Youth drinking and Occam’s razor
A flash of shocking insight from new government research:
According to government figures, the number of 11- to 15-year-olds drinking regularly fell from more than a quarter in 2001 to about a fifth in 2006. However, a third said they drank to get drunk.
However, a third said they drank to get drunk. Which makes me wonder if the government were entertaining the vain hope that there was another reason as to why 11- to 15-year-olds drink.
Did Whitehall boffins examine just what it is that 11- to 15-year-olds drink? Were they surprised to find that Britain’s kids aren’t savouring Mouton Rothschild ‘55? Did they have their fingers crossed that these children drink merely to savour the malty undertones of Stella Artois?
Anyone who claims they drink stuff like Stella for the taste is a liar anyway. God knows I’ve never made the claim - I’m not a completely tasteless idiot. Stella might be advertised as ‘reassuringly expensive’ but the 2-for-1 deals you can get in Tesco and Sainsbury’s make even a hardened old soak like me fall to my knees and weep joyous tears of thanