More on the Demon Drink...
No - not me this time.
If you're squeamish about talk of vomit, you may want to give this post a miss.
Scotland and Ireland have long been synonymous with drinking alcohol in excess and it's certainly something I was very familiar with growing up here. If you search "binge drinking Scotland" on Google, you'll come up with ten pages of related information, which is quite shocking. It's not entirely fair though because it's going on elsewhere too. I read an article in the Globe and Mail a while ago about the problems caused by young women binge drinking in Birmingham (England, not Alabama).
Before I left Scotland for Canada in 1972, most of the pubs I was surrounded by catered to working class people. Pubs in Scotland were open Monday to Saturday between the hours of 11:00 am and 3:00 pm for the lunchtime crowd, then reopened at 5:00 for the after work business, closing for the night at 10:00. They were closed on Sunday, but you could go to a hotel bar for a drink as these were allowed to stay open. There was no legal requirement to serve drinks only when accompanied by food, as there was in Canada at that time.
The Scottish working class society in which I grew up was largely hard-working, with little money or time for having fun. For teenagers and adults, Friday and Saturday nights out were inviolable and very few people stayed at home on those nights. I babysat from the age of twelve for my sister and for my cousin so they could have their nights out. Traditionally, married women had a girls' night out on Friday nights and their husbands went out with the boys. On Saturdays, married couples went out together. I may be mistaken, but I believe these nights out invariably involved drinking. The people involved may have gone to see a film, or gone for a meal, placed a few bets at the track (greyhound racing) or gone to the dancing, but there was usually drink involved at some point. There was drinking Monday to Thursday too, of course, but I think a lot of this was limited to a man having a pint with his pals after work before going home for his evening meal, the preparation of which didn't leave any time or opportunity for his wife to go to the pub.
In my teens, walking home with my pals, it was a common sight to see people - mostly men, but occasionally women - staggering out of pubs, shouting, arguing and sometimes fighting. And there was a lot of vomiting. You always had to watch where you stepped, although most people tried to make it to the gutter. There was a pub on the corner of Great Junction Street and Bangor Road that I used to have to pass by often, coming home from a friend's house or the cinema. A few minutes after ten o'clock, the doors would open and out spilled dozens of men. They'd congregate on the pavement in small groups to carry on conversations started inside. One night, I was approaching the pub just as a man hurled himself through the door, grabbing the lamp post to steady himself and projectile vomiting into the road (and whatever traffic was unfortunate enough to be passing by at the time). It was all done in one smooth, fluid movement and I had to stop, spellbound. Three or four pints of Tennents lager arced across Great Junction Street as gracefully as the dancing waters of the fountain in Princes Street Gardens. Billy Connolly, that great Scottish comedian, wondered why there are always diced carrots in vomit and thought there was a wee man with pocketsful of them, distributing them where needed.
Another scene I remember vividly was a vicious fight outside a pub in the High Street, on the Royal Mile, where all the tourists go. Even if a pub's in a touristy area, it's still someone's local and there's still a crowd of drinkers who all kinow each other. This one night, just after ten o'clock again, the men surged through the pub doors onto the brightly lit street amid shouting and swearing and jostling. Then I saw one man strike another in the face with a broken bottle and there was blood all over the pavement. I had crossed the road to get out of the way by this time and got the hell out of there. That was frightening.
It's my theory that binge drinking (remember I started out talking about binge drinking several paragraphs ago?!) started because people only had a few hours to get their bevvying done so they'd swallow as much as they could in a short period. It's anybody's guess whether their intention was to get as drunk as possible during that time. When I started drinking at the tender age of 13, my friends and I would buy Carlsberg Special because it was the fastest way to get drunk (whoever looked the oldest was the one buying the bottles; there was no ID in those days). I remember trying to get drunk before an expedition to Kirkcaldy (for an innocent game of bowling) arranged by the Leith Community Centre for us little guttersnipes. Two of my friends and I hid round the corner from the bus that was taking us, swilling Carlsberg (which tasted bloody putrid) and trying to get drunk in the few minutes before we had to take our seats. Feeling sick from the taste of it, we ditched the empty bottles and pretended to be drunk as we walked to the bus because we thought that made us look cool. What a pack of bloody eejits we were.
Who knows what my drinking habits might have been if I'd stayed in Scotland instead of emigrating? Apart from those times in my teens, I've never been much of a drinker and never liked the taste of alcohol (I still don't like the taste of beer). I get drunk easily too - half a glass of wine and I'm on the floor, anybody's friend. I do enjoy a glass of wine once in a while and recently discovered the pleasure of gin and tonic with lime but if I end up drunk (once every year or two), it's because I wasn't paying attention and not because getting drunk was the plan.
