Ethanol

Inside the Rover’s Return, in Coronation Street, is where most of the action happens, episode by episode. Over the 50 years since the series began in 1960, we have seen this corner pub renovated, crashed into, burnt out, rebuilt, remodelled – yet it remains the focal venue of just about every plot and sub-plot.

I do understand that the “local”, in England at any rate, has long been an important social institution. And it’s easy to see how convenient it must have been to the producers of Coronation Street to have so much of the action in one place. Right from the start, when Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst sat and swapped their venomous gossip in the Snug over their milk stouts, nicely insulated by frosted glass from the raunchier and riskier world of the public bar, it has been possible to concentrate on faces and moods and dialogue, with only the occasional irruption of action and flying fists. The Rover’s is where they daily oil the social mechanism, bonding, abusing each other, reassuring each other, planning one-upmanship, checking their defences and nourishing their antipathies. You can’t do any of that alone at home, really; it’s social, it requires others to listen and respond.

But how much week by week do these people spend on their alcohol? The “girls” who sew garments in Underworld routinely adjourn to the Rovers for their lunch. Sure, there they have Betty’s ‘Otpot, which presumably would give them some sensible protein. Come to think, does the Rover’s ever serve tea/coffee? I have never, ever, heard of it. Typically, day or night, the locals require ale, wine or spirits, or some fruit drink if you’re pregnant. Mike Baldwin normally asked for “my usual, please, and whatever she’s having”. His usual was a double whisky. He died. These people drink. A pot of tea, on the other hand, “a brew”, is what you have at home. “I could murder a brew...”

Perhaps the normal level of salaries/wages in the UK takes account of the money one spends on buying alcohol for oneself and on purchasing rounds for others. I doubt it. It must be considerable. It would be bad enough here in NZ... It says something about the place alcohol has come to assume in the lives of so many, as though it were indispensable as a social lubricant.

We too have the beer culture, and the profoundly silly wine culture... There is a NZ talkback host who thinks it sophisticated to inform us that he would never buy a bottle of wine under NZ$25.00. We have wine “experts”, and some radio chap who is wheeled on to advise us which wines to choose with which foods. People are making money from telling us which wine they personally prefer, as though it matters or is even remotely interesting. We now have “Masters of Wine”, whatever they are. Wine, however ancient, is simply another slightly more sophisticated vehicle for shunting alcohol into our brain cells. You like a particular wine or you don’t, I would have thought.

The beer culture has drunken obnoxious Britons fouling the streets of Europe and elsewhere following rugby or soccer or league. They threaten to come here for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, as useless and abhorrent an event as I ever imagined. Vulgar yobboes with their tinnies and over-strained livers.

The wine culture, more pervasive, has otherwise sensible people thinking they can be connoisseurs of taste/smell/whatnot... They have their own wine literature about redolence of apricot and lavender, slightly... ye gods, who invented this humbug...?
But the real social damage is in simply drinking. Alcohol is an addictive drug, for many. Teenagers are getting paralytic at parties, and are falling about on the streets. Beer boozers in rugby clubs and at home are beating up their womenfolk and their kids, sometimes with fatal consequences. Alcohol moreover potentiates the effect of other more serious drugs. It is behind many of society’s tragedies and horrors.

I don’t drink. I decided some time ago to put alcohol out of my life. It was a good decision. No one needs that stuff. And I have recently decided it is not wowserism or puritanism to advocate really strong restrictions on the availability of beer, wine and spirits – it is simply to take seriously a serious social disease. I believe alcohol is unnecessary. For me the best social and personal remedy is abstinence. Most people don’t believe that, of course. But they have to come up with some remedies likely to work.