Did you tut in despair at the way standards have slipped? Or did you, like me, think: Really? 3 in 5 admit to doing this? Some of these people are lying and it isn't the drinkers! And it's pretty rich this news coming with a hefty slap of disapproval from journalists, not themselves the most abstemious people in the world.
But why would people drink nowadays?
I mean, it's not like the 18th century when the lives of the poor in Britain were awful and it was cheaper to buy gin (and feed it to your children) than it was to buy food.
After all, we live in the 5th - or is it now, thanks to the Tories, the 6th - wealthiest economy in the world. And we all know about the dangers of too much drink. The media are never done telling us.
I would say we're on the way to driving smoking out of our society. That was always a good way to relax - and I speak from personal experience. So having a drink at the end of the day probably replaces the fags.
And then, there's the stress people now endure at work: there's constant pressure to work harder and do more. Keep up to date with technology even though you're not paid to do so. And take more responsibility. In many public services, just as in industry, staff have been cut over the last three decades, but especially since the introduction of 'austerity', and more work is routinely passed on to those who are left. And remember, the UK is still the country in the wider Europe where people work the longest hours, not because they want to but because that's the only way to get through the work.
And still, we are less productive than the Germans. Go figure.
Sadly, we also suffer from what I call Thatcher syndrome: her government introduced the idea of workers being at the customer's beck and call, even if you didn't have the staff to handle the demand. So people these days apparently will not wait so much as a minute but need to have their phone call answered within 4 rings. Need a reply to a letter within 5 to 7 working days. Need to be attended to within minutes of arriving at the checkout, although UK supermarkets - god rot them - are getting round that one by having almost no manned check outs, just self-serve, so if you're going to moan about anyone it'll be another customer.
And if all that's not bad enough, in the small amount of leisure time left to you you can switch on the telly or open a newspaper or surf the internet and there you'll find people waiting to hector you about your lifestyle:
Give up smoking.
Stop drinking.
Go vegan.
Avoid sugar.
Don't eat chocolate or cheese or Gregg's sausage rolls.
Above all, don't listen to the conflicting advice given at every turn by the so-called experts, and ignore the fact that these days every GP practice and every dental surgery routinely doles out a 'lifestyle survey' to its patients. I once asked my dentist why he needed to know what and how much I drank. He had a kinda shifty answer: Well, you see, he said, gin can affect your teeth. And he wasn't best pleased when I said: Okay, I'm all right then - I don't drink gin. Cheers!
As the great Adam McNaughtan's song told the late Princess Di who was a great fan of colonic irrigation: you can do what you like but...
Yer still gonny die!
No comments:
Post a Comment