Alcohol’s allure was powerful when we were growing up and those born after us consume far less. Now booze is falling out of fashion, is it time to assess old habits?
My first job in journalism was editing a free magazine called Rasp. In 1995, we ran a competition for a year’s supply of Two Dogs lemon brew, the Australian alcopop. Two Dogs tried to send us 365 bottles, and I negotiated them up to 1,000, indignant that a bottle a day could constitute a “supply”. It is the only time I’ve ever played hardball. Nobody entered the competition because we didn’t have any readers, and nor did we have any staff. The two of us, me and the designer, drank the whole lot in the space of two months. A constant drip feed of 4.5% ABV, all day. If anybody asked – there was a much larger team upstairs running TNT, a freesheet for expat Australians – we’d say it was a British tradition, going back to medieval times, when workers would sip ale because of the contaminated water supply. “But medieval ale would have been more like 0.5%,” they might have protested, except they were also constantly drunk, and at lunchtime we’d all go to the pub, 60 people in crocodile formation marching down the street, like a misbegotten nursery outing.
So the cliche of the drunken journalist happens to be true, but in the early 90s it was also true of teachers. Dave Lawrence, 56, co-author of Scarred for Life, of which more shortly, remembers his teacher training: “There was a pub across the road and at lunchtime, all the teachers would head over there, and all afternoon they would reek of booze.” It wasn’t really sectoral – this was just generation X. Colin Angus, a senior research fellow in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group, is 39. He’s not generation X, which is usually defined as those born between 1965 and 1980. But in his pre-academic career in electrical wholesaling, “Everyone was always talking about the good old days of long, boozy lunches.”