Why do we drink for England?

by James Brown Former editor of Loaded

FANCY a drink?

Fancy 16? Fancy a run around the square chucking chairs at riot police?

Then again, you could always come back to my place, I've got a 60- day lock-in with Big Brother, they're filming me, every drop I take, every flash of buttock. Check out the media, they're everywhere: Alcoholidays in the sun, reality TV based on Ollie Reed on After Dark. And it's not just the focus on Big Brother on 4 or big bother in Portugal, the excessive use of alcohol is everywhere.

We drink as we travel, in airports and stations, on planes and trains. We drink to celebrate and to commiserate. We drink as we eat, we drink because we haven't eaten, we drink until we can't eat, in fact we even drink until we show each other what we have eaten.

Many of us are genuinely alcoholic without realising it.

By the time we do, it's too late.

I used to love drinking too much, but after a while it stopped being funny. We aren't an All Bar One nation, we are an All Bar nation. Standing in the mob of paralytic sheep allows you to disguise this behaviour.

"Everyone does it," we're told, this is our ticket to binge.

Point the cameras away from the football and go and stick it in the student unions, the Army and Navy towns, the Oxbridge balls. Excessive alcohol intake knows no class barriers. Union leaders get tanked up and strike each other, royal princes drink until they're dancing on the table.

This is simplistic, but deep down perhaps there's so much a lcohol ic consumption because we can't get off our island: we're trapped. Or when we do, and end up in hot climes, we are so relieved to be away from our uptight country it's just the excuse needed to develop a hellbent thirst for excess, self-destruction and the good old taste of alcohol. The Germans call the British hooligans The Island Apes, so they clearly think it has something to do with it.

Psychologists, come to my aid. If Britain is the worst offender in the European Drinking Championships, surely our primary difference is that we're off the mainland floating on our own national branch of Threshers. Yes, the Irish are too, they like a drink more than the British, but they never conquered the world so they are without the arrogance that came with colonialism. Violent self-belief and a thirst for beer go hand in band to give us night after night of battle.

At all international football matches there's tribalism, patriotism, competition and alcoholic excess. It's a recipe for disaster but you can't just blame the mob. Mobs have been going on the rampage for hundreds of years, thousands.

Nowadays they just chuck plastic chairs and plastic beer pots, in the old days people got tanked up and stoned each other to death.

Every time there's a summer football championship, masses of men gather with long beers and short hair and go mental - and then the press wonders why.

Well, Mrs Merton had a point when she asked if George Best might not have drunk so much if he hadn't done so much running around.

If they started holding World Cups and Euro Championships in the heart of winter, things might not be so angry.

You know the lifestyle of our beer-belly boot boys might not look attractive, but the violence is understandable. We are educated in the UK to believe that we are the centre of the world, that we ruled the waves, that we invented everything and therefore should be the best at it. It's not long since the Rightwing press had darkest Africa as inferior to white man in every way possible. You can't bang on about this through our education system and then get upset when people believe and take matters into their own hands.

Aren't these thoughts the kindling that fires the flames of tribal violence? Look who we're descended from: Vikings crossed with the French.

That's magic mushrooms mixed with wine - a combination that never works (I'm speaking from experience here).

Think about the origins of football, townfolk from rival villages engaged in a daylong fight during which a pig's bladder was battled for from one village green to the next. It probably looked more like the running of the bulls in Pamplona than anything that goes on in The Stadium of Light, but we are talking about a historically brutal tribalistic game.

THEN there are the European wars.

Everyone hates each other for a century, then all the allies are swapped round and started again.

These are the principles behind the mind of the drunken football- mob members.

The alcohol is just the juice to get the engine going.

We are an alcoholic nation in denial. The Binge Culture is so self- destructive, so unacceptable if you really want a decent life. Maybe we're in a time when everyone's given up hope. Gin Lane: The Sequel, in which a nation of rascals and dossers take their fun-loving inebriated rampage abroad. I definitely think that if you were allowed to drink where and when you wanted, there would be less emphasis than there is under the current licensing laws on doing as much as possible in the limited space of time available.

As for excessive drinking on Big Brother, so what? They're just a bunch of no-mark showoffs desperate to lock themselves into a 24- hour media jail - you have to be drunk to watch it, never mind appear in it. And then again, isn't it supposed to be normal, the way we are?

I used to love drinking. I felt it gave me an identity. It washed away feelings, added extra confidence and made me the life and soul of the party that's what I thought anyway.

Only drink can tell you that the best way to make friends and influence people is to get drunk and chin them.

I admired the hell-raisers of the Sixties, the Peter O'Tooles, the Ollie Reeds with their amazing stories of excess.

They went on a European pub crawl, for God's sake, over three days, in a jet. When you're sitting with nothing but a pint to admire yourself in, the grand heroes of heroic alcoholism do indeed look glamorous.

There is, of course, another side. For every glamorous actor or rock star or sportsman with deep pockets to pay for rehab, there are a hundred losers covered in vomit lying dead in a gutter.

But this is how we so often rate ourselves: the drunker we are, the more impressive we consider it. It's weird. Where do you go from here, a nation in detox? Unless the individual recognises how bad they look and feel, nothing will change.

One nation under the booze.

We think we're great, but we look pathetic. Time, gentlemen, please.

(c)2004. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.