Fifty
Shades of Grey
By
Dominic Horton
It
has been revealed this week that a study by The Office for National
Statistics (ONS) has found that more than one in five adults (21%) in
Great Britain are teetotal and do not dabble with alcohol at all. The
figure has risen from 19% in 2005. On the face of it, it looks to be
the case that my fellow inmates at the Flagon & Gorses and I are
increasingly becoming dinosaurs in a new sober 21st century age.
And we all know that dinosaurs had small brains so that is consistent
with the average punter you find in The Flagon. Especially after
they have had a few drinks and their mental capacities shrink leaving
them telling you a story that you have heard a hundred times before
and playing out old set-piece jokes and laughing inanely at them,
even though they were only vaguely funny when they
were originally told, years ago. I concede that I am as much a
culprit of this type of behaviour as any.
 |
| The new pub sign at the Flagon & Gorses. |
I
have written in these pages before about the repetition of
pub life, it is like a Samuel Beckett play acted out again and again
and again so everyone knows the words, the routines, the actions. The
form. But the familiarity of the surroundings, the people, the
drinks, the smells, the atmosphere is comforting and we all cling on
to it like it is a lifeboat floating in a dangerously stormy sea.
Except that we don't want to get rescued, we are happy drifting in
the open water. As long as we have a pint in our hands that is.
Sometimes as a pub goer I feel like a hamster on a wheel, going round
and round in perpetual circles, and occasionally I want
to get off but I never do. I keep walking on the wheel waiting for
something to happen, hoping that one day there will be a metaphorical
pot of gold somewhere over the rainbow. Until then I'll keep turning
up at the pub, afraid that I am going to miss out if I don't. Miss
out on what exactly, I'm not sure. But then I won't know what I have
missed if I miss it.
The
age demographic of the sailors in the Flagon lifeboat is not young
people but overwhelmingly middle-aged. The young are increasingly
drinking less, according to the ONS study, with alcohol and binge
drinking becoming increasingly unpopular in the youth ranks. There
are undoubtedly fewer younger people visiting pubs than when I was a
teenager and in my 20's and on the face of it that can be seen as a
good thing as a sober-ish lifestyle has its undoubted health benefits
(I use the word sober-ish as moderate drinkers have a greater life
expectancy than teetotalers, so a little alcohol is a good
thing.)
From
a psychological perspective however the social angle of pub going is
a positive aspect and one suspects that the young may in part have
replaced actual face-to-face contact with socialising through social
media and the like, which is a poor substitute for the real thing.
One of the five foundation stones for mental well-being set out by
the New Economics Foundation is to connect with others and pub going
does allow people to meet up, often where it is a person's only
substantial social contact of the day – indeed, that applies to me
as I will spend the today in solitary confinement at my desk before
nipping up the Flagon later to drop off the paper copy of this
edition of Lowlife and to chinwag some nonsense with
the regular Monday night devotees (we won't be having a “catch
up”; I am not sure where that ghastly phrase has emanated from
but I suspect that it has crept up from the Smoke and in my
estimation it can jolly well go back down the M1 and stay there.
Often when two people meet for a “catch up” they have nothing to
catch up on anyway as since the last time they met their lives have
been vulgarly splattered all over Facebook.)
 |
Jolly Dave at the National Winter Ales
Festival, Derby by request of Toby In-Tents.
|
Apparently
over a third of Londoners claim to be abstainers, which is a
staggering statistic but not one that is wholly surprising –
the last time Alexander Sutcliffe and I visited the capital (to see
Barty Hook) we spent the afternoon in the pub and we seemed to be the
only drinkers who had taken root for a good old soak, with all the
other punters having just the one drink or a pair at most. I was
amazed to learn that regionally the West Midlands has the second
largest proportion of teetotalers after London, some 25%.
But once the Muslim proportion of both the London and the West
Midlands community is taken into account the figures are more easily
understood – 40% of the country's Muslims reside in the
capital making up 12.4% of its people. 14.3% of the population of the
West Midlands' biggest city, Birmingham, is Muslim.
The
survey frustratingly didn't delve into the drinking habits of
different ethnic and other demographic groups in the country. This
was most probably because the researchers couldn't be bothered as
they wanted to get to the pub. If you discount the
abstaining Muslim proportion of the population and the
elderly, who comparatively tend to drink little, then the
survey's findings that alcohol consumption is on the decrease will
most probably not apply to the rest of the population and the
opposite could well be true.
Additionally
the old chestnut of people underestimating how much they drink should
be taken into consideration – apparently HMRC figures show that
twice as much alcohol is purchased than people admit to drinking
according to various studies. One would hope that the ONS allowed
respondents to their study to provide information anonymously,
through the internet for example, as if the data was collected
face-to-face subjects would have been more likely to fib about the
amount of alcohol they drink. But if the methods used by the ONS were
inappropriate it would not surprise me as often official
surveys can be highly shabby, such as YouGov's recent study on
the popularity of accents in Britain (see Lowlife No
100, All Played Out, December 2014.)
 |
The Pirate & The Coarse Whisperer in
The Brunswick, Derby.
|
So
the findings of the research should be taken with a pinch of
salt, preferably smeared around the rim of a glass
of tequila. Based on HMRC figures of alcohol sales people are
drinking on average 25 units a week (the equivalent of a dozen odd
pints of standard strength bitter) and it is believed that more than
half of those who drink do so at risky levels. The figure of 25 units
is of course an average so once you disregard the
abstainers and infrequent to moderate drinkers those who are
left must be knocking back a fair bit between them. It appears that
in reality Britain is as booze soaked as a Christmas pudding after
all.
Contrary
to popular belief it is the middle-aged and not the young who are the
least sober. Ironically one of the favourite sports of the
middle-aged is sitting in the pub having a pint whilst moaning about
the drunken behaviour of teenagers on weekends. Statistically a young
person of 16-24 years is more likely to be partaking in sober
pursuits on a Saturday night than getting blotto – the ONS study
claims that only one in 50 young people in the 16-24 age range drank
alcohol frequently in 2013. I do not know what the definition of
“frequently” is for the study's purposes but it undoubtedly seems
to be true that young people are generally not drinkers.
 |
Drinkers at the National Winter Ales Festival, the
Roundhouse, Derby
|
If
my trip to the CAMRA National Winter Ales Festival in Derby on
Thursday is anything to go by the middle-aged are most definitely the
most boozy section of the populace. The festival was jam packed with
mostly men of advancing or advanced years having a tipple or ten and
our party consisting of the Pirate, Jolly Dave, Harry Stottle, Ant,
the Coarse Whisperer and yours truly, was no exception. I was most
probably the youngest person that I saw at the festival. A hot bed of
youth it was not. In fact if you had taken a photograph of the throng
of drinkers at the festival you could have entitled it Fifty
Shades of Grey.
You
can dress beer festivals up in a thin veneer of
respectability by saying that attendees go primarily to
taste different ales in a variety of styles or to be social and
chatter and have a pleasant day out. But the bottom line is that a
beer festival is just an easy excuse to drink all day without the
stigma of doing it in the pub - they provide a snapshot of the boozy
middle-aged underbelly of the drinkers of Britain that seem to have
flown under the radar of the ONS study.
©
Dominic Horton, February 2015.
Lowlife
is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall
Email:
lordhofr@gmail.com
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