Drinking Culture
Mankind has always seemed to have a yen for fermented drinks. There is a fascinating real life tale of archeological tracking down of ancient alcoholic admixtures and rebrewing them today - King Midas of Phrygia's (modern Turkey) favourite tipple from 700BC has been recreated by a brewery in Delaware, but it bears close resemblance to Greek potions dating back 3,100 years. It may not always have been yeast doing the fermenting, sometimes human spittle seems to have stood in to do the job, but pretty early on man sussed that weird and wonderful transformations could be wrought on pressed fruits and the like by interposing an agent of change. The word 'barmy', which we take as a gentle, affectionate term for 'out of one's headedness', actually refers etymologically to a 'frothiness' or zestiness, as 'barm' means the yeast formed while fermenting. So already there is a link between the chemical processes and the affect on human behaviour.
Culturally, alcohol may be akin to the Andean people chewing coca leaves to steel them for their crushing labours. Certainly in Britain,
beer production has always been part of the agricultural roster, to fortify and supplement its rural workforce. With industrialisation, brewing became a significant enterprise, to supply those labour forces decamped to the growing cities. Alcohol, a toxin and a vice, has always implicitly been seen as a payoff and a reward to the labouring classes. Moral panics occasionally arose when it was perceived the working classes would be too drunk and dissolute to perform their labours; the Eighteenth Century crisis over cheap gin and the First World War introduction of the Licensing Laws being two cases in point. But the proffering of alcoholic pleasure had to remain in place, so deeply embedded within the psyche of the working Britain. Prohibition was not tried here.
beer production has always been part of the agricultural roster, to fortify and supplement its rural workforce. With industrialisation, brewing became a significant enterprise, to supply those labour forces decamped to the growing cities. Alcohol, a toxin and a vice, has always implicitly been seen as a payoff and a reward to the labouring classes. Moral panics occasionally arose when it was perceived the working classes would be too drunk and dissolute to perform their labours; the Eighteenth Century crisis over cheap gin and the First World War introduction of the Licensing Laws being two cases in point. But the proffering of alcoholic pleasure had to remain in place, so deeply embedded within the psyche of the working Britain. Prohibition was not tried here.
The Local. Regulars with their favoured seats and tankards behind the bar. No one has to ask them what they drink. There is no menu chalked up on a board. They come in expectation of an evening's entertainment being derived from the community of everything that happens around the social act of drinking. The ubiquitous pub culture, with its local parochialisms. Perhaps it will be facilitated by quaint bar games with their arcane entry requirements - do you chalk your name up on the board, or lay down 50p on the pool table? Winner stays on, so you never get to play with the friend that you came out with. Anecdotes are traded accordingly. Revolving around any and every aspect of the pub culture. The pub is the hub of entertainment. Anything that happens within its environs is potentially a source of myth and legend handed down by word of mouth in the retelling.
But all that has been largely swept away beneath thunderous jukeboxes, dead-eyed one armed bandits, franchise peri-peri chicken or Thai food. Clipped margins mean a pool table denies floor space to potential consumers. Spit and sawdust replaced by themed pubs and women-friendly chain bars. I'm not for one moment bemoaning the end of the saloon bar culture and the demise of the cribbage board. But it has coincided with a different approach to a night out drinking I believe. Now with the emphasis less on community and locality and more on bottom lines, it's all about shifting units, in this case alcoholic units. A good night out less relies on the conversation and ritual familiarity, and more on the quantity necked. Happy Hours, cheapest price at the pumps, special promotional offers, all mark a consumptive kite mark of value for money. How mortalled, bladdered, legless, off their face or any other assault upon the integrity of their own body they can deem themselves to have achieved.
I was never particular smitten with drinking anecdotes. I guess you had to be there that night X threw up, or fell asleep under the banquettes. The stories all tend to blur into one anyway, so they bore me inside a pub as much as outside its locale. But now they are transmuted into War stories. Brawl stories. drink plus violence, because of the uninhibited consumption through bingeing. There was always an undercurrent of violence around pubs; arguments over the pool table and did you spill my pint and the like. But it tended to be funneled into the 11pm throwing out time and most people could avoid being caught up in it. Less so now with varied licensed times and the consumerist spree of drinking establishments all grouped together in the club/bar areas of modern cities and town centres. Every night out is a pub and bar crawl, as people still mooch along in expectation of there being something more interesting happening at the next establishment.
