A terrible crisis looms on the horizon. A grin spreads across its slavering maw as it contemplates the tiny band of youths poised to defend their God-given rights. What are these rights you ask? Why, the right to pass out on the floor of a stranger, stained by your own vomit! The right to say extremely rude things to extremely unpleasant people without fear of reprisal! The right to cavort in a most indecent manner with people who would normally make you wretch! All these things and more have come under the scrutiny of this aforementioned monster. It casts its baleful gaze across the vast expanse of teenage enjoyment and says: "Enough!"
The identity of this monster: none other than our own government. None other than the Scottish nationalists who so nobly abolished tuition fees so that Scotland's young scholars could learn without the dark cloud of yet more debt threatening them with its cascading torrents. God forbid this was an attempt to soften our resistance! God forbid in equal measure if they expect us to thank them for their new plan! Now, sit back and allow my finely distilled, single malt argument to wash over you...
SNP. Scottish Nationalist Party. The party dedicated to the well-being of our country and preserving its cultural identity. The very same party who desired an utterly independent Scotland, free from the greasy clutches of Westminster. This concept was, of course, miscarried soon after conception, but Mr. Salmond clearly failed to notice the death throes of his political love child, writhing inside him. Scottish independence, despite the support of villain-thwarting, cocktail-recipe-specifying, dragon-voicing Sir Sean Connery, was a tremendous flop, which was an immense relief to anyone sensible enough to oppose it.
Let us hope this pattern of political dunderheadedness continues.
Plans have been drafted and research meticulously carried out with regard to improving Scotland's appalling binge-drinking problem. The idea is that anyone under the age of twenty-one will be forbidden by law from purchasing alcohol in off-licences, supermarkets and the like. They will still be able to purchase a pint in a pub (accidental alliteration...there I go again...) but, of course, this shall be at the discretion of the publican. There are numerous angles from which to observe and criticise this. On the one hand, these plans should do a fair job of digging out the troublesome problem of twelve-year-olds having their older friends buy their half bottle of vodka for them. This is a good thing really. Inebriated twelve-year-olds are unsightly and can really spoil a pleasant evening stroll through a park. Yet, what of the eighteen-year-olds who can currently buy alcohol for themselves. Twelve-year-olds drink in parks because they cannot possibly drink in their own homes. Social services would swoop down upon their unsuspecting parents, eyes blazing with bureaucratic fury behind comically large spectacles if they did. Eighteen-year-olds can, in many cases, drink in their own homes. They are unlikely there to selfishly unravel the fabric of society. In the comfort of their own homes, eighteen-year-olds can have a relaxing drink with friends, learning respect for alcohol and obtaining valuable experience and knowledge of their own tolerances. By the time they are twenty-one they will know their limits and will by-and-large stick to them. Of course, on certain special occasions one might be permitted to venture into the no-man's land beyond the boundary set by one's liver. This need not be a problem...in one's home! In a pub! A pub presents all manner of unpredictable variables. A sensible eighteen year old girl can have a glass of wine and retain almost all of her common sense. The same cannot be said for the greedy opportunist waiting for her to leave her drink unattended. There are rarely potential rapists in one's home. Unless of course one is a potential rapist. Similarly, a young man may have a pint with his friends and on his way to the bathroom, upset a grizzled drunk with a trivial bump to the shoulder. Despite profuse apologising there is no assurance that this drunk will not create a bit of a scene. Grizzled drunks are also a rarity in most homes. Are Scotland's young people really safer in a pub than in their own front rooms?
Yet this new proposal of the Scottish Parliament appears more about protecting our livers. Groups of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds cannot really afford to get drunk in a pub regularly. That would be financial sodomy! It follows suit then that they will get drunk less often if they are denied access to Somerfield's shelves of cheap booze and buy-one-get-one-frees. Fair point.
But not everyone who buys two crates of beer intends to become paralytic by dawn. Two crates of twenty beers between ten friends equals (I shall insult you intelligence by telling you) four beers each. Not exactly going to provide for a hedonistic orgy of boozing and unprotected sex is it? It will provide for a relaxed atmosphere and, depending on the friends, an evening of sterling banter! Are our leaders intending to deny us this small trifle? Do they really seek to rob us of this simple pleasure? To do the same in a pub would cost anywhere in the region of a tenner a head! It's simply barbaric.
