Alcohol

Doing good doesn’t always work out as expected. A regular entering his local pub takes pity on an old lady seemingly fishing with a bent stick and string in a kerbside pool of rain. He invites her in for a drink. As she raises her gin and Dubonnet, he asks amiably: ‘So how many did you catch today?’ ‘You’re the eighth,’ she replies. Imagine another pub scene. As lockdown is relaxed, a customer’s order of three pints of bitter and two G&Ts is refused by the landlord: ‘Sorry, Squire, but according to my government boozometer that takes you over your permitted weekly Alcoholic Spending Limit of £100. You signed for two rounds on Sunday.

At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken from my arm. I was then handed a plastic jar and a refreshing wipe and directed to the nearest unisex lavatory to give a urine sample (mid-stream). Then a nurse stuck a long cotton bud up my nose as far as it would go and twiddled it this way and that. Blood, urine and Covid tests were preparatory to a hospital admission for a procedure involving a general anaesthetic. Then I drove home and ate a kipper for breakfast. While I was eating, Catriona stuck a hypodermic needle in my upper arm and injected me with a flu jab she’d bought at the village pharmacy — the last one in the shop.

Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing, that basic and necessary human need for people to meet for a drink has never been so difficult. Now, with the government’s new three-tier Covid strategy in place, anyone at any moment could find their local pub shut, their parties cancelled, and all forms of indoor mixing prohibited. Millions in the UK are already living under these restrictions. It’s a fair bet that millions more will soon join them. And if the government gives in to demands for a ‘circuit breaker’ — a short-term lockdown — it would in effect totally suspend social drinking as we know it.

The one certainty about crisis is that it makes bad situations worse. Anyone working in restaurants, pubs, cafes and clubs that depend on alcohol sales will have noticed ominous developments before Covid-19 struck. Like so much else that matters, government policy has had nothing to do with the cultural change. The drying out of Britain has been fuelled by changes the authorities never initiated: greater awareness of the dangers to health, the growth of British Islam with its religious prohibitions, and the young turning away from their parents’ addictions. 20 per cent of people said they did not consume alcohol in 2017. The amount drinkers reported consuming had fallen by around 16 per cent since 2004.

‘How’s your day going?’ said the taxi driver as he snapped his knob into drive. If I caught the plane it would be a miracle. Angry with myself for failing once again adequately to plan a simple journey to Bristol airport, I decided to tell him. ‘Well, my mother is dying of cancer, my brother’s cancer has spread to his hip, and mine is showing signs of waking up. I’ve just had a tax bill for 30 grand, I’ve had three hours’ sleep in the last 36, and unless you get me to the airport in 40 minutes I’m going to miss a plane. Otherwise everything is tickety-boo.’ ‘So where are you off to today?’ he said, sincerely envious. ‘France,’ I said. ‘France!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you like wine?

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would guess, of around 500. A quarter of the company — two of the men — had been officially diagnosed as suffering from one form or another of dementia. We whose brains still neatly fitted the inside of our skulls were instead prey to all the usual anxieties, delusions, depressions and addictions typical of those wealthy, late middle-aged English people who exist in the strange limbo of expatriation. We sat there facing each other across the dinner table on the last day of the year, knackered, it’s true, each drifting aimlessly in a private universe of his or her own devising.