Alcohol

Could a 100-bottle limit help me cut down on drinking?

My New Year’s resolution is to cut down on my drinking. I’m not talking about bringing it within the NHS’s recommended limit, obviously. I’ve never met anyone who confines their alcohol intake to 14 units a week, which amounts to a bottle and a half of wine, ideally spread over many days. I’m thinking of something more in the region of two bottles a week. Why not simply stop altogether? Partly because I’ve tried that before and don’t have the willpower. The longest stretch I’ve gone without a drink was in the two years leading up to my marriage in 2001, because I didn’t think Caroline would go through with

They call me the ‘problem teetotaller’

My guts went on strike last July. I was staying in a hotel and I spent several days sprawled on the bed, vomiting occasionally, eating and drinking nothing and barely able even to wet my lips with water. Meanwhile, a bottle of Prosecco offered by the management stood untouched next to the widescreen TV. I started to wonder if this was my Frank Skinner moment. My farewell to booze. In his memoirs, Skinner describes how he gave up drinking by accident in his twenties when a virus confined him to his bed for a week and destroyed his interest in alcohol. Restored to health, he went back to the pub

Another tragic case involving medical incompetence and cover-up

It was only eight lines into O Brother that I realised I was in the hands of a good writer. John Niven’s landline phone has rung. His partner hands it to him. ‘I take the phone from her as she watches me in the intense, quizzical way we monitor people who are about to receive Very Bad News.’ I can’t recall a writer noticing that before (I presume a few have), but we have noticed it ourselves. And the narrative masterstroke is that now the reader is looking at the page in an intense, quizzical way, for we want to know what the Very Bad News is. The VBN is

In defence of drunken freshers’ weeks

I don’t remember much of freshers’ week at Edinburgh. Friends have helped to fill in the blanks. I vaguely recall a police officer handing out vodka shots to show how easy it was to fail a breathalyser test. A famous DJ had his set in the union cut short because he played the song ‘Blurred Lines’. It had been banned by student politicians. I have hazy memories, too, of my first interactions with posh English women. One assumed I must be gifted since I’d made it into university from a Scottish state school. Another asked if I was limping because I’d overdone it at the ‘introduction to reeling event’ (I

A trip down Ronnie Lane: from child busker to international star

Thirty years ago, I worked for a while in a shop in Soho selling vintage newspapers and magazines. The holy grail for some customers might be the 1955 Playboy featuring Bettie Page or the 1976 Daily Mirror with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Filth & the Fury’ headline. But those of a born-again Mod persuasion were usually looking for 1960s publications with the Small Faces on the cover – preferably the August 1966 copy of the teenage music and fashion bible Rave, showing Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott from that most style-conscious of bands, complete with a double-page poster of the group inside. Now, nearly six decades after their formation, there is,

A farewell to alcohol

Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid. Our neighbour Gilfrid produced an alcohol so pernicious the hangover hit as soon as it crossed one’s tongue Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants

In defence of the boozy office party

I’m not big on nostalgia – if the past was so great, how come it’s history? – but I allowed myself a smirk of reminiscence on reading recently that Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute (‘a professional body focusing on management and leadership’) has put the damper on the age-old tradition of getting blotto at work parties. Francke told the BBC that while hanging out after-hours with workmates is ‘a great team-building opportunity’, managers have a responsibility to keep inappropriate behaviour in check. ‘That might mean adding additional activities alongside alcohol, limiting the amount of drinks available per person or ensuring that people who are drinking too

Our nanny state holds back Britain’s young

Clever people often believe that their cleverness gives them the right to control other people. Nowhere is this more manifest than in nanny state Britain.  So fixated was Public Health England on shielding us from our own bad decisions that when an infectious disease arrived on our shores the quango was woefully unprepared. Junk food advertising bans were prioritised over protecting us against an epidemic.  And so determined are politicians to insulate us from hardship that they attempt to regulate anything that moves. Arguably the most troubling recent development concerns the tacit raising of the age of majority. Since 1969 it has been accepted that we are treated as adults by law

Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth

I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces of coercive conformity. As far as I see it, the path to the grave is lined with compromise after compromise until, at the moment of the final rattle, one has become a travesty, physically and spiritually, of the person one used to be. Not that I would want to overdramatise the whole thing, mind. I more usually tend to present my dis-avowal of smoking as a kind of glorious epiphany. One moment I smoked, the next I didn’t. And in a sense that is true: no doctors were involved, there

Japan’s cult of safetyism

The Japanese government has launched an initiative to encourage young people to drink more alcohol. Yes, really. The national tax agency’s ‘Sake Viva’ campaign is an appeal for ideas to get youngsters boozing after taxes on alcohol products, which accounted for 5 per cent of total revenue back in the hard-drinking 1980s, fell to just 1.7 per cent in 2020. So, at a time of economic hardship, Japan’s youth are being asked to do their patriotic duty and get hammered. The falloff in social drinking is being attributed in part to the pandemic. Japan didn’t have a full-blown lockdown imposed from above, but the more subtle bottom-up lockdown that demonised

