Monday 16 February 2015

Lowlife 109 – Fifty Shades of Grey

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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