There was a news article today here about a woman who was not allowed to buy a bottle of wine at a supermarket (Morrisons) because her 17 year old daughter was with her and, according to the cashier ’she might drink it’. Despite lots of people and papers and MPs and things telling them this was ridiculous, Morrisons stand by their decision not to have sold the wine. And they say that they would have sold the wine to the woman had her child been younger – say, twelve – because the child would have apparently been less likely to drink it.
There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to start.
There is a law in this country stating that it’s illegal for a person over eighteen to buy alcohol for a minor. But there is also another law stating that parents may serve alcohol to their children, once they are over the age of five, in their own home. So if this woman, who said to the cashier that the wine was for herself and her husband, had instead said, ‘Yes, my daughter will drink it with us over dinner tonight’ she would not actually have been breaking the law to let her do so.
(Of course, she would have most likely been lying if she had said this, since it was highly probable that the teenage daughter would crack open the bottle of wine in her mum’s car on the way home, or possibly go and drink it at the bus stop with her mates, all with wine glasses smuggled from their parents’ houses, comparing the Australian Shiraz with the French Merlot so that they could impress boys with their wine knowledge later on. Obviously.)
Saying, ‘you can’t buy it because she might drink it’ is pretty much equivalent to forbidding someone to buy nail varnish remover just because you happen to notice that they’re buying matches in the same transaction and they ‘might set fire to it’, or disallowing purchases of sugar in circumstances when the customer needs to walk through the car park on the way out, in case they happen to pour some into someone’s petrol tank on their way past. Or not letting people buy biros in case they go around stabbing people in the eye. Or turnips, in case they intend to throw them at people’s heads. All right, I’ll stop now.
It was implied that if the daughter hadn’t been present at the actual transaction it would have been fine, and in fact that if she’d gone to wait in the car while the packing took place, despite having already been seen with the mother by the cashier, it would have been all right. Which is beyond stupid. If they’re going to take this line they should at least be consistent. And to be consistent they’d have to make people prove they don’t have any children under eighteen before they’re allowed to buy any alcohol at all, in case they’re buying it for them. Hell, they should make them prove they don’t even know anyone under eighteen.
All this is in aid of Stopping Underage Binge Drinking. So far everything anyone has done in this country in an attempt to stop Underage Binge Drinking has increased Underage Binge Drinking. They seem to think that by banning it, and then banning it a bit more, and banning it a different way with large capital letters, it will make teenagers go ‘Oh yes, sorry, better not do that again.’
Actually, they should just stop letting people make disgusting sugary bubble-gum flavoured alcoholic drinks which children like to drink. And on top of that, every time someone pours Coca-Cola into some whisky, or lemonade into vodka or anything like that, a large flashing, alarmed sign should descend from the sky as on an obnoxious game show, and destroy the drink with laser beams. Sweet fizzy wines will have to go. The only things left will be the drinks that only appeal to mature tastebuds, rather than sweet things that tiny children want to drink.
And there’s more. Before being allowed to drink outside the home, everyone must take a GSCE in drinking things properly. An alcohol appreciation course! They must do an exam in which they mix a Margherita, a Gin and Tonic and a Bloody Mary, which will be graded on quality, correctly differentiate between a blended whisky versus a single malt, and a glass of Chateauneuf du Pape versus a glass of Tesco own brand ‘Basic Red Table Wine’ by taste, and answer questions on the correct serving temperatures for red and white wine, beer and lager. In other words, to appreciate good alcohol as one appreciates good music or art or literature. (Theory immediately falls down: I have an English GCSE and I still read chicklit sometimes. But at least I know it generally isn’t really art. And also, chicklit doesn’t usually cause physical harm. Unless it’s really, really bad.)
So I am not against “underage” alcohol consumption – the feeding of red wine to children from an early age seems to work very well at preventing underage binge drinking in mainland Europe, as is often quoted. But actually when I was underage I found it very difficult to do, and could have done with the GCSE in Alcohol Appreciation for other reasons: for guidance.
When I was a teenager I didn’t really like alcohol. My mum used to try to encourage me to drink red wine with meals, but I didn’t like it (my friends, on the other hand, became rather keen to come to my house for dinner…). Unfortunately, being a teenager, I was additionally supposed to go to parties at which everyone got drunk, danced and snogged each other. I got invited to a few of these, and went along despite not wanting to partake in any of the above objectives. (I didn’t like alcohol yet; dancing was the most embarrassing activity on the planet; and the idea of snogging any of the male specimens from our school seemed quite alarming.) I always wore the wrong thing, after planning what I thought was the right thing for ages, was painfully shy, and at one party I decided to go and lie in the empty bath (because it was the only surface available that was not covered in snoggers), and read a book. So I decided I’d better learn to drink alcohol so that I, too, could talk nonsense very loudly and fall over and have a much better time in such situations than I was currently having while lying in a bath fully dressed reading a book.
