The pubs have gone so why are we drinking as much as ever? – The Guardian

S

ome forgotten heroes or mistreated victims, if you prefer of the coronavirus outbreak are pubs. People who love pubs always said it was the atmosphere, not the alcohol, and people who didnt love them thought we were just spinning them a line. Now we have proof, because we are drinking as much as we ever did and yet we complain almost constantly.

That debate has ended, anyway, because the people who miss pubs now talk only to each other. We start off complaining about the pub, then segue, almost shyly, into: Are you managing to drink quite a lot? Jesus Christ, you should see the state of my recycling bin. It only got collected two days ago. Today I had to climb into it to compress the cans with my body weight. I actually cant carry as much beer as I want to drink, said one friend. One night, I ended up buying a bottle of gin.

Gin is the go-to spirit when you havent really dabbled in hard liquor since the vodka years, but arent yet ready to go quietly into a whisky soda. It has its own peculiar evocations. Another friend in the young-childcare phase peace be with her said she had banjaxed the classic parenting yardarm walking upstairs at bath time with a nappy in one hand and a corkscrew in the other and started having a really strong gin and tonic at 5pm. She said she stood at her kitchen door, feeling a deep connection to the generations of desperate, gin-soaked women that went before her her mother, her grandmother, all the way back to those hags of Hogarth. It was so poetic that it reminded me of about nine books, all of which end up with someone in prison.

Pubs were a useful corrective in the world of hedonism. You couldnt drink more until all the other people had finished. You didnt want to disappoint the barman. Beyond a certain age, you didnt want to push it all the way to closing time. They were what we had instead of a moral compass. I miss my local, the Canton Arms, so much I cant even walk past it.

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The pubs have gone so why are we drinking as much as ever? - The Guardian