A nation the worse for drink

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The Sunday Times November 06, 2005

A nation the worse for drink
AA Gill had to stop drinking or die: he sees in England a unique capacity for alcohol abuse



I am an alcoholic. I remember my first drink; first drinks are important to alcoholics. They’re the start of something big, something life-changing. It’s where you earn your other name, your appellation, your label, your vintage. Mine is 1969, my first unsupervised drink.
I’d been given watered wine by my parents because that’s what they did in France, and France was the gold standard for civilised table life, and my grandmother would slip me tiny crystal glasses of ginger wine at Christmas. The glasses were cut to look like thistles — I liked them more than the wine.



My first real drink, the drink that did it, was at boarding school in the fields that rolled out from behind our cricket pitch — a bottle of cider and a quarter bottle of English cooking brandy. I was 15 and everything was happening very fast: sex, cigarettes, politics, books, arguments and the terror of the life waiting to be lived.



remember adolescence as like being put on a horse at the start of the Grand National and told that if you fell off at the first jump the options for the rest of your life would be reduced to waiting tables. As I’d tried waiting tables in the holidays and found it beyond me, I was properly scared.
It would be neat to say that that first throat-tightening mouthful of drink flicked a switch, that a light went on and change occurred at a molecular level, but I don’t remember it like that. A week later I badgered a friend to walk the mile-and-a-half to the Fox in the village of Willian to buy a surreptitious under-age half of Guinness served out of the back window and drunk with disproportionate glee.

Why Guinness? God knows. Why walk a three-mile round trip in the dark across open country for a half pint? That’s not normal. But then nothing you do is normal at 15. What I do remember was that drink cut the edge off the fear of failing at life before I’d even started living.

I wasn’t any good at academic work; there was no natural path for me to university; my family didn’t have a business or a farm or a hereditary connection to the armed forces that I could slot into. The 20th century had given us the freedom to make of our lives what we could, and at 15 that was a prospect so terrifying I would lie awake at night rigid with the misery of great expectations — and a drink, or several, took that and folded it up and made it manageable. It expanded me and reduced everything else. It was the Gulliver option.

There are problems with starting to drink. The first being, it’s horrible. Alcohol is nasty stuff; your throat naturally tries to reject it, it burns, it tastes horrid. You have to force yourself to drink, like smoking. That’s frightful, too, but actually drink helps with that.

To begin with you don’t drink for the thousands of subtle notes in a vintage, or the hoppiness, the barleyness, the grapey, toasty, leathery, flowery euphemism of drink. You drink to get drunk. Kids are very straightforward about drinking, and we drank like Aborigines. We sat on benches under trees in cowpat fields, hugging ourselves, passing bottles and cigarettes and wet kisses and laughter, waiting for it to work. And it certainly worked for me.

Alcoholics’ stories are narratives. They rise and fall with drama, humour and pathos. They’re descriptive and emotional, they’re sagas and parables. We tell them to each other a lot; they get polished and improved, and if you’re hearing one that isn’t slurred and burped or told with self-pity and anger you’re probably listening to a happy ending.

The point is that they have a plot, but the plot is always retrospective. It’s a trail that becomes obvious after you’ve travelled it. While you were living it there was no plot, no plan, no goal, no grand design.

The one thing you should always bear in mind about drink is that all drunks are different, in the same way, and that nobody ever picked up a drink thinking it would make their day worse.




THE English have a huge drink problem. Their one consolation is that it might not be quite as bad as the Scots and the Irish problem. In America alcoholism is sometimes referred to as the Celtic disease, but actually the whole world has a drink problem. It’s hard to find a country where a great many of the social ills aren’t related to drink or drugs, particularly in the ones that are dry or have prohibition.


To say that humanity has a problem with drink and would be better off not doing it is like saying it has a problem with sex or the weather. It just is the way we are, it’s what we do, it’s our recreational weather. But for some people it seems to be sunnier than for others, and while all societies drink, they don’t all drink the same. The northern nations have a particular affinity to scrappy oblivion, but even in cold Europe the English stand out as being particularly crap drunks.

Bad is a value judgment that has an alternative view: if the point of drinking is to get drunk and release inhibition, then the English are very good at drinking, but drink is still a constant social problem.

One in four hospital beds is occupied by someone with a drink-related or exacerbated condition. Almost all domestic violence and violent crime is committed with the help of a drink. In fact it’s difficult to find a social ill from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases to carpet-chewing club bores that doesn’t have “just the one� at its heart. And of course, drink kills you. It takes years off your life and is the guide of your terminal illness.

In Amsterdam a prostitute once asked me why the English were such awful drinkers. Italians, she said, were charming drunks, the French pretentious, the Spanish dark and self-destructive, the Germans pretended they weren’t drunk, the Dutch were morose and apologetic, the Scandinavians incomprehensible then comatose; but the English, the English were hideous, violent, foul. They came in groups, they’d swear and bully, they didn’t want to pay; then they were too drunk to do it and they’d blame the girls and get violent.

"Why are they like that?� she asked.

For the English, drink is the key that unlocks the cellar door to their dark side. While it may heighten and enlarge the national characters of their neighbours, it doesn’t do quite the same for the English. Their character is built on, and devoted to, subduing their nature. An Englishman is a series of restraints and bandages, straps, patches, plasters, muzzles, hair-shirts and rubber underwear; all self-imposed for restraining, hiding and controlling the id.

It wouldn’t be the whole truth to say that drink unlocks the inner Englishman, that in vodka there is veritas, because the true nature of the English is their struggle to contain and smother a large section of their raw inclination. The English are high-maintenance, self-imposed people. The idea of a real Englishman is almost a contradiction in terms, like talking about a real theme park or a real golf club.

