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August 11, 2005
Dawn of the dead drunk
Is this what the communist liquor sales apologists are afraid of?
Faces leered and weaved towards me, pale and waxy with drink, and everyone seemed to be hurling strange oaths and invitations, and, since I could find nowhere to sit and read my book, I fled to the railway station and sat shivering on the platform until the night train arrived.
I hope not, because it won't happen. It can't. There is nothing in Canada, maybe even North America, that can compete with Britain's yob class. The controversy over 24-hour drinking in the UK is rooted in the fact that this significant group of Britons is in fact genetically incapable of drinking without turning all they touch, look at and think about immediately to shit. I support 24-hour liquor availability in Canada, in theory, but I am mindful of the very different concerns the Brits have to address.
Really, though, I just wanted to call attention to that article. I mean, read that awesomely literate, wonderfully British piece, and then note the author's profession. I would grant asylum to half the yobs and ladettes in all of Britain if we could have just one person of such intelligence and wit and insight — just one! — in a similar position in Canada.
UPDATE August 12: Tom Utley follows on from Boris Johnson's piece today with a tear-jerking paean to his own benign alcoholism:
By all the definitions that I have read, I am a binge-drinker on a heroic scale, consuming many more than the Government's recommended weekly maximum number of "units" every day of my life. Yet I refuse to acknowledge that the description fits me. I know that being "in denial" is said to be one of the tell-tale signs of alcoholism, as it used to be taken as irrefutable evidence of being a witch. But I do not deny that I am an alcoholic (which makes me think that I may not be one). All I deny is that I am a binge-drinker, in the sense in which the expression is now used.
I like to think that my reasons for drinking such a lot (apart from the obvious one that I am addicted to alcohol) are very different from those of the lager louts who cause so much mayhem in our city centres on Friday and Saturday nights.
I drink to open the flood gates of words, when I am stuck for something to say on the page or to the fellow guest to whom I have just been introduced at a party. I drink to celebrate when I have written an article with which I am pleased, and to forget when I have written or said something of which I am ashamed. During the week, I drink to psyche myself up. At the weekend, I drink to relax. I drink to relieve the intense boredom of modern life, when Big Brother is on the telly, the boys are fighting and the papers are full of depressing stories about suicide bombers.
I also like his soluton to yobbism:
...tens of thousands of young people pour into our city centres every weekend, with no other purpose in mind than to get hog-whimperingly drunk. Many of them know, with complete certainty, that, before the night is out, they will be vomiting in a gutter or queueing up in A&E to have their heads stitched. It is a total mystery to me how this can be anybody's idea of a good night out. If only these people drank more during the week, perhaps they wouldn't behave like this at the weekend.
Posted by Chris Selley at August 11, 2005 10:09 PM
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Comments
Too funny:
"Deep down, because of some peculiarity in our psyche, we think it rather admirable to get bladdered, leathered, rat-arsed and otherwise hogwhimpering drunk."
I can't imagine a single one of our Parliamentatians being able to express themselves with such insight and wit. Sad, really...
Posted by: Jay Dubya at August 12, 2005 08:37 AM
Boris the Menace went from being a lionized journalist and editor to being an MP, not the other way around. It's not really that we don't have any politicians this literate and clever; the more essential truth is that we probably don't have any writers of this calibre at all, and therefore none who might even conceivably become politicians.
All that said, the funniest thing about this piece is that Englishmen in pubs with their good-looking girlfriends should really be slaying Boris Johnson immediately with tackhammers, rather than prattling hesitantly at him about being a "snob".
Posted by: Colby Cosh at August 12, 2005 12:39 PM