“Your round, then,” are the three fatal words that make us Brits drink up and drink fast. The quickest drinker will always set the pace and the rest of us have to follow or risk looking mean.
The British way of life is based around booze. It always has been. It’s what some historians think made us so pugilistic, so creative and so inventive.
But it’s more than just drinking to get plastered, it’s to do with being sociable and letting your hair down. It’s linked to a love of dressing up, and amateur dramatics, slapstick comedy and playing games. It’s to do with giving yourself a treat after a long hard week at work. And the British still work the longest hours in the EU with the longest journey times, often putting in 14 hour days door to door, having to sit in traffic jams in the pouring rain, or stuck on crowded commuter trains, or wedged on cramped buses.
So would you have seen as many drunks on the streets of London in the 19th century as you now do in Ayia Napa? Yes, probably. So what has changed?
What has changed is not just the age profile and gender, but how it’s done. I am sitting by a pool in Cyprus, we’ve just had a barbeque, and between the eight of us respectable folk, coppers and military, diplomats and teachers, journalists and doctors, we have already consumed 12 cocktails, eight bottles of wine, and a large number of beers. The host, in good British tradition, is now offering us liquors to go with coffee: it would be rude to say no. I am guessing as one long afternoon slips into evening that we are already heading well over our weekly unit allowance.
But we aren’t about to get ASBOs, and the conversation turns to the drinking of the young. ”Shocking, disgusting, not like it in my day,” says the successful and professional male next to me. “So how many units do you actually drink a week?” I ask him.
To my certain knowledge he has consumed at least ten in the last three hours and he isn’t about to stop yet. But it’s giving him the confidence to let rip. He laughs, “About as many as Winston Churchill did!” A lot then.
There is no doubt that the Brits on holiday are drinking to excess, and it’s no excuse to say it’s egged on by bar owners offering happy hour vodka shots and holiday reps, on commission, taking hordes of youth on pub crawls – we all have the choice to stop. But Brits have been heavy drinkers for years, even centuries, in all classes. The reason we drink, and why it is going to be very hard to change our habits, is, because, we like it. Offering someone a drink is part of our culture, from sipping champagne at Glyndebourne to having a pint of ale watching the dogs. It makes us feel generous. What has changed is the speed of drinking, we are simply drinking too fast to match our accelerated 21st century lifestyle.
We need to find strategies to slow our boozing down. In Britain, the government has decided the way to do that is by tax. Make it too expensive, and we’ll drink less. So it’s not surprising that when Brits abroad discover the cheap spirits of the Med, the generous measures and the exhilaration of escaping weather and work, they get carried away with the bonhomie of those three little words, “My round, mate”.