I don’t think alcopops had quite been invented when I was a teenager. Hooch, the alcoholic lemonade, had been slightly invented, and someone I knew had bought some at the Spar, but then it was banned for a while, before being un-banned again shortly afterwards. This was confusing, and I think my parents had heavily condemned alcopops as disgusting (and I was a bit weird as a teenager – I tended to listen to my parents’ opinions), so I decided to try cider instead. I used to hang out with some morris dancers (of my parents’ age) in the pub on Thursday nights (yes, I was a big huge unfashionable geek when I was sixteen. I am very proud of this. It wouldn’t be the same these days – morris dancing is all popular) and during this time I learnt to drink halves of cider in between playing morris tunes on the viola, even though for morris you are really supposed to drink large quantities of real ale. (Debateably some ciders may fall into the category of sweet drinks I propose to ban, but I think it should be allowed because proper good cider actually tastes of apples.)
Just before I went to university, my mother sat me down at the table one afternoon and presented me with a can of Guinness. She poured it into a glass. She said I had to drink it, all of it, and was not leaving the table until I’d a) finished it and b) learnt to like it. Seriously: I am not exaggerating. She had decided that since students were prone to binge-drinking, and since she was convinced I was under-weight, that both problems would be solved if I liked Guinness, because it is alcoholic and nutritious. I thought, at the time, that it was disgusting.
Upon starting university, I was terrified of drinking the Incorrect Alcoholic Drink And Being Really Uncool. (This was before I realised that university is not school, nobody really cares what you drink there, and if you drink a terribly uncool drink you can get away with it by saying you’re drinking it ironically.) On the very first day we were all put into ‘meeting other people’ groups and sent to the bar to socialise. A tall, good-looking boy offered to buy a round of drinks for our group. ‘What does everyone want?’ he asked. Fortunately, a girl asked for a vodka and tonic before I was asked.
When it was my turn I said, ‘Er.. I’ll have a vodka and tonic as well please..’
‘It’s a good drink, isn’t it?’ said the girl before me, smiling and looking really friendly.
‘Yeah,’ I said nervously, having never before encountered or heard of a vodka and tonic in my life previously, and feeling as if large signs were going to descend from the ceiling with the words ‘liar’ and ‘fraud’ on them in big flashing lights.
I don’t think I’ve had a vodka and tonic since. I found a friend shortly afterwards who also drank cider, but halfway through the first term we mutually decided that it looked really uncool to drink cider, because, like, fourteen year olds did it, and we were now nineteen year old adults of maturiosity. We decided that the drink which would make us look the absolute coolest would be enormous, huge pints of manly Guinness (just as per instructions from my mother). So we learnt to drink Guinness, together. Nobody noticed how cool we were except large, leery, patronising older men who occasionally said, ‘You’re not going to drink all that, are you?’ to us in when we ordered it in the pub.
Having finally learnt to like Guinness, trying everything else was easy. Throughout the next few years I educated my alcoholic palate and damaged my liver by trying pretty much everything else I came across. This ranged from student simulations of ‘dinner parties’ (we cooked pasta in student kitchens, invited people over and all drank a bottle of wine each) to clubbing with 50p alcopops, to real ale in the folk session pub, to mixing-who-knows-what at parties until 6am. Eventually I have settled down to drinking approximately the same as my parents: wine, real ale and gin and tonic, with the addition of whisky (which my mother disapproves of) and continental lagers (which morris dancers disapprove of) and the occasional bloody mary. I don’t mix things or drink too much all the time any more because it makes me far too ill with hangovers, I don’t actually like being veryvery drunk, and I am far too old and boring and stuff.
I don’t really think this could all have been avoided by doing a GCSE in it. There would probably have been a rebellion against the officially recognised ‘good’ drinks, and the alcopops, Lambrini and Very Dodgy Punch At Parties would still have occurred. But I do think that something like that would have helped to normalise alcohol in my and plenty of other people’s first experience of it, and present it as part of everyday life and something of quality to be appreciated, like food, rather than primarily a tool with which to get well and truly plastered. In countries where they do give it to children from a young age, perhaps this is closer to how it is presented. It took me quite a while to understand this concept, I think.
Oh well. At least I know what I like now, and no longer care what is cool. I even drink cider sometimes.
I spend a lot of time thinking I really ought to improve in all three of these areas, but not knowing how to go about it efficiently. However, I have come up with one idea which will cover all three: Only Drink Alcohol When It’s Free. Thus, whenever a drink is required, I must attend some sort of event such as a gallery or exhibition opening, or aftershow party (which will lead to networking), or else be playing music at a function which provides free booze (which will lead to financial gain, in addition to the money saved by not buying any alcohol).
