The reason we drink is that we think it's naughty
Binge-drinking is a reflex reponse to daft puritanism, says Celia Walden. We need to retrain the British psyche to see alcohol as a pleasure rather than a source of sin As we become ever more steeped in Protestant guilt over the next week or so, each additional glass of wine swelling the self-loathing, redemption is in sight. New Year's Day looms in all its stark innocence, symbolising enforced abstinence, a return to purity and, for a few weeks at least, the weight of our sinfulness will be lifted. Only then, as we all know, around 7 January, when virtue becomes boring, a friend offers us a glass, we accept, and the whole contorted mindset starts again.
There is a single explanation for Britain's problem with alcohol: we think it's naughty. Why that theatrical pause before accepting a drink? The bitten bottom lip and, 'Well I shouldn't. . .'? For the pure delight of giving in. Only the question wasn't 'Shall we go and get his and hers tattoos?' or 'Why don't we pop over to Amy Winehouse's and see if she's got any smack?' It was, quite simply, 'Red or white?'
Equating alcohol with transgression, British people have increasingly drunk in a taboo-breaking manner, and this has never been more apparent than in the last year, when it was revealed that Britain's children have some of the worst alcohol-related problems in the world. Last month the schools watchdog Ofsted found that a fifth of tento 15-year-olds were regularly getting drunk, after researchers questioned 111,000 children for the survey. A few days later there was a new scare: the Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo claimed binge-drinking was now a middle-class problem, insisting that 'serious and dramatic harm' was taking place in people's homes and, amusingly, highlighting Surrey as the worst offender. Guy Woodward, editor of the wine magazine Decanter, heading the counter attack, put into words what many of us were thinking. 'The way the press — and the government — is talking, you'd be forgiven for thinking Surrey was turning into Sodom and Gomorrah,' he said. Although the story was ultimately derided and rejected by the (largely middle-class) press, the instance did serve to remind many of us that our attitudes to alcohol are neither normal nor healthy.
The government, unaware and illequipped to deal with this crisis, is focusing its efforts on the young, calling for laws to raise the current legal drinking age of six within the home. This will do nothing to help, and may even make matters worse. It's our most basic, anti-puritan reflex that needs changing: we used to be all buttoned up, now we're all unbuttoned. The illusion transcends class, age and now, thanks to a fictional culture made endemic by television programmes like Sex and the City, sex.
The reaction against puritanical attitudes to drink in Anglo-Protestant countries is now taking a similar course to that against sexual repression: a demonstrative defiance of convention that quickly morphs into its own convention. Unlike French and Italian women — for whom drink is an enjoyable accompaniment to food, not a wild libertarian statement — British women feel pressured by the gender war into outdoing men. And there is no reason why they should not try (although their waistlines will not share much of the glory). Watch a group of women being delivered their first bottle of Chardonnay in a Soho bar. Eyes narrowed, they huddle around the table, thrillingly courting sin, hoping all the while that they bear some resemblance to Carrie & Co. Unhappily for them, the image itself, packaged so shinily and wittily by the US, is a lie. Manhattan women are far too concerned with their figures to drink, but British women blithely persevere in subscribing to the image nevertheless.
Even in Russia — a country in which 36,000 people die of alcohol-related diseases every year — girls don't drink like we do. Asked whether they actually enjoy drinking alcohol, however, our girls will become fiercely defensive, claiming to cherish the stuff. This would be more believable if the wine they drink (and that served in most British pubs and bars) weren't usually of the lowest possible calibre, and something no French or Italian person would voluntarily imbibe. And yet they're still out there, shivering on the pavements, bravely downing their carafes of disinfectant and paying preposterously over the odds for the pleasure — all just to show how frightfully naughty they are.
In France, children as young as four are allowed a sip of wine at dinner, so that they may begin to accustom themselves to the taste of it, develop an appreciation of its many varieties and demystify what is essentially fermented fruit juice. Subsequently, while our children are rushing off to get drunk and vomit the moment they turn 14, French teenagers are concentrating on other, more enjoyable things. Nobody binge drinks in France. Why on earth would they? If they feel like a glass of wine, they'll have one, even two, but they tend not to brag about getting 'smashed', 'hammered' or 'wasted' to their work colleagues the following morning because it would be demeaning — and why would you drink so much that it became unpleasant anyway? Think how many British men aspire to resemble characters from Men Behaving Badly (the title itself baldly summing up our British desire to provoke).
Yet attempts to curb teenage drinkers by passing draconian legislation here will only trigger a self-conscious reaction to drink still more: just look at America. Because that horned and forktailed image of a drink is not about to lose its dastardly allure, and when the parents (even grandparents) are as persuaded as the children that they are inviting damnation with every sip, our attitude is not likely to change. What Britain needs to do is retrain its psyche to understand that the appeal of wine or spirits is not a perverse one: alcohol is an enjoyable thing. So rather than following the masses in disallowing yourself something which does, in a completely unmystical way, simply heighten the joy of everyday life, on 1 January, why not pledge instead to be measured and rational over the week — and years — to come, and thereby avoid having to pay any kind of penance for your humble pleasures?
'Moderation,' said Plato, 'which consists in an indifference about little things, and in a prudent and well-proportioned zeal about things of importance, can proceed from nothing but true knowledge, which has its foundation in self-acquaintance.'
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