Drinking time
Peter Wicks
Englishman Abroad
I should start with a correction. In my last column I carelessly referred to South Bend as "the Athens of Indiana." An astute — if somewhat literal-minded — correspondent has drawn it to my attention that the city of Athens, IN, has a stronger claim to that title. It would be hard to disagree.
Today's cross-cultural sermon is on the subject of alcohol, a topic which as an Englishman I feel well-qualified to comment upon, belonging as I do to a nation of heavy drinkers surrounded by other nations of heavy drinkers.
To the West, the Welsh drink beer in truly colossal quantities, and indeed anyone encountering the Welsh language for the first time will immediately conclude either that it was created during an epic bender or that it is the result of some sort of national vowel shortage. I favor the first of these explanations as it seems to me to be the only possible way to account for the fact that if you stare at anything written in Welsh for long enough you will begin to feel tipsy. Dylan Thomas, who wrote in English, is thought by some to be the greatest Welsh poet of the 20th Century. His last words were "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that's the record." Having lived with a Welshman in my undergraduate days, I'm willing to bet that it wasn't.
The Scots are expert in both the production and consumption of whiskey. Gaelic speakers in Scotland actually have a word for the itchy feeling one gets on the upper lip immediately before drinking whiskey ("sgriob," in case you were wondering). Furthermore, it seems to me that the traditional Scottish sport of tossing the caber (which is like the shot put but with a tree trunk instead of the shot) could only have its origins in a drunken wager.
It is not true that the Irish government has passed legislation according to which all visitors to the Emerald Isle are required upon returning to their homeland to spend the rest of their lives complaining about the inferior quality of the Guinness on sale in the rest of the world. It is not true, but it might as well be.
I'm not even going to talk about the French.
Despite this stiff competition, English drinking culture has an intensity that is without rival. The reputation of the English for heavy drinking was well established around Europe even in Shakespeare's day. In Othello, Iago testifies to the Florentine Cassio about the ability of the English to drink a range of other Europeans under the table (Act II, scene 3 for those English majors still looking for a senior thesis).
Rightly or wrongly, this high tolerance for alcohol has become a source of national pride, at least amongst men. It is no accident that James Bond, the archetypal British male fantasy, drinks constantly. In fact, his feats of alcohol consumption strain credulity more than all his other stunts combined. A real spy who consumed vodka martinis in such quantities would have no chance of saving the world from whichever consortium of international criminals was threatening it that week. He would be lucky if he could remember where he parked his Aston Martin.
Theories as to why the English drink so much are various. It is often argued that English men get drunk in order to overcome their innate shyness in social settings, but since it has never been possible to locate enough sober English men to constitute a control group the theory remains speculative.
England has a culture of binge drinking. It has been observed that English people drink as if someone is about to take their beer away from them. There is a perfectly straightforward explanation for this; it is because someone is about to take their beer away from them. Around the country public houses stop serving drinks at 11 p.m. The legal origins of this arrangement date back to the Defense of the Realm Act passed during the First World War. The act mandated early closing times to ensure that munitions workers did not have hangovers when they arrived at their factories in the morning.
Although it did not escape the government's notice when the First World War ended in 1918, such is the English reverence for tradition that the law was never rescinded. It's a sobering thought that more than eighty years after the Treaty of Versailles I can't get a drink after 11 p.m. in England so that I can make bullets that won't misfire in the trenches of the Somme. But there is hope in sight. The current government is at last proposing to abolish all restrictions on the times when alcohol can be sold. I shudder to think what the celebrations will be like when they do.
Peter Wicks is a graduate student in the Philosophy Department. Peter is slowly resigning himself to the fact that he will never be a international spy. He can be contacted at pwicks@nd.edu
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, February 13, 2003
