Skinful

11pm, Charing Cross Road. Ever so rarely, life is like a movie — and tonight’s feature is some lurid zombie flick, circa 1978. Vacant eyes and spastic lumbering are de rigeur; hairy people in caps emerge dribbling from every shop doorway. The atmosphere is one of menace and confusion. It’s your standard Friday night.

Just what is it with the British and drinking? Why do we need this space to let go, and why do we need to do it so often, and to such extremes? A recent report in The Economist looked at drinking habits across Europe. It identified a broad distinction between the northern countries, where they drink a lot in one sitting but don’t guzzle that often, and the countries of the south, where they consume fewer drinks in one go, but drink more overall. In the UK (and also in Ireland) the distinction doesn’t work — we drink a lot in one session, and we have a lot of sessions.

Blair calls our bingeing “the new British disease” and it’s costing the nation an estimated £20 billion a year, roughly the GDP of Nigeria. There’s been a lot of punditry about this. The philosopher Alain de Botton has suggested it’s because we’re repressed, and that it’s only through excessive drinking that we can actually communicate with people on an emotional level.

Then there’s the one about our licensing laws, first introduced as a temporary measure to boost productivity during the First World War. Because pubs close at eleven, it creates a pressure cooker atmosphere — a need to drink as much as possible while you still can. The Licensing Act 2003 liberalises things, but will changing circumstances sink in?

Or maybe it’s the decline of the Empire. This argument is sometimes used to explain our hooligans — we can’t cope with the fact that we used to rule a quarter of the globe but now work in call centres, so every now and then we go and smash something up. Is our need to get wasted a similar reaction to post-colonialism?

But maybe all this analysis is pointless; maybe there’s a more trivial, prosaic factor in our recklessness; that we go out all the time just because that’s what we do.

This is the idea that we do x and y, not for historical or sociological reasons (or not just for these reasons) but often out of habit. So maybe we go to the pub not because our jobs are unbearable, it’s happy hour or we work the longest hours in Europe, but because er, that’s what everyone does and we’ve never really thought about it. And when you look at it like that — on an individual level — free will comes back into the equation. You can take a step back, ask yourself if the reasons that drove you to the pub are still valid, and maybe do things differently.

Think like that and it becomes easier to imagine a world where Friday night isn’t a perpetual re-run of Dawn of the Dead. A world where it’s the way we do things now that seems strange.

By thinking differently, the current debate about smoking in pubs is no longer one between selfish libertarians and health fascists. Think in terms of possible worlds. To the extent that our habits influence what is seen as normal, what might seem like authoritarian measures now can become accepted, mainstream. Take the fact that since 1987 we can’t puff away on the tube. Seventeen years down the line, prohibition does not seem like an infringement of personal liberties. What seems weird is that we could ever spark up in the first place. Non-smoking pubs could soon be a reality; and the parameters of what’s possible will shift again. Could the same thing happen to our drinking culture — and if it does, will we see this as a loss?

We’ll see. Cultures change; not all roads in Britain must end at a pub. But there are limits to the possible, to what can be achieved by social change and state engineering. There will always be a space where people go to get smashed, where low comedy and clumsy snogs are the order of the day. See you there.