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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 1 2001 03.26 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 1 2001
I love drinking and drinking loves me. I would even go so far as to say that drinking adores me, worships the ground I walk on, never wants to let me go. Throughout my adult life, drinking has remained committed and true. Unlike other things, certain people, drinking has never once forsaken me. It even waited patiently in the wings while I had my sordid little flings with Class As and Bs, smiling stoically as I washed them down with mineral water and danced the night away in sad little hot pants that would always turn tepid the moment the sun came up.
When I stopped all that, when I came to, drink was there waiting. No arguments, no recriminations, no cuckolded martyrdom, or tiresome postmortems about where things had gone wrong. We just got back together as if nothing had ever happened. And that's because drink is obsessed with me, and can't give me up. And I, in turn, have come to respect drink for its loyalty, ubiquity and legality, and for its ability to cheer me up when all else fails. Drink and I are good together, the happiest couple I know. Carve it on a tree: 'Babs and Booze. 2gevver 4ever'. Until death or cirrhosis do us part.
It may occur to some people that the time has come for me to attend AA meetings in fusty church halls, where I would be required to stand up and say: 'My name is Barbara, and I'm missing Coronation Street .' However, what they are forgetting is that boozers, unlike, say, junkies or spliffers, see the humorous side to having fun. Not for us the squalid self-mutilation of needles or the hippy drear of spliffing-up. Boozers like a laugh, and something that makes us laugh extra hard is pretending to consume far more than we actually do. We're the bragging fishermen of hedonism, forever with our arms outstretched: 'Last night, I drank... this much.' Junkies wouldn't do this. They would never say: 'The syringe was... this full.' And that's because, unlike alcohol, their poison of choice rots the soul, robbing a person of everything, leaving their sense of humour up on bricks, like a nice car in a bad neighbourhood.
One thinks of all this when one reads last week's hand-wringing, lip-chewing studies about the 'new breed of young professional females' who have the audacity to drink too much, get all lairy in wine bars, and then skive off work, suffering from near-death hangovers. First of all, I would argue with 'new'. Time was, when every generation thought that they'd invented sex, now they're trying to do the same with drinking heavily, and they're not going to get away with it. I have been having drinking 'adventures' for the past 15-odd years, and, let me tell you, I did not work alone. One way or another, women have been getting rat-arsed for almost as long as men have, but the puritanical world at large has only just deigned to start noticing.
If you ask me, all those complaints about hen party riots, and all-female groups kicking it up over their Baileys and potato skins, are just a smokescreen. What seems to be the main problem is that women are richer, more independent, more 'visible' these days. Some would have it that groups of females are becoming as intimidating as groups of males, but are we really to believe that women have exchanged chocolate oranges for all-female remakes of Clockwork Orange ? Ditto, the concerns over 'safety'. Yes, a drunk woman might be more likely to get into a fight, or into a strange bed. However, even when very drunk, if a woman sticks with her friends she is unlikely to end up in any more danger than usual of illness, assault, or unexpected sex. Every girl finds that out the first time she is sick on Babycham and ends up snogging the guy whom the barge pole never usually toucheth.
The real issue here seems to be that these women are out there, noisily and colourfully enjoying their new found freedom and pecunity. They are also, it seems, turning the idea of drink as sexual lubricant for inhibited Britain on its head. Note that there was little fuss when women were being plied with drink by rampant males, but the moment they ply themselves with drink, there's a hue and cry. More fundamentally, the Drinking Female goes against the idea of the perfect woman as being slim (invisible), quiet (invisible), and well-behaved (invisible). I am not arguing that every woman should be drunk - we should be fighting for equal rights to pay and conditions, not equal rights to heart disease and liver damage. However, in some curious way, the sober woman is the invisible woman, and I'll never drink to that.