I've noticed that, when people here between the ages of 15 and 30 (and sometimes older) are talking about their social lives, many of them rate their enjoyment of a social event by how drunk they were. They'll talk about how drunk they plan to get before going out for the evening. I've made this observation based on conversations I've had with people myself and on conversations overheard on the bus, in the street, etc. One man told me he didn't feel he'd had a good time unless he got drunk enough to lose a few hours and said he frequently couldn't account for large blocks of time when he'd been out drinking. Although he touched briefly on the disquieting aspect of losing hours of your waking life to inebriation, his overall opinion was that these blackouts were a way to measure how much fun he'd had, even if he had no recollection of what he'd been doing. I see the evidence splashed on the pavements every morning on the way to work of how much fun people were having the night before.
I've heard people speak with pride of their outrageous behaviour while drunk, try to outdo each other's stories of hangovers, and dismiss any physical damage they might be doing to themselves. I've done it myself in this very blog (see January 1). I know why people enjoy being intoxicated because I enjoy it myself. I'd probably enjoy it more often if it didn't scare the hell out of me because of family history. But because I like to be in control (of myself and others), I also don't feel comfortable in a mind-altered state. I think that's what makes me start reaching for water instead of wine at a certain point in my drinking. And maybe I just don't trust myself.
What really puzzles me though - and I've said this before - is why people go out with the specific intention of getting as hammered as they possibly can when they know how ill they'll be the next day. I heard a young girl at the bus stop last Monday morning telling someone how proud she was that she'd stayed in on Saturday night, that it was the first Saturday night in six months that she hadn't been drunk, and how good she felt on Sunday. During the 5-minute wait for the bus, she commented in incredulous tones on both phenomena (staying in Saturday and not being ill on Sunday) three times. (Incidentally, she's one of the young women described in my cold weather post - with the heavy stage-like tan makeup, the bare blue belly spilling over the low-rise jeans and not enough clothes to cope with cold temperatures).
It seems appropriate, as I bring this to a close, that the song just now selected randomly by my music software is The Proclaimers "It's Saturday Night", a song about being drunk - "the drink that I had three hours ago has been joined by fourteen others in a steady flow" - and scratching cars with a key. Another line is "...if it doesn't leave my stomach, it will split my head."
I couldn't have planned better accompanying music for my penultimate paragraph. Too bad I can't include it here as a soundtrack!
If you're squeamish about talk of vomit, you may want to give this post a miss.
Scotland and Ireland have long been synonymous with drinking alcohol in excess and it's certainly something I was very familiar with growing up here. If you search "binge drinking Scotland" on Google, you'll come up with ten pages of related information, which is quite shocking. It's not entirely fair though because it's going on elsewhere too. I read an article in the Globe and Mail a while ago about the problems caused by young women binge drinking in Birmingham (England, not Alabama).
Before I left Scotland for Canada in 1972, most of the pubs I was surrounded by catered to working class people. Pubs in Scotland were open Monday to Saturday between the hours of 11:00 am and 3:00 pm for the lunchtime crowd, then reopened at 5:00 for the after work business, closing for the night at 10:00. They were closed on Sunday, but you could go to a hotel bar for a drink as these were allowed to stay open. There was no legal requirement to serve drinks only when accompanied by food, as there was in Canada at that time.
The Scottish working class society in which I grew up was largely hard-working, with little money or time for having fun. For teenagers and adults, Friday and Saturday nights out were inviolable and very few people stayed at home on those nights. I babysat from the age of twelve for my sister and for my cousin so they could have their nights out. Traditionally, married women had a girls' night out on Friday nights and their husbands went out with the boys. On Saturdays, married couples went out together. I may be mistaken, but I believe these nights out invariably involved drinking. The people involved may have gone to see a film, or gone for a meal, placed a few bets at the track (greyhound racing) or gone to the dancing, but there was usually drink involved at some point. There was drinking Monday to Thursday too, of course, but I think a lot of this was limited to a man having a pint with his pals after work before going home for his evening meal, the preparation of which didn't leave any time or opportunity for his wife to go to the pub.
In my teens, walking home with my pals, it was a common sight to see people - mostly men, but occasionally women - staggering out of pubs, shouting, arguing and sometimes fighting. And there was a lot of vomiting. You always had to watch where you stepped, although most people tried to make it to the gutter. There was a pub on the corner of Great Junction Street and Bangor Road that I used to have to pass by often, coming home from a friend's house or the cinema. A few minutes after ten o'clock, the doors would open and out spilled dozens of men. They'd congregate on the pavement in small groups to carry on conversations started inside. One night, I was approaching the pub just as a man hurled himself through the door, grabbing the lamp post to steady himself and projectile vomiting into the road (and whatever traffic was unfortunate enough to be passing by at the time). It was all done in one smooth, fluid movement and I had to stop, spellbound. Three or four pints of Tennents lager arced across Great Junction Street as gracefully as the dancing waters of the fountain in Princes Street Gardens. Billy Connolly, that great Scottish comedian, wondered why there are always diced carrots in vomit and thought there was a wee man with pocketsful of them, distributing them where needed.
