From The Archive: O, for a draught of vintage

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense, and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope, that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

O, for a draught of vintage - 28/09/05

On the BBC News 'Have Your Say' site there is this article: Are young women drinking too much? .

As a brave fearless pontificator about this world and all its woes, I have decided to have my say about this, and in case the BBC doesn't get around to printing my comments, I'm putting them here as well.

Are young women drinking too much?

Well, yes they are. But then - so it seems - young men are too. As someone says in the comments this has always happened - which is certainly true. However, there has been a rather profound change over the least few decades.

This period of overindulgence used to be a mark of adolescence, almost a rite of passage from the teenage years into adulthood. By their early twenties, most people had grown out of this kind of thing. However, these days it seems that the period of adolescence is stretching further and further into the area that used to be regarded as adulthood. People in their late twenties, thirties and even their forties are still behaving like adolescents; overindulgence and binge-drinking are just one aspect of this.

This extension of adolescence into adulthood means that all the old virtues of sobriety, self-improvement, restraint, maturity and, especially, 'settling-down' are derided as old-fashioned. These days there is no need to grow-up, because without those old 'virtues' there is nothing to grow up for. The now universal popular culture with its tabloid mentality and cult of celebrity leads to short-term unreflective hedonism as the 'ideal lifestyle choice'.

Pubs have changed in recent years too, gone are the cosy quiet places where friends could meet and chat around a table with a few drinks - the stereotypical British pub of advert, soap-opera and sit-com. Instead, they have become large drinking sheds with loud aggressive 'music', big crowds and flashy hip and trendy (usually higher-alcohol content) drinks. All this designed to increase consumption and therefore turnover while driving away the older - and wiser - drinkers, leaving the young (and pseudo-young) no idea that there is any other way to drink other than to neck it all as fast as possible.

The new drinks, alco-pops and suchlike, also take away another of the rites of passage of drinking - learning to like the stuff, blurring the distinction between children's drinks (soft drinks) and the grown-ups drinks (alcohol). So another marker on the road to adulthood is lost.

It seems our glorious leader himself is perturbed by these goings on and is busy trying to find some sort of solution to them. Perhaps the next time Blair is posing in front of the Downing Street bedroom mirror with his Stratocaster maybe, just maybe, he ought to wonder if his usual solution; the short-termist, feelgood intellect-lite platitudes that pander to the illusions of those who believe themselves to be the young and groovy (just like him) could just be part of the problem, not the solution.