Gin Lane

Ireland also provides a natural experiment for another piece of recieved wisdom; “If we relaxed licensing laws, then we wouldn’t have this terrible need to cram all our drinking into a few hours and we’d all sip wine at pavement cafes likes the Continentals”. The Irish did this a few years back, and it turns out that the tendency to get blind drunk is more or less in the blood and nothing’s going to shift it.

Btw, Ken Worpole wins an official D2D “Oh For F**k’s sake!” award for the following gem:

“When [alcohol] accompanies food and conversation, it compounds the pleasure, as it does when listening to an impromptu pub session of folk music, or jazz.”

I mean, what can you say to a man who can write that sentence without thinking to himself “Hmmmm it’s not the way I intended it I can see how some might regard that sentence as making me look like the teensiest bit of an arse”.

Oh yeh, and detailed analysis of that factoid reveals that Chris’ scepticism is well-placed. The actual quote from the Irish Examiner is:

“A Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children, which is investigating the effect of alcohol on hospital attendances, heard last week that there had been more than a four-fold increase in the number of requests by women attending the Rotunda Hospital sexual assault treatment unit (SATU) for the staff to determine whether they had been sexually assaulted.

They were unable to remember because of alcohol intake.”

First, the linked article does not support the attribution to Dr Mary Holohan, and second the fourfold increase looks to me as if it’s likely to be driven by changes in police procedure rather than alcohol consumption.

I’m personally of the opinion that “freedom and whisky gang thegither” and that while public drunkenness of young people is a social evil, there’s no solution to it which isn’t worse than the problem. Although I realise that I say this as a big burly bloke capable of looking after myself, and acquaintances of mine who are less robsut or more female seem to have a less complacent view.

There’s a world of difference between ending the evening roaring maudlin tunes about dying children on the ends of British bayonets, on the one hand, and wandering around looking for some poor bastard to kick the shite out of, on the other.

which is worse?

which is worse?

Perhaps they might be combined to everyone’s benefit if you attended “an impromptu pub session of folk music, or jazz” with Ken Worpole.

Regarding drinking in northern Europe: When I visited Denmark some years ago, it was June, and daylight lasted until very late at night and resumed very early in the morning. I asked a Danish friend how they dealt with the long day, and she said, “It’s wonderful; it’s light all the time, and all summer long we stay up most of the night drinking.” It later occurred to me to ask her how they coped with the equally long, long nights in December, and she told me, “It’s awful; it’s dark all the time, and all winter long we stay up most of the night drinking.”

I never did figure out whether she was joking.

Here’s a couple of articles about an apparently steep increase in loutish British tourism in Prague.
New York Times
Modern Prague City Magazine

The binge drinking might be too well embedded to be displaced easily by now. We were always told that the rule of thumb is that the further north in Europe one goes, the harder the drinking becomes and less leisurely. Certainly the behaviour of English holdiaygoers to the Continent in locales such as the Mediterranean doesn’t fill one with confidence here; as one Spanish newspaper put it “the English they come over here, start drinking in the bars, come up to 11 realise that there is no last orders; and go Crazy!” I seem to recall that the Brit Consul-General in Majorca or somewhere, resigned out of disgust at what the summer droves of Brits got up to. Though to be fair, it is probably a bit unwise to select a sample of young, mostly single holidaymakers, eager to enjoy some good weather and their main excursion out of the country. Not the kind of conditions that breed restraint.