Drink, drank, drunk.

There are some pretty good reasons for imbibing alcohol.(i) A few drinks can make you surprisingly eloquent, and increase your confidence in otherwise daunting social situations. It can lower your inhibitions, especially those related to low self-esteem. It can inspire a sense of closeness and camaraderie in otherwise disparate persons. It can make you feel good. It makes things funnier. It can be a lot of fun.

Drinking to excess is a different story. As well as coming with a list of side effects that far outweigh the aforementioned positives, getting completely woozled also cancels said positives entirely. A few drinks can make your more eloquent. Getting totally potted will not continue the trend. If this were true, pubs would be stuffed with angelically articulate winos, slurring their way through sonnets like a shitfaced Billy Shakespeare. This, clearly, is not the case. All the positives of drinking are removed by taking it too far. Having enough Dutch courage to finally go up to the girl you’ve been eyeing up is useless if all you can manage is to spray spit down her dress and eventually fall over. Getting completely winkled is generally accepted to be a BAD IDEA, unless you have a particular fondness for vomiting, or accidentally peeing on your shoes.

All the solid reasons for getting trampolined(ii) have a darker undercurrent. Drinking to forget, drinking to keep out the cold etc. all are effective solutions to a particular problem, but none are much fun, and it’s a shame that anyone has to deploy them.

And yet, getting kaboomed has evolved into a national pastime. This is normally the point when I would employ a series of statistics to illustrate my point, but it really isn’t necessary. Our reliance on the ol’ sauce is trumpeted from every media outlet almost every day. It recently emerged that 1 in 6 deaths (damn, there it is) in Scotland can be linked to alcohol (although let’s be clear: these are broadly defined ‘links,’ including things like some cancers that can be exacerbated by excessive alcohol consumption. It is NOT to be inferred that 1 in 6 Scots are drinking themselves to death).

So howcumzit? Everybody who has ever got truly buffaloed has experienced the negative effects. If you aren’t drinking heavily with an aim in mind, why are you doing it at all?

The first reason is obvious: alcohol can be freakin’ dee-licious. After a decade of hard work and practice I have developed a fondness for lager simply as a preferred beverage. After a tough day of loafing, nothing is more satisfying than a pint of something premium strength and Eastern European. It’s like a manly handshake and a nice big hug all in one frosty glass. I could easily spend an evening drinking lager ‘cause it’s nice, with getting babooned(iii) an unavoidable side effect.(iv)

Alcohol also has a detrimental influence on one’s rationality. If you’re a little bit drunk, getting a little bit more drunk can seem like a smashing idea. You know when you’re sober that it’s unlikely to improve things, but the logical parts of your brain use booze as an excuse to take some paid holiday, right when you could use them the most. Getting attenbouroughedv might never have been your aim, but before you know it you’re howling ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ at the back of a cab driver’s head.

These aren’t bad excuses, but they do not explain what has become known as ‘drink culture.’ Getting peterboroughed has become an end in itself; one now drinks simply to become intoxicated. It is not due to a failure in rationality (except in the most obvious sense) as we begin consuming with the express aim of getting carpeted. It can also no longer be blamed on how scrummy alcoholic beverages are, as a significant proportion of drinkers now imbibe potions simply for their alcoholic content, rather than their taste. Admit it, sambuca tastes like Satan’s sandy bumhole. Any drink you have to immolate before you swallow probably wasn’t much cop to start with.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. How much plonk you can keep down has been a manly competition since time immemorial. The days of quaffing Vikings are over, but competitive drinking still exists. Not everybody plays, however, and yet the streets are still full every evening with the tragically (or comically) din-dinsed.(vi)

I am certainly not immune to this, in fact it’s why this sort of thing is on my mind. Suppose I had had the self-control in the past to control my excessive drinking? How many ladies have I upset, how many friendships have I imperilled? How many regrets do I carry.

I got a bit maudlin there, sorry. I do have a point to make though, or at least a request. Maybe I should ask my readers (that’s right, the pair of you), to think about what it is you want from a night out, and whether you really need to get banjoed to get it. So that when you’ve reached that truly glorious stage of intoxication where you dance like a man possessed, flirt like you took lessons and tell stories to rival the greatest Jacobean raconteur, you could say to your mates: “No thank you, I have reached an adequate stage of consumption, and have no immediate requirement of an alcoholic beverage. Fetch me instead a soft drink of equal or greater deliciousness." Except, well, you might want to paraphrase, or they’ll think you’re a peenarse.

I sound like a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And I doubt this post will mark a curtailment in my own drinking. I don’t want to impact on anyone’s enjoyment- quite the opposite. I honestly suspect that if we thought a bit harder about how tomatoed we’d like to get, we might be a tiny bit happier. And tiny or not, any increase is worth it, because as we all know:


(vii)

(i) I’m going to do a Michael McIntyre here and see how many innocuous words I can substitute for the adjective ‘drunk.’
(ii) That one’s definitely my favourite.
(iii) I’ve got an animal theme thing going now.
(iv) This does raise the intriguing question: would I drink comparable amounts of non-alcoholic lager if they can make one that doesn’t taste like a tramp’s wee-wee?
(v) It works with proper nouns! Yes!
(vi) That one didn’t work so well, did it?
(vii) If this image doesn’t bring a smile to your face, you need to speak to your doctor about possibly upping your meds. The man responsible is artist, explorer and semi-professional pistol duellist William Elliot, who’s fantastic artwork can be found here.