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A woman has become the first person to be banned from buying or drinking alcohol anywhere in England and Wales.
Laura Hall, 20, was issued with a Drinking Banning Order - nicknamed Booze Asbos - which bars her from entering any pub, club, off-licence or bar.
The two-year order also bans Hall from buying alcohol at any other establishment or shop, carrying it in an unsealed container or drinking it in a public place.
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A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year found that female binge drinking had almost doubled over the last decade. According to Government statistics, the number of women involved in alcohol-related crime rose 30 per cent between 2005 and 2007.
OK, there's a golden mean somewhere. But the English are well off to one side and sliding fast. I lived in East London so far to the east that I feared that if I fell over I'd land in France. We're talking, in terms of my childhood years, the wilderness of England, a land so uptight that there was no music in church, it being sinful and self-indulgent and distracting from the serious business of Christianity. Last time there, the club across the street disgorged ladies onto the street that left the pavement thick with puke and the detritus of spilt purses and lost and single high-heeled shoes. Those women were not just staggering drunk but falling down and vomiting and screaming drunk. We're talking a nice, middle-class suburb.
There's a Leftist meme circulating in this city that drunkenness is the result of colonialism on native peoples, those whose culture is destroyed, leaving them in a cosmic state of total despair from which they are not able to recover themselves. That's a typical pseudo-intellectual laziness of mind that one expects of Leftists. but there's almost a case to be made on the same thesis that this is what's happening to the British; that they're colonized by Islam, and in a state of profound depression leading to mass suicide. I'll pass on it. I see it as a matter of conformity to the group: that getting drunk and puking is just all right with the mates, and drunk it is. It'll take sober men to say no. But why would they? That would be so "Sarah Palin." So much cooler, the bad Dexter.
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Drinking, among other things, used to have a purpose in the UK, loosening things up, allowing for socializing, mediating tensions, mixing things up, and getting the job done. Now they just get drunk because they have no purpose and there is nothing left to loosen. They are still looking to the old ritual, hoping it can somehow bring the magic back...
Churchill quotes:
[Said during a lunch with the Arab leader Ibn Saud, when he heard that the king’s religion forbade smoking and alcohol]
"I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them."
[Triumph and Tragedy]
Alcoholism on a grand scale isn't new to Britain, the Gin Plague being a good past example. But throughout most of my life and that of my grandparents' generation as well, going to the pub was a social occasion during which one could stand up and sign sea chanties while someone played the piano and men showed off their fine voices. A couple of pints would last an enjoyable evening, whereas a couple of pints of wine would leave a big man stupid, and a couple of pints of hard liquor would leave a big man near death.
But those were times when men liked women; and men and women had to get up in the morning and attend to family life. Who can like these women now? And judging by the costumes men wear in public, what sober woman would care to be with such a fool as so many men are unless she were blind drunk?
I've seen some Beauty in my travels: a woman no one could think of as anything but ugly to look at, telling me her husband wasn't much to look at, "But I likes him." And she was happy. So was he. Sober. I get high just recalling her looking at him, tender and sweet.
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