Let's also, please, not forget the social and cultural side of this topic. Getting drunk is fun. There. I said it. I have said, and it is here for the entire Internet surfing world to read should they find it, what nobody would dare say in opposition to these new proposals. Drinking is the cornerstone of student life. How else to escape the suffocating pressure of exams and homework assignments and Olympian workloads than a relaxing drink in a friend's living room.
A point put forward in a column of a student newspaper a short while ago drew attention to the fact that Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and even Oscar Wilde all enjoyed a drink. It is as integral a part of human culture as literature, music or any art form. It is one of life's completely unnecessary pleasures. The human race could have survived without Mozart, but it would have been fairly dull. We could survive as a society without alcohol...but would it be all that great?
I have a theory. Any and all comments are welcome on this theory and here it is. Government would have you believe Scotland's youth is plagued by three ills: obesity, sex and alcohol. This seems reasonable.
Now, for years we have tried, as a country, to promote healthy eating. School canteens have gone through vast changes to accommodate Government legislation but the only real result was the emotional upheaval of thousands of spoiled and portly children who were given salad instead of chips.
Campaigns to encourage the use of contraception appear to have been thwarted rather ironically by their own impotence, unable to fully enter the collective consciousness of ravenously horny Scottish youth and ejaculate their important message.
Unlike these two mighty social leviathans, alcohol failed to evade the binding chains of Parliamentary power. To pass laws on eating would make a mockery of human rights. Despite laws forbidding sex before the age of sixteen, there is no way of preventing it, again, without defecating on the notion of human rights. Alcohol, however, was caught unawares and imprisoned in a labyrinthine prison complex of law and order. Despite being a "major cause" of both of the above (I shall denounce this fact shortly) it was the only one which the government could control...and it prepares to do so with a new ruthlessness. The government cannot control the other two and so, as much for the sake of its global image as anything else, is cracking down on one of them in a blatant display of discrimination!!!
Alcohol, were it human, would no doubt be portrayed as a combination of the horrible rapist mentioned above and the grizzled drunk, similarly mentioned. I believe this is wholly unfair. Alcohol does not change you. There is a reason why there are things you would say drunk that would soil you mouth were you sober. Alcohol does not, cannot, change you. It enhances you. It intensifies you. It creates pure you. Pure you without the dilution of social etiquette. Every drunk thing you do is entirely in character. Every single word, every action, every nuance of behaviour is flat-out, no-holds-barred YOU.
How?
Why?
Well, we are all extremely complex. We are all dice with infinite faces. It is just that we choose to stifle certain parts. I, for instance, try desperately to hide the pompous, grumpy bugger hiding just below the surface of the painstakingly polite and considerate gentleman you see on an everyday basis. Many very macho men, amongst whom I cannot count myself, hide quite extreme sensitivity beneath their shaved heads and barrel-like chests. The "I Love Mum" tattoos? The fingers covered in rings? All are outward signs of inner sensitivity. If you don't believe me then please do not try to prove me wrong. You may well manage to, but you will be horribly disfigured in the attempt.
My point, from which I seem to have strayed considerably, is that alcohol is not to blame for society's problems. Alcohol is a liquid microscope which reveals hidden problems too tiny and hidden to perceive with the naked eye.
Scotland is not a hot-bed of knife-crime because of alcohol. It is a hot-bed of knife-crime because there are many angry people living here, and because there are twisted people willing to exploit this for profit. British crime is actually at its lowest in decades. Only knife crime stands alone in its own category, so vast a problem is it. But the government should spend more time fixing deep-rooted social problems and freeing people from restrictions rather than imposing new and more rigid barriers. They should target the parents of twelve-year-olds who knowingly allow their children to put themselves in danger, and the parents of the teenagers who hide knives in their rooms. These problems are not so insidiously subtle as we are often told. They are obvious on the streets, they must be obvious in the home.
I have very much tired my brain with this Blog entry and the typing has reduced my fingers to bloody stumps... I hope I have not been an incoherent mess throughout all this and I hope equally that you understand my argument. It is pointless restricting the majority to cure the minority.
Well, it is a Saturday afternoon and I may have a nap before I go out...then I shall revel in the beauty of one of the few universal cultural pleasures in this world. Or, in the words of a good friend of mine: "Famous an' Coke please!"
'Til next time.
