So the licensing hours are to be extended, despite last-ditch attempts to derail the whole process. Well of course, they always
were going to be extended — drunk people are far superior to sober people in their ability to railroad through huge projects, which are both seemingly impossible and potentially catastrophic. Drunk people are the biggest untapped natural energy resource in this country. Drunk people could probably push through the legalisation of murder, given six weeks, a QC and a case of Scotch.
Observe drunk people doggedly walking seven miles home down dark country lanes in high heels. Drunk people succeeding in blagging 17 extra people into a wake, despite one of them being dressed as Darth Maul. Drunk people coming home unable to form sentences, but determined to get back with and marry someone who dumped them five years ago, and all in one ululating phonecall to Zaire.
I tell you, other wizards may crave dominion over the creatures of the sky, the creatures of the oceans, or the creatures of the earth, but I’d head up a column of drunkards any time.
This isn’t to say, however, that because so many red-faced people will it, the extension of drinking hours is a good thing. By and large, there is a time and a place for humanity to be determined and energetic, and it is not at 1.45am on a Wednesday in a Wetherspoons — unless one is waging a battle against serried ranks of vampires and the undead, anyway.
Despite shifting employment patterns, I can’t believe there are enough freelance HTML programmers in Britain to justify people staying up until 2am on a weeknight. Aside from vitamins and artisan bakeries, the one thing Britain needs more of is sleep, and I see the implementation of the Licensing Act 2003 as being more anti-sleep than pro-booze. For it to work without incident, it needs counter-part legislation facilitating a European-style afternoon nap — the 2006 Getting Your Head Down in Front of Loose Women Act — if we aren’t all to become gaunt, red-eyed and mad.
However, one must be optimistic, and presume that these pubs aren’t staying open to become second homes for proto-hostel-fodder. Instead, we must hope it is to facilitate people’s sporadic, once-a-month Special Drinking events: birthdays, reunions, favourable chance of laying the hot piece of ass on the fourth floor. Drinking sprees that a single lie-in can rectify. Drinking that is a mere decorative appendage to the national schedule, rather than something that fundamentally underpins it.
As the debate raged on last week, various questions did present themselves. Aside from the vexed issue of what knock-on effect this is going to have on the home-brew industry, the key question would seem to be: why is it just drinking hours that we are extending? If the main worry with the extension of the drinking laws is that the streets will suddenly be awash with boozehounds rendered semi-automatic by WKD, why not give them some alternative options for getting out the house in the evening? Ones that don’t involve a 24-hour out-of-town Tesco, anyway.
Shops, for instance, should clearly be open later. It seems extraordinary that we’ve tackled the “problem” of not being able to drink after 11pm, despite it having a perfectly viable solution — cans of White Lightning at a bus stop — yet have done nothing to tackle the problem of not being able to purchase a hall carpet after 6pm, for which there is no viable alternative. Except breaking in and stealing one from a house with the same dimensions and decorative colour scheme as your own.
Likewise, it would be nice not to have to climb over a set of locked gates, ruining a perfectly good pair of tights, every time a body wishes to take a walk in a park after sundown. Why can’t parks be lit up and opened at night? Does no one else in Britain want to observe the looping flight of the bat? With a couple of strings of fairy-lights and an insomniac manning the coffee-stall, parks could offer moonlit boating, floodlit crazy golf and, in the summer, the opportunity for more 14-year-olds to experiment sexually in the herbaceous borders. After taking the air, one should then be able to go on to an art gallery, a Turkish bath, a patisserie, a library, a wholefood café, the beautician’s — any one of two dozen activities that should be open to us in the long evenings, but currently and bafflingly cease at just the time most people leave work for the day.
With the entire country shut, like a long dark 1950s Sunday, after 6pm, no wonder everyone ends up heading for the single light shining in the dark: the pub.
Daughter v Dad: the reckoning
Good to see that Rhonda Paisley, 45, is taking legal action against her father, the Rev Ian Paisley, and others claiming sexual discrimination. This is because she wasn’t appointed to the job of policy officer at the Democratic Unionist Party when she applied for it, in a case that’s being supported by the Equality Commission in Northern Ireland. What’s fascinating to me is the idea of her getting into a battle with her father. This is what all women with fathers over 40 probably need to do, if they’re not to spend their whole lives standing in the kitchen with their mothers, hissing: “He's done it again! I’ll stuff his cup of tea up his arse if he makes one more sexist crack about my biological clock, fancy London hair and fractionally compromised ability to parallel park!”
My generation is the last to have fathers who were raised by pre-feminists, but who got married to and sired post-feminists. While this leads to a lot of complicated problems on the dads’ behalf — feeling distress when their daughters wear a trouser suit, having an inability to ever give their female offspring the leg off a roast chicken — it does, in the end, mean only one thing for the daughters. They must get a lawyer. Lawyers never start to sob uncontrollably when they say: “You’ve always disapproved of ‘Black Country drayman’ as a career for a woman!”
Kerpow, Pope Man
There is soon to be launched the comic-book adventures of Pope John Paul II. It will recount a life of “derring do” and “adventure” in a series of flashbacks. These will include his visit to the Wailing Wall, and the assassination attempt in 1981.
I don’t know if anyone at the Vatican has read a comic book, but they may find that they are at odds with the idiom. The Hulk would have struggled to carve adventure out of a day spent staring at a wall, no matter how special it was; while Marvel is unlikely to fill six pages with the day where Spidey wore a dress and took three bullets travelling in a low-powered car.
