A week ago I was struck by one of those cold/flu mutants that is neither, but still lays you out for a few days. Despite that, I managed to drag myself out to the Coach & Horses in Soho on Wednesday afternoon to be interviewed by PY Gerbeau about the Great British Drinking Problem. For indeed there is one.
PY, best known for his stint running the Millennium Dome, is a charming, jolly bloke, with an English wife and young baby. We, and the BBC’s Claire Burgoyne, sat in the corner with mugs of tea as we brainstormed about what could be done. He has lived in the UK for years, and continues to be astounded by London’s late night carnage. ‘In Paris, if you saw someone lying in the road like that, you would stop and ask them if they were ok.’ In this country you might expect to be stabbed, or at least spat at, during the process of such an enquiry, and would tend to back off.
For PY, the clincher happened when he was driving through town and saw a man slumped on the pavement with a pint of Guinness. He drank some of it, vomited it back into the glass, drank some, and then vomited again. The man was clearly a true Brit doing what we do best. But how to change this culture?
I wonder if it’s time to introduce shame into the process. We did it with drink-driving, why not public drunkenness as a whole? We had a very interesting chat.
The programme will air on Radio 4 in a couple of months time.
lff12
January 20, 2009
What a charmer. Then again thats pretty much what Guiness tastes like so I am unsurprised. One of my most shameful moments in life was drinking an early morning cappucino in Gran Canaria with a lady who went on to date my ex, conscious of a guy lying in the street on the other side of the road. It didn’t dawn on either of us to pop over and try to help, even though it was probably just a case of “are you alright mate?” Of course I would say its not so much a great British problem as a great Anglocentric problem – I’ve seen exactly the same kind of drinking culture in Ireland and Australia (which of course in the UK have been almost transformed into particlar binge “brands” if you can have such a thing).
Enjoyed the book by the way. Found your feelings about therapy particularly interesting. Some friends seem to have benefited from it, others have just become 20 times worse.
all the best
Laura