The identity of this monster: none other than our own government. None other than the Scottish nationalists who so nobly abolished tuition fees so that Scotland's young scholars could learn without the dark cloud of yet more debt threatening them with its cascading torrents. God forbid this was an attempt to soften our resistance! God forbid in equal measure if they expect us to thank them for their new plan! Now, sit back and allow my finely distilled, single malt argument to wash over you...
SNP. Scottish Nationalist Party. The party dedicated to the well-being of our country and preserving its cultural identity. The very same party who desired an utterly independent Scotland, free from the greasy clutches of Westminster. This concept was, of course, miscarried soon after conception, but Mr. Salmond clearly failed to notice the death throes of his political love child, writhing inside him. Scottish independence, despite the support of villain-thwarting, cocktail-recipe-specifying, dragon-voicing Sir Sean Connery, was a tremendous flop, which was an immense relief to anyone sensible enough to oppose it.
Let us hope this pattern of political dunderheadedness continues.
Plans have been drafted and research meticulously carried out with regard to improving Scotland's appalling binge-drinking problem. The idea is that anyone under the age of twenty-one will be forbidden by law from purchasing alcohol in off-licences, supermarkets and the like. They will still be able to purchase a pint in a pub (accidental alliteration...there I go again...) but, of course, this shall be at the discretion of the publican. There are numerous angles from which to observe and criticise this. On the one hand, these plans should do a fair job of digging out the troublesome problem of twelve-year-olds having their older friends buy their half bottle of vodka for them. This is a good thing really. Inebriated twelve-year-olds are unsightly and can really spoil a pleasant evening stroll through a park. Yet, what of the eighteen-year-olds who can currently buy alcohol for themselves. Twelve-year-olds drink in parks because they cannot possibly drink in their own homes. Social services would swoop down upon their unsuspecting parents, eyes blazing with bureaucratic fury behind comically large spectacles if they did. Eighteen-year-olds can, in many cases, drink in their own homes. They are unlikely there to selfishly unravel the fabric of society. In the comfort of their own homes, eighteen-year-olds can have a relaxing drink with friends, learning respect for alcohol and obtaining valuable experience and knowledge of their own tolerances. By the time they are twenty-one they will know their limits and will by-and-large stick to them. Of course, on certain special occasions one might be permitted to venture into the no-man's land beyond the boundary set by one's liver. This need not be a problem...in one's home! In a pub! A pub presents all manner of unpredictable variables. A sensible eighteen year old girl can have a glass of wine and retain almost all of her common sense. The same cannot be said for the greedy opportunist waiting for her to leave her drink unattended. There are rarely potential rapists in one's home. Unless of course one is a potential rapist. Similarly, a young man may have a pint with his friends and on his way to the bathroom, upset a grizzled drunk with a trivial bump to the shoulder. Despite profuse apologising there is no assurance that this drunk will not create a bit of a scene. Grizzled drunks are also a rarity in most homes. Are Scotland's young people really safer in a pub than in their own front rooms?
Yet this new proposal of the Scottish Parliament appears more about protecting our livers. Groups of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds cannot really afford to get drunk in a pub regularly. That would be financial sodomy! It follows suit then that they will get drunk less often if they are denied access to Somerfield's shelves of cheap booze and buy-one-get-one-frees. Fair point.
But not everyone who buys two crates of beer intends to become paralytic by dawn. Two crates of twenty beers between ten friends equals (I shall insult you intelligence by telling you) four beers each. Not exactly going to provide for a hedonistic orgy of boozing and unprotected sex is it? It will provide for a relaxed atmosphere and, depending on the friends, an evening of sterling banter! Are our leaders intending to deny us this small trifle? Do they really seek to rob us of this simple pleasure? To do the same in a pub would cost anywhere in the region of a tenner a head! It's simply barbaric.
Let's also, please, not forget the social and cultural side of this topic. Getting drunk is fun. There. I said it. I have said, and it is here for the entire Internet surfing world to read should they find it, what nobody would dare say in opposition to these new proposals. Drinking is the cornerstone of student life. How else to escape the suffocating pressure of exams and homework assignments and Olympian workloads than a relaxing drink in a friend's living room.
A point put forward in a column of a student newspaper a short while ago drew attention to the fact that Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and even Oscar Wilde all enjoyed a drink. It is as integral a part of human culture as literature, music or any art form. It is one of life's completely unnecessary pleasures. The human race could have survived without Mozart, but it would have been fairly dull. We could survive as a society without alcohol...but would it be all that great?