As with so many things that ought to be intuitive relaxed fun, the English impose a great many rules on drinking. If they didn’t quite invent French wine, then they invented and refined the classification and snobbery of it.

Few things are quite as English as the minute listing and grading of wine. Naturally the French, being partial to a nip of snobbery, took to it with alacrity. But it’s the northern societies that invented drinking games, the ritual of rhyme and forfeit, the childish repetitions in hot smoky rooms.

All the people of cold northern Europe put great store on controlled drinking, at being able to handle or hold drink, which essentially means being able to maintain your front. Drinking becomes an exercise in brinkmanship.

The English don’t stipulate how much you should drink, just that you shouldn’t exhibit any of the effects of drink. Being a good drinker is not about indulgence or pleasure, it’s about resisting drink — while drinking.

And then there are hangovers. The English are enormously partial to hangovers. They will come down to breakfast holding their heads and groaning gleefully. They’ll eat huge quantities of appalling fried food and make special patented concoctions involving eggs and chillies and the bottled proprietary condiments that England has such a bewildering variety of. They take such evident pleasure in being invalids and being able to play both doctor and patient, pampering themselves and wallowing in the pain and the misery, swearing they’ll never do it again, reliving with excruciating embarrassment the behaviour of the night before. I have never seen the English enjoy themselves as much as when they can collect around a shared hangover.




ALCOHOLICS divide drunks into two sorts: topper-uppers and binge-drinkers. I was a topper-upper. By the time I was 19 I was drinking every day and continued to drink every day, come sickness or prohibition, until I was poured into a treatment centre at the age of 30.

I was, in English terms, very good at drinking. Too good. I had a substantial capacity for absorbing the stuff and had worked out the Dumb Crambo of moving around when your internal gyroscope has fallen over. I learnt to enunciate when my mouth felt like it was made out of putty and my teeth had all changed places and I had the tongue of the dog whose hair I’d consumed.

I drank steadily, with a steely determination. I drank on and through peripheral neuritis, alcoholic gastritis, an atrophied brain, an enlarged liver, a damaged pancreas, blackouts, suicidal depression, anonymous bloody sores and DTs so severe that I would have to take the first drink of the morning using a towel hooked round my neck as a pulley, because I was frightened of knocking my teeth out with the glass.

I went for help one April and the doctor said that I’d better be serious about stopping, because if I didn’t I was unlikely to see another Christmas. Incredulous friends said they couldn’t believe I had a problem as they’d never seen me drunk. The truth was, they’d never seen me sober, I’d just woven drink into the fabric of who I was and I had to unpick it.

Unravelling your life when you’ve no other life is not easy or pleasant, and I don’t recommend it, unless you need to, and then I can’t recommend it enough. Being a topper-upper meant that when I was finally told I was an alcoholic I saw in a flash the bald, sad truth of it. The choice was to continue alcoholic drinking or stop.

Binge-drinking is different. Binge-drinkers can go days, sometimes weeks, without drinking. When they do drink, though, they go for it; they will drink to oblivion and beyond, and the binges will get longer and the periods between shorter and more remorseful.

It’s binge-drinking that is the English calamity. Not just bingeing individuals, but bingeing communities. Anyone who’s been through a market town on a Friday night will have seen the violent, chaotic, staggering state of hundreds of kids. Drunkenness is their key to companionship, belonging, sex, laughter and an intensely good time, and that is the driving ambition, the holy grail and addictive drug of choice of young England. It’s not the drink, it’s that great bonding, brilliant moment of bright, elevating, hugging, glorious, risk-everything, timeless happiness that makes everything else worth it.

The corrosive, self-destructive, embarrassing dead-end behaviour that is the bill they pay in pursuit of the great clan joy has been part of English life as long as the English have been an identifiable people.

When the state and the editorials look at the pandemic of bingeing in young people, they invariably see it as a problem, because from the sober standpoint it is. And they ascribe this to any number of social deficiencies — the breakdown of families, the lack of alternative entertainment, the paucity of education, the absence of work, the ugliness of environment, the cheapness of drink, the culture of inebriation. And all or any of those things may be true, but they’re not the truth.

Young England’s relationship with drink isn’t their problem, it’s their raison d’être. The booze and bonking holidays that so disgust southern Europe are ardently worked-for and dreamt-of. The multiple partners, the vomiting, the hideous sunburn and bruises, the police cells, the grim hotels, the airport hell — it’s not a nightmare, it’s an English dream.

They don’t do it because something’s wrong; they’ll put up with loads that’s wrong so they can have this. On Friday nights and stag nights and for two weeks in the summer this bingeing is what’s utterly brilliant about being young and English.


On the other side of drunkenness there is a no less committed balance of prohibition and abstinence in England. My great-great uncle, who had drunk the farm by the time he was 30, signed the pledge and lived a white-knuckle straitlaced existence ever after. The rise of Methodism and the dissenting chapels and the great Victorian social reformers all grew out of the monster drink. Vast amounts of energy and money and effort were poured into separating the Englishman from his bottle. The proposed remedies — making the stuff more expensive, offering leisure alternatives and spiritual fulfilment via teetotalism — have changed little. Over the centuries the reforming, straight-living, good-book-and-cocoa social improvers may have changed individual lives, but they’ve had comfortingly little effect on the drinking habits of society and specifically on the young. If you were designing a rational, healthy nature from scratch, then top of your list of things to ban would be alcohol. It has very little to commend it. Simply fiddling with its presentation or cost is going to make little difference. Drink isn’t a stain on the English character, it is the founding dedication of young England’s character. They drink because they can. It isn’t a mistake, it isn’t a symptom, it’s a huge pleasure. And the English are very, very good at it.