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A bit of bingeing can be good for you
Binge-drinking goes against every uptight principle of our therapeutic society.

...What is it about getting drunk that today's society finds so hard to handle? It isn't as though we live in a nation of feckless alcoholics, too sodden to pour themselves out of bed and into work in the morning. For all the government's dire warnings about rising rates of liver cirrhosis and general alcohol-related health calamities, we should remember (again) that in reality, we are living longer and healthier lives than ever before.

And Britain 2005 is hardly a hotbed of inebriated violence. On 11 January, a judge grabbed the headlines by attacking legalised 24-hour drinking on the grounds that easy access to alcohol is breeding 'urban savages' and turning town centres into no-go areas (2). The basis for his claim? That he was sentencing three men convicted of vicious assaults while out drinking and drug-taking after the European Championships, which left one of their victims in a coma. Maybe this judge knows more about town centres and urban savagery than the rest of us - even so, he surely must believe that behaviour like that above is the exception rather than the rule.

What we do have is a society in which sometimes, and for a variety of reasons, people like to drink to get drunk. Not because they think that wine goes better with dinner than Ribena; not because they want to relax a little after a hard day's white-collar work; not because they believe the studies about a glass of red being good for their hearts (but two pints of lager being very bad indeed); but because they want to get off the plane of existence that is normal, humdrum, everyday life, and into that parallel universe of inebriation. What's wrong with doing that once in a while? Nothing. Indeed, there is a good deal that is very right about it....

...It is not the consequences of drunkenness that make it a modern bogeyman, but its simple out-of-controlness. For a political class hell-bent on micro-management of all aspects of everyday life, in thrall to etiquette, suspicious of spontaneity, and living by the code of 'everything in moderation', the image of the carefree drunk is one that it cannot comprehend, still less empathise with. For the rest of us, for whom the odd bender is not a political statement but a welcome fact of life, we should resist the temptation to buy into the cult of 'responsible drinking' and remember what we are doing in the pub in the first place.

Already, there are too many twentysomething women on broken detox diets crying into their alcopops about how they know they drink too much. There are too many single men staying 'just for the one' before driving home to their X-box and pizza-and-Pepsi meal deal. There is too much consensus that we need to change the licensing laws because we have a cultural 'drinking problem' (rather than simply changing the law to allow us to have a drink when we want it). There is too much no smoking at the bar, no swearing at the bar, no standing at the bar and no going to the bar too many times.

We know that, every now and then, one very important reason to drink is to get drunk. We know that people with lost inhibitions generally don't get raped, beaten up or bankrupt, but generally do become sexier, funnier, more honest and more sociable (even if they appeal only to other drunk people). And we know that humdrum everyday life is often better escaped from in a pub with colleagues, friends and strangers than obsessed upon over a nice bottle of wine with a therapist or mentor.

So let's leave the official preoccupations with when we drink, how much we drink and why we drink to the medics, judges, politicians and policemen, and carry on drinking as we choose.