I have a theory. Any and all comments are welcome on this theory and here it is. Government would have you believe Scotland's youth is plagued by three ills: obesity, sex and alcohol. This seems reasonable.
Now, for years we have tried, as a country, to promote healthy eating. School canteens have gone through vast changes to accommodate Government legislation but the only real result was the emotional upheaval of thousands of spoiled and portly children who were given salad instead of chips.
Campaigns to encourage the use of contraception appear to have been thwarted rather ironically by their own impotence, unable to fully enter the collective consciousness of ravenously horny Scottish youth and ejaculate their important message.
Unlike these two mighty social leviathans, alcohol failed to evade the binding chains of Parliamentary power. To pass laws on eating would make a mockery of human rights. Despite laws forbidding sex before the age of sixteen, there is no way of preventing it, again, without defecating on the notion of human rights. Alcohol, however, was caught unawares and imprisoned in a labyrinthine prison complex of law and order. Despite being a "major cause" of both of the above (I shall denounce this fact shortly) it was the only one which the government could control...and it prepares to do so with a new ruthlessness. The government cannot control the other two and so, as much for the sake of its global image as anything else, is cracking down on one of them in a blatant display of discrimination!!!
Alcohol, were it human, would no doubt be portrayed as a combination of the horrible rapist mentioned above and the grizzled drunk, similarly mentioned. I believe this is wholly unfair. Alcohol does not change you. There is a reason why there are things you would say drunk that would soil you mouth were you sober. Alcohol does not, cannot, change you. It enhances you. It intensifies you. It creates pure you. Pure you without the dilution of social etiquette. Every drunk thing you do is entirely in character. Every single word, every action, every nuance of behaviour is flat-out, no-holds-barred YOU.
How?
Why?
Well, we are all extremely complex. We are all dice with infinite faces. It is just that we choose to stifle certain parts. I, for instance, try desperately to hide the pompous, grumpy bugger hiding just below the surface of the painstakingly polite and considerate gentleman you see on an everyday basis. Many very macho men, amongst whom I cannot count myself, hide quite extreme sensitivity beneath their shaved heads and barrel-like chests. The "I Love Mum" tattoos? The fingers covered in rings? All are outward signs of inner sensitivity. If you don't believe me then please do not try to prove me wrong. You may well manage to, but you will be horribly disfigured in the attempt.
My point, from which I seem to have strayed considerably, is that alcohol is not to blame for society's problems. Alcohol is a liquid microscope which reveals hidden problems too tiny and hidden to perceive with the naked eye.
Scotland is not a hot-bed of knife-crime because of alcohol. It is a hot-bed of knife-crime because there are many angry people living here, and because there are twisted people willing to exploit this for profit. British crime is actually at its lowest in decades. Only knife crime stands alone in its own category, so vast a problem is it. But the government should spend more time fixing deep-rooted social problems and freeing people from restrictions rather than imposing new and more rigid barriers. They should target the parents of twelve-year-olds who knowingly allow their children to put themselves in danger, and the parents of the teenagers who hide knives in their rooms. These problems are not so insidiously subtle as we are often told. They are obvious on the streets, they must be obvious in the home.
I have very much tired my brain with this Blog entry and the typing has reduced my fingers to bloody stumps... I hope I have not been an incoherent mess throughout all this and I hope equally that you understand my argument. It is pointless restricting the majority to cure the minority.
Well, it is a Saturday afternoon and I may have a nap before I go out...then I shall revel in the beauty of one of the few universal cultural pleasures in this world. Or, in the words of a good friend of mine: "Famous an' Coke please!"
'Til next time.
1 comment:
Oh shut it Jamie!! Us Americans have been dealing with it for a long time now! And, after living with you for a semester and watching you down a liter of Tesco's finest white rum (poor decision in my opinion) I think you could use a little restraint! You obviously must have observed the exquisite self control I exhibited during that time (excluding the gin incident and the number of pint glasses that I stole) and I have the wonderful (and I must say quite flawless) U.S. government to thank for that restraint that allows me to be a well respectable and upstanding citizen!
Its about time you had to suffer from not being able to drink whenever you want!
But seriously I hope that 18 year olds everywhere will someday be able to enjoy going to their local Tesco and buying their finest!
Good luck!!
Sincerely,
Brett
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