Alcohol

Oxford in my day was another, better world

I was in the attic killing some Taleban on Medal of Honor when Girl interrupted and said: ‘Dad, what’s this?’ What it was was a pile of memorabilia which I’d stuffed into a plastic shopping bag on leaving university and which I’d barely looked at since. We picked through the contents rapt with wonder. To me it seems like yesterday but this was a window to a world that no longer exists — an Oxford at least as remote from current experience as my Oxford was from the version attended 30 years earlier by all those clever grammar-school boys with their pipes and tweed suits, fresh from doing their National

Confessions of a Saga lout

It’s chucking-out time at my local pub, and the high street is full of idiots. They’ve all had a lot to drink, but they’re in no hurry to go home. They’re looking for a party, somewhere loud and lairy to go on to. They’d settle for more booze, but some speed or skunk would be even better. It’s a scene I’ve seen a thousand times, but lately something’s changed: these tearaways aren’t teenagers — they’re in their fifties and sixties. Meet the Saga louts, those feckless folk who refuse to grow up even as they approach old age. Saga louts are a pain, and I should know because I’m one

Low life | 10 March 2016

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

School drinking is the best kind

Last December it was reported that Ampleforth and Rugby schools both have new on-site bars, where pupils are allowed to drink in moderation. ‘We are trying to create somewhere where [the pupils] can let their hair down but we’re all on call,’ said David Lambon, the school’s first lay headmaster. ‘It’s a fine balance with children of that age — they need to be treated like adults and feel independent.’ The only shock was that this was presented as news. Booze and sex are the death and taxes of adolescence: they’re unavoidable, so you might as well find a way to manage them. Schools have had provision around alcohol since

Barometer | 25 February 2016

Vote no, vote often David Cameron scorned Boris Johnson’s idea that voting to leave the EU might result in further reforms followed by another referendum. History, though, would side with Boris. — In June 1992 Denmark rejected the Maastrict Treaty, with 50.7 per cent voting against in a referendum. Denmark was granted four opt-outs, including from the single currency, and held another referendum a year later. — Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty in a 2005 referendum, with 61.5 voting against. After several concessions, Irish voters approved it a year later. — An ‘out’ vote might serve British teams well at the European football championships. In the same month that Denmark voted

Long life | 21 January 2016

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

Health killjoys are now using alcohol guidelines to promote gender equality

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

Planet of the canapés

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

Dear Mary: Nigel Slater asks how to seem grateful for bad presents

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

The office party should not be hard work

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

Cocktails: Talking ’bout milk and alcohol

A few years ago, I came across an interview with an illustrious French chef who had made his home in Britain. I’ve forgotten which chef, but I do remember him going to some lengths to impress on us rosbifs just how lucky we are with our dairy cows. When he moved here, he was astonished by the quality of milk available to the average Briton and remade a number of his dishes to celebrate our heavenly liquid. And of course, anyone who has gazed at the UHT nonsense you find in French supermarkets will believe him, having experienced this epiphany in reverse. His enthusiasm now seems poignant as it becomes

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 November 2015

When Jeremy Corbyn says it is better to bring people to trial than to shoot them, he is right. So one might feel a little sorry for him as the critics attack his reaction to the Paris events. But in fact the critics are correct, for the wrong reason. It is not Mr Corbyn’s concern for restraint and due process which are the problem. It is the question of where his sympathies really lie, of what story he thinks all these things tell. Every single time that a terrorist act is committed (unless, of course, it be a right-wing one, like that of Anders Breivik), Mr Corbyn locates the ill

A soothing Negroni for la dolce vita

The first draft of the famous story was called ‘A Martini as Big as the Ritz’. That’s not true, but F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly at work in the First Cocktail Age. The Algonquin circle also floated into literary history on a choppy ocean of toxically high-ABV mixed drinks. The quotes and jokes are legend: Robert Benchley says to Ginger Rogers in a 1942 Billy Wilder film ‘Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?’ (The line is also attributed to Mae West.) And ours is the Second Cocktail Age. While we wait for its literary heroes, three appreciative books are here to be

Stewed Siena

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

Can the binge-drinking killjoys please chill out? We’re trying to get drunk

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

The myth of the ‘middle class drink epidemic’

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

Giving up alcohol is not as much fun as I’d hoped

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

Low life | 25 June 2015

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

Diary – 11 June 2015

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

Low life | 4 June 2015

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