Where We're Going After Loss-Of-Empire

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From The Sunday Times
October 5, 2008
Let’s put the drink down and just talk
New Yorker Sarah Lyall voices her shock at the British dependence on the bottle for relaxation
Sarah Lyall, New York Times London Correspondent

Most Octobers I cover the Man Booker prize, an occasion where members of the literati converge in an elaborate medieval banqueting hall in London to hear who has won the country’s most important fiction award so they can proceed to attack, sneer at and feel jealous and insecure about the decision. The dinner beforehand tends to drag and when you are seated next to someone who has nothing to say and seems weary of his (and your) very existence, you feel you should have spent the evening at home watching CSI: Miami reruns in your pyjamas.

I felt this keenly at one of these dinners when the man on my left, a moderately successful publishing executive, turned out to be a twitching parody of a tongue-tied Englishman spooked by normal social interaction. He answered in monosyllables. He failed to initiate topics of conversation. He stared at his bread roll, shuffled in his chair, fidgeted with his napkin. Aside from the occasional phlegm-displacing sound he was a silent companion.

But by the time the main course arrived, a strange transformation had taken place. Mr Silent had become Mr Forthcoming, even Mr Amusing. He listened to what I said, told complex anecdotes with memorable punch lines, spoke expansively about literature, leant in close for a tête-à-tête.

I had drawn him out, I thought; I was finally getting the hang of this place. But it wasn’t me. It was the wine. By the time we got our coffee, my man had had too much and his conversation flowed down the path to nowhere. He started and abandoned subjects. He spoke in nonsequiturs, repeated himself, grew sweaty and red-faced. Finally he went quiet again, clutching his glass in contemplative desperation.

By British standards, of course, this man was not a hopeless drunk, not even close. Meeting him taught me that you should take advantage of a man’s lucid middle period during this type of meal because you won’t get much before or after it. His performance also helped to illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of alcohol as a tool and a prop and a backdrop to British society.

In a nation of the chronically ill-at-ease, alcohol is the lubricant that eases the pain of frightening social encounters, an essential prelude to relaxation, to joie de vivre and even, at times, to rudimentary conversation. But because Britain has what is known as an “ambivalent alcohol culture” – which means the British haven’t worked it out completely – they can take their drinking too far, too fast, with corrosive consequences to health, happiness and productivity.

I have many British friends who in America would be considered functioning alcoholics – the equivalent of 1950s Cheeveresque businessmen from suburban Connecticut who greeted the end of the workday with a couple of predinner martinis before moving on to wine and whisky. Heavy drinking is part of the fabric of their lives and it would be considered rude to comment on it.

I had come from New York, a city where this kind of drinking is reserved for the weekend and drinking to the point of insensibility is an activity only for the very young or the very likely to be headed for AA. By contrast, Britons seemed to drink all the time. It was a shock to see how enthusiastically they knocked back the booze at Sunday lunches in the country and how high their tolerance was. It was a shock to see, after we’d had our first weekday dinner party (everyone stayed until 1am, never mind their jobs), that the table was covered in twice as many empty wine bottles as there had been guests.

Britons love to drink and love to boast about drinking. Like hungover students who wake up sick on sticky, beer-soaked floors with someone else’s underpants on their heads but then brag about their awesome night of partying, they have an amused tolerance for drunken high jinks.

One of the reasons the late Queen Mother was so beloved was that she spent the last decades of her life in a benign alcoholic haze. For the British, alcohol is a relaxant, an emollient, a crutch, a relief, an excuse. If they go overboard, it is the get-out-of-jail-free card that allows them to throw up their hands, palms out, and disavow responsibility.

Per capita drinking across most of Europe has decreased in the past 40 years, but in Britain it has increased. People start younger, drink more and are increasingly likely to binge-drink. Government figures released last year show that British adults on average drink the equivalent of 11.4 litres of pure alcohol a year – translating into 130 bottles of wine or 1,137 pints of beer. The government has estimated that the total cost to society, in medical bills, missed work, clean-up charges and increased policing, is about £20 billion a year.

“There’s no social group that’s immune to binge drinking except the elderly – although we recently had a 90-year-old who drank five pints and fell down as he tried to leave his local pub,” Dr Paul Atkinson, a consultant in the A&E department at Adden-brooke’s hospital in Cambridge, told me. “It’s very common to have head injuries. I’ve had people who’ve inhaled their teeth into their lungs.”

The effects are all too obvious to anyone brave enough to take certain trains late at night, to stand outside pubs or clubs at closing time or to venture into town and city centres late on Friday or Saturday nights.

Drunken Brits are one of the country’s most visible exports, too. Other Europeans sometimes feel as if Britain treats their continent as one huge pub, followed by one huge bath-room. One day I decided to go to Prague on easyJet (price of last-minute ticket: £50) on a flight that left at 6.15am. Most of the passengers – groups of young men in matching shirts with stag-party slogans – seemed to have been up all night in the pub. When I tried to talk to some of them, they were like schoolchildren: embarrassed to be singled out, staring glassy-eyed through the window.

Why did they choose Prague? “We looked on the internet and these were the flights that were available,” said one guy, maybe 35, whose breakfast, three cans of Kronen-bourg, was lined up in front of him. He snickered: “I thought we were going to Barcelona.”

His even more unfriendly friend, unshaven and paunchy, finished his first round. “Bring the trolley to me with a big straw!” he shouted to the flight attendant, who seemed unperturbed.

If the atmosphere on the plane was unpleasant, the atmosphere in Prague was poisonous. Rocky O’Reilly’s, a transplanted Irish pub just down the street from my hotel, was filled with British men drinking for drinking’s sake. A group were attempting to flick sugar cubes into water glasses. One man wore a plastic headpiece in the shape of a turd because he had expressed annoyance about something – or “got a turd on”. So he had to wear the hat until someone else got annoyed, whereupon he could then pass it on.

These were men in their early thirties whose touristic research had consisted of printing out lists of Prague drinking establishments and strip clubs from the web. They explained that British society no longer allows for male-only activities, except possibly for football matches, so stag weekends are important bonding opportunities. “It’s the extreme end of men’s behaviour,” said one guy, who admitted that he couldn’t have a real conversation with his pals without a drink in his hand.

Robbie Norton, the owner of Rocky O’Reilly’s, told me about a party of 23, fresh off the plane, who had consumed 180 vodkas and 60 cans of Red Bull in a single Friday. Sometimes the British embassy was taking 60 drunken calls a night from Brits who had lost their wallet or could not remember the name of their hotel or what city they were in.

I hate to sound like a spoil-sport, but it’s hard not to feel there is a large problem here that many people simply refuse to confront, no matter how much doctors warn about cirrhosis or the government enacts new laws about antisocial behaviour. It’s also hard to expect the public to change its attitude when many of the people it most admires – sports stars, younger members of the royal family, politicians – spend so much of their time getting publicly trashed.

Extracted from A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall, published by Quercus at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585