IT IS a warm Saturday night in the centre of Toulouse and the cafés and bars are still thronged with late drinkers. The crowd is mostly composed of middle-aged men and a handful of wives and girlfriends. I can see no one who looks under the age of 25.
To British eyes, there is something not quite right about the scene: there is no tension, no chanting, no loitering police vehicle waiting for trouble. Indeed, there is no sense of occasion, or self-consciousness, at all. One man says his au revoirs, shakes hands all round; as he leaves, he staggers slightly and holds on to a tree. His companions jeer at him convivially; he grins ruefully and then weaves off down the street.
Compare that tableau with the scene at the Kingston Mill pub in southwest London last week. It is a weekday night, but 15 minutes before closing time the bar is heaving and the drinking is accelerating. A group of three women, identically blonde and identically blotto, have lined up a multicoloured thicket of alcopops. A fight is developing over the Extreme Hunting video game; hard when sober, impossible when drunk, and a recipe for intoxicated confrontation. I am the only person in the bar over 25. Everyone is shouting, and sweating and extremely drunk.
Finally it is chucking-out time, and chucking up time. One of the blondes is sitting on the kerb, while her companions totter around her, screeching with fake laughter. In an alleyway, a young man is being loudly and extravagantly sick. It has been a quiet night, a pale foretaste of what will come at the weekend up and down the country.
Here is one of the more unsettling insights offered by holidaymaking abroad: the extraordinary contrast between the way most countries consume alcohol and the way Britain, as a nation, gets drunk. A colleague speaks with awe of boarding a morning boat on the Danube with a group of beer-drinking Hungarians on a stag party who drink carefully all day but remain paragons of politeness.
My sister, who lives in New Orleans, party-capital of the US, points out that even at the height of Mardi Gras that city never comes close to getting as drunk as Birmingham on a Saturday night. A friend who has just returned from a year in Florence says she never saw anyone drunk in public, let alone the baying, aggressive display of binge drinking that is now a ritualised feature of every town in Britain.
We like to think of ourselves as a nation of hard-headed drinkers, but the simple truth is that the British have never learnt how to drink properly. Somehow, in British history, we have failed to realise the distinction between inebriation, which occurs in all cultures, and drinking to the point of violence, illness and amnesia, night after night.
Tinkering with pub opening hours will not quickly change this, because Britain’s history of boozing has become part of our national heritage. Here is a familiar scene: the boys start drinking at the pub before midday; they eat nothing, and continue all day; by evening, the drink is doing all the talking, and the mood is souring. There is an argument; fists fly, a knife flashes, and a man of 29 dies in a stew of blood and ale on the floor.
That may sound like a typically tragic event in one of the modern “drinking factories”; in fact, it is a simplified description of the death of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in a Deptford tavern in 1593.
Marlowe’s contemporary, William Shakespeare, recognised that the British drink differently, and competitively. When Iago, in Othello, speaks of drinking, he observes: “I learn’d it in England, where indeed they are most potent at potting: your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander — Drunk Ho! — are nothing to the English.”
Alcohol consumption is increasing in Britain (sales have risen 5 per cent in five years), but is falling in France and Germany. In Germany, the biggest drinkers are aged 20 to 24. In France, the under-25s are least likely to drink heavily, with hard drinking concentrated in those over 55. In Britain, there is no adult age group that drinks more than any other; we drink steadily though the ages.
Some have ascribed the peculiar nature of British boozing to national character, a shared reticence that can only be unlocked by drink. While other nations tend to drink in structured social environments — family meals, social gatherings with children — the British tradition is to drink in groups, usually of the same sex, and without food or restraint.
In the 19th century, people drank to find oblivion from endemic poverty. Today that has been reversed: heavy drinking has become one of the most visible characteristics of British consumerism. In French culture, like ours, drinking is associated with masculinity, but in France drinking too much is regarded as weakness; in Britain, by contrast, the sheer quantity of drink is the measure of manliness.
No other nation counts its drinks the way we do. American student parties, for example, traditionally buy beer in kegs. No one knows, or cares, exactly how much each individual has drunk. The measure of a good party is how much the collective has consumed.
Like all addicts, British drinkers find their addiction interesting and talk about it while doing it. Consider the vast number of British words we have evolved for the state of inebriation: blootered, smashed, wasted, rat-arsed and so on, with more evolving all the time.
We have grades of drunkenness, from tipsy all the way through to hog-whimpering. Eskimos may have 18 words for snow, but Glaswegians have many more for getting drunk.
The French, who do not find drunkenness as funny or as interesting as we do, have few terms for it, but one universal gesture: the dismissive fist held to the nose and turned one quarter clockwise.
The rich history of British boozing further illustrates a relationship that is quite unlike that of any other nation. It is said that Harold’s troops, routed by the Normans in 1066, were still hung-over.
Before the Reformation, British monks toped through eight pints of ale a day. By 1727, a population of six million people was sucking down five million gallons of gin a year, or a pint a week per adult.
And for as long as there has been drunkenness there have been voices raised in outrage. A law attempting to ban public drinking in 1736 declared: “Whereas the loathsome sin of drunkenness is, of late, grown into common use within the realm, being the root and foundation of many enormous sins, such as bloodshed, stabbing, murder, swearing, fornication, adultery and suchlike, to the great dishonour of God, and of our nation.”
But for the language, that might be a police statement from modern-day Kingston.
Hogarth’s portrayal of Gin Lane, with a gin-soaked woman allowing her abandoned baby to tumble from her arms, is an indictment of gin, but not of alcohol in general. In the same year (1750) Hogarth depicted Beer Alley, a place of peaceful, old English virtues. Beer, in Hogarth’s depiction, was a calming, benign tipple.
Then again, Hogarth had never seen the lager lads steaming out of Wetherspoon’s or Outback at closing time.
