stuff. This would be more believable if the wine they drink (and that served in most British pubs and bars) weren’t usually of the lowest possible calibre, and something no French or Italian person would voluntarily imbibe. And yet they’re still out there, shivering on the pavements, bravely downing their carafes of disinfectant and paying preposterously over the odds for the pleasure — all just to show how frightfully naughty they are.