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Paul R Taylor: On the town
by Paul R Taylor18/ 8/2005
BINGE drinking is the new evil in our society it seems.
The licensing laws will change at the end of November to allow some
bars and pubs to open for 24-hours and allow us to become more like
the French. That's the idea anyway. We'll instantly swap our pints
of absinthe for a nice small Merlot, and only drink while enjoying
a three-course meal at a restaurant.
Walk through Manchester on any Friday or Saturday night and you'll
see that this will simply not happen. There was some guy outside my
flat's bedroom window last weekend, bellowing his lungs out about
Sam.
I'm not sure whether Sam was a man or a woman, and I'm not sure
what he or she had done, but it must have been pretty bad because
the guy sounded very upset. He screamed for approximately 10
minutes and then went home, or for a fight, or to casualty.
It's happening across the country, not just Manchester. In one of
the tabloids this week there's a report about the "frontline of
lawless Britain", showing drunken girls fighting after a night on
the town.
In the second paragraph the writer describes the "shameful"
pictures. "They show fighting, drunkenness and loutish and
anti-social behaviour that have sadly become a regular part of our
lives."
Now if you've read to this point you're probably thinking I'm one
of these prohibitionists who thinks anyone who so much as sucks on
a brandy snap should be shot. But I'm not.
I recognise that they're everywhere at the moment, these experts.
You can't turn on the TV without being told that we're all
drunkards who are making life very difficult for our good
upstanding police officers, and costing the NHS millions of
pounds.
This is true, but re-read the quote above from the newspaper
because there's a word I take issue with. It's the word
"become".
Humans were getting drunk before they thought to begin recording
time. There's evidence of wine production in early Mesopotamia in
6,000BC.
Around 4,000 years ago in Babylon, it was accepted practice that
for a month before a wedding the bride's father would supply his
son-in-law with all the mead or beer he could drink. The Babylonian
calendar was based on the cycle of the moon, and this might be
where the word honeymoon originates from, as mead is a honey
beer.
For the last 8,000 years, and especially in the last few hundred,
people have been getting drunk.
They even tried to ban it in the 20s in the US, and look at the
trouble that caused.
And Churchill was a drunk for god's sake.
We love booze. We love being drunk. We don't want to be more like
the French, we want to be more like Homer Simpson.
The thing that annoys me is this idea of a golden age, when
everyone behaved in a sober manner. It's rubbish, never
happened.
They say underage drinking is on the increase as well. But I used
to get drunk when I was 14. True, after one particularly heavy
night on the cider I ran into a car park barrier that had been left
half way up and woke up in casualty looking like John Merrick. I've
been mugged while very drunk, again waking up in casualty with a
smashed up face. I've also been head-butted by a drunken person,
while I myself was drunk but generally minding my own business. I
have scars on my face as a result but the thing is I recovered from
these incidents.
I've had some absolutely fantastic times while very drunk. If I had
the choice of a face without scars or a life without alcohol, I
know which one I'd choose.
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