Take all this and multiply when considering certain holiday resorts catering mainly to the British. Pubs, bars and nightclubs grouped together for convenience and to jostle and compete for the tourist Euros. Places with even less soul, rather solely dedicated to minting money in exchange for alcoholic nectar. These are little more than alcohol service stations along the motorway of binge consumption. Refuelling stops. Drinking games, emptied glasses on the head, spirits poured straight from the optics down the throat, getting the alcohol into the bloodstream by the quickest method.
Alcohol no longer seems the means to a convivial end. It is the end in itself, by volume proof of intake. And with that it is largely stripped of any social context. I won't even begin to broach the problem of underage drinking on the streets with alcohol bought from shops, for this is not what my novel covers. But I want to pose the question of what happens when you strip away the social context of drinking to a bare one of consumption. When people who always looked to the pub to provide a full evening of entertainment, and now have nothing to fill up the spaces around the alcohol, how they have to go and make their own entertainment, frequently in horrifically anti-social and uncontrollable ways. This is the world of "A,B&E", accident and emergency, breaking and entering.
But all that has been largely swept away beneath thunderous jukeboxes, dead-eyed one armed bandits, franchise peri-peri chicken or Thai food. Clipped margins mean a pool table denies floor space to potential consumers. Spit and sawdust replaced by themed pubs and women-friendly chain bars. I'm not for one moment bemoaning the end of the saloon bar culture and the demise of the cribbage board. But it has coincided with a different approach to a night out drinking I believe. Now with the emphasis less on community and locality and more on bottom lines, it's all about shifting units, in this case alcoholic units. A good night out less relies on the conversation and ritual familiarity, and more on the quantity necked. Happy Hours, cheapest price at the pumps, special promotional offers, all mark a consumptive kite mark of value for money. How mortalled, bladdered, legless, off their face or any other assault upon the integrity of their own body they can deem themselves to have achieved.
I was never particular smitten with drinking anecdotes. I guess you had to be there that night X threw up, or fell asleep under the banquettes. The stories all tend to blur into one anyway, so they bore me inside a pub as much as outside its locale. But now they are transmuted into War stories. Brawl stories. drink plus violence, because of the uninhibited consumption through bingeing. There was always an undercurrent of violence around pubs; arguments over the pool table and did you spill my pint and the like. But it tended to be funneled into the 11pm throwing out time and most people could avoid being caught up in it. Less so now with varied licensed times and the consumerist spree of drinking establishments all grouped together in the club/bar areas of modern cities and town centres. Every night out is a pub and bar crawl, as people still mooch along in expectation of there being something more interesting happening at the next establishment.
Take all this and multiply when considering certain holiday resorts catering mainly to the British. Pubs, bars and nightclubs grouped together for convenience and to jostle and compete for the tourist Euros. Places with even less soul, rather solely dedicated to minting money in exchange for alcoholic nectar. These are little more than alcohol service stations along the motorway of binge consumption. Refuelling stops. Drinking games, emptied glasses on the head, spirits poured straight from the optics down the throat, getting the alcohol into the bloodstream by the quickest method.
Alcohol no longer seems the means to a convivial end. It is the end in itself, by volume proof of intake. And with that it is largely stripped of any social context. I won't even begin to broach the problem of underage drinking on the streets with alcohol bought from shops, for this is not what my novel covers. But I want to pose the question of what happens when you strip away the social context of drinking to a bare one of consumption. When people who always looked to the pub to provide a full evening of entertainment, and now have nothing to fill up the spaces around the alcohol, how they have to go and make their own entertainment, frequently in horrifically anti-social and uncontrollable ways. This is the world of "A,B&E", accident and emergency, breaking and entering.