Another scene I remember vividly was a vicious fight outside a pub in the High Street, on the Royal Mile, where all the tourists go. Even if a pub's in a touristy area, it's still someone's local and there's still a crowd of drinkers who all kinow each other. This one night, just after ten o'clock again, the men surged through the pub doors onto the brightly lit street amid shouting and swearing and jostling. Then I saw one man strike another in the face with a broken bottle and there was blood all over the pavement. I had crossed the road to get out of the way by this time and got the hell out of there. That was frightening.
It's my theory that binge drinking (remember I started out talking about binge drinking several paragraphs ago?!) started because people only had a few hours to get their bevvying done so they'd swallow as much as they could in a short period. It's anybody's guess whether their intention was to get as drunk as possible during that time. When I started drinking at the tender age of 13, my friends and I would buy Carlsberg Special because it was the fastest way to get drunk (whoever looked the oldest was the one buying the bottles; there was no ID in those days). I remember trying to get drunk before an expedition to Kirkcaldy (for an innocent game of bowling) arranged by the Leith Community Centre for us little guttersnipes. Two of my friends and I hid round the corner from the bus that was taking us, swilling Carlsberg (which tasted bloody putrid) and trying to get drunk in the few minutes before we had to take our seats. Feeling sick from the taste of it, we ditched the empty bottles and pretended to be drunk as we walked to the bus because we thought that made us look cool. What a pack of bloody eejits we were.
Who knows what my drinking habits might have been if I'd stayed in Scotland instead of emigrating? Apart from those times in my teens, I've never been much of a drinker and never liked the taste of alcohol (I still don't like the taste of beer). I get drunk easily too - half a glass of wine and I'm on the floor, anybody's friend. I do enjoy a glass of wine once in a while and recently discovered the pleasure of gin and tonic with lime but if I end up drunk (once every year or two), it's because I wasn't paying attention and not because getting drunk was the plan.
I've noticed that, when people here between the ages of 15 and 30 (and sometimes older) are talking about their social lives, many of them rate their enjoyment of a social event by how drunk they were. They'll talk about how drunk they plan to get before going out for the evening. I've made this observation based on conversations I've had with people myself and on conversations overheard on the bus, in the street, etc. One man told me he didn't feel he'd had a good time unless he got drunk enough to lose a few hours and said he frequently couldn't account for large blocks of time when he'd been out drinking. Although he touched briefly on the disquieting aspect of losing hours of your waking life to inebriation, his overall opinion was that these blackouts were a way to measure how much fun he'd had, even if he had no recollection of what he'd been doing. I see the evidence splashed on the pavements every morning on the way to work of how much fun people were having the night before.
I've heard people speak with pride of their outrageous behaviour while drunk, try to outdo each other's stories of hangovers, and dismiss any physical damage they might be doing to themselves. I've done it myself in this very blog (see January 1). I know why people enjoy being intoxicated because I enjoy it myself. I'd probably enjoy it more often if it didn't scare the hell out of me because of family history. But because I like to be in control (of myself and others), I also don't feel comfortable in a mind-altered state. I think that's what makes me start reaching for water instead of wine at a certain point in my drinking. And maybe I just don't trust myself.
What really puzzles me though - and I've said this before - is why people go out with the specific intention of getting as hammered as they possibly can when they know how ill they'll be the next day. I heard a young girl at the bus stop last Monday morning telling someone how proud she was that she'd stayed in on Saturday night, that it was the first Saturday night in six months that she hadn't been drunk, and how good she felt on Sunday. During the 5-minute wait for the bus, she commented in incredulous tones on both phenomena (staying in Saturday and not being ill on Sunday) three times. (Incidentally, she's one of the young women described in my cold weather post - with the heavy stage-like tan makeup, the bare blue belly spilling over the low-rise jeans and not enough clothes to cope with cold temperatures).
It seems appropriate, as I bring this to a close, that the song just now selected randomly by my music software is The Proclaimers "It's Saturday Night", a song about being drunk - "the drink that I had three hours ago has been joined by fourteen others in a steady flow" - and scratching cars with a key. Another line is "...if it doesn't leave my stomach, it will split my head."
I couldn't have planned better accompanying music for my penultimate paragraph. Too bad I can't include it here as a soundtrack!
Labels: Binge drinking
posted by Jacki | 7:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home