Why we drink

‘I like to have a martini,/ Two at the very most./ After three I’m under the table,/ After four I’m under my host.’ I never fully appreciated the brilliance of that spurious quote of Dorothy Parker until I visited Dukes Bar in Mayfair. It used to be the case – it probably still is – that you may order no more than two martinis there owing to their potency. Had she not preferred whisky to gin, Parker might well have banged her fists on that table for a third. After one-and-a-half before dinner, however, this critic would be more inclined to dance on it. Humans may respond to drink in

Liz Truss: ‘It’s raining men’

It’s the final day of Tory party conference today, with all eyes on Boris Johnson’s speech at midday. But will all the cabinet be there to watch it, bright-eyed and bushy tailed? Judging from last night’s antics, Mr S suspects that the answer may be: no. Truss, wearing a striking green number, stood out a mile in a sea of identikit Tory boy blue suits Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey was seen belting out ‘The Time of My Life’ at the legendary inHouse comms karaoke party while many of her fellow ministers attended The Spectator’s own champagne-fuelled shindig. But while Tom Tugendhat and Michael Gove twirled and spun together

The blind spot in the SNP’s ‘war on drink’

Scotland’s grim reputation for abnormally high drug fatalities has become embedded in the public consciousness over the past year. The fact that fake benzodiazepines (‘street valium’) can be procured for 50p a pill on the streets of Dundee and Glasgow is now common knowledge, as is Scotland’s unenviable place at the top of Europe’s drug deaths league table. However, belated attention to this crisis should not allow signs of another to slip below the radar. New figures from National Records of Scotland (NRS) show a 17 per cent surge in alcohol-specific deaths between 2019 and 2020, a rise from 1,020 to 1,190 in the space of 12 months, what NRS

A taste inquisition on Stink Street

Walking up through the Stink Street medieval arch with a bag of shopping, I spotted Michael between the oleander branches seated in front of his ancient cottage having a drink. Stink Street is so called because it is just without the old town walls and in medieval times pigs were kept there. At this time of year it’s not easy to walk up Stink Street after midday without one or other of the cottagers inviting you to join them for a glass. And it was just after six and I deserved one. Stink Street runs uphill steeply and has only recently been dressed with its first layer of tarmac. Michael’s

How alcohol deaths hit a record high during lockdown

Almost a year after the statistics were first published, the country remains horrified by the daily total of Covid 19-related deaths. Meanwhile, we are rather less apt to notice other statistics related to harm and death, which may be an unintended by-product of the fight against Covid-19.  The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) latest figures for the number of deaths related to alcohol-specific causes, published yesterday, received little attention. But they make for dreadful reading. There were 5460 such deaths in the first three quarters of 2020, a shocking rise of 16.4 per cent compared with the same nine-month period in 2019. This grim tally marks the highest number of deaths in the 20 years

In defence of gambling

Doing good doesn’t always work out as expected. A regular entering his local pub takes pity on an old lady seemingly fishing with a bent stick and string in a kerbside pool of rain. He invites her in for a drink. As she raises her gin and Dubonnet, he asks amiably: ‘So how many did you catch today?’ ‘You’re the eighth,’ she replies. Imagine another pub scene. As lockdown is relaxed, a customer’s order of three pints of bitter and two G&Ts is refused by the landlord: ‘Sorry, Squire, but according to my government boozometer that takes you over your permitted weekly Alcoholic Spending Limit of £100. You signed for

My neighbour’s dinner party was a near-death experience

At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken from my arm. I was then handed a plastic jar and a refreshing wipe and directed to the nearest unisex lavatory to give a urine sample (mid-stream). Then a nurse stuck a long cotton bud up my nose as far as it would go and twiddled it this way and that. Blood, urine and Covid tests were preparatory to a hospital admission for a procedure involving a general anaesthetic. Then I drove home and ate a kipper for breakfast. While I was eating, Catriona stuck a hypodermic needle in my

The joy of drinking alone

Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing, that basic and necessary human need for people to meet for a drink has never been so difficult. Now, with the government’s new three-tier Covid strategy in place, anyone at any moment could find their local pub shut, their parties cancelled, and all forms of indoor mixing prohibited. Millions in the UK are already living under these restrictions. It’s a fair bet that millions more will soon join them. And if the government gives in to demands for a ‘circuit breaker’ — a short-term lockdown — it would in effect

How to save our nightlife after coronavirus

The one certainty about crisis is that it makes bad situations worse. Anyone working in restaurants, pubs, cafes and clubs that depend on alcohol sales will have noticed ominous developments before Covid-19 struck. Like so much else that matters, government policy has had nothing to do with the cultural change. The drying out of Britain has been fuelled by changes the authorities never initiated: greater awareness of the dangers to health, the growth of British Islam with its religious prohibitions, and the young turning away from their parents’ addictions. 20 per cent of people said they did not consume alcohol in 2017. The amount drinkers reported consuming had fallen by

Tips for Christmas tipples

It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like a firm of provincial solicitors). Hugh Johnson wrote the first World Atlas of Wine in 1971. Since the 1998 edition he has been, in his words, ‘progressively passing the baton’ to Jancis Robinson. It’s astonishing how much has changed; early editions were little more than France, Germany, Italy, sherry and port. Now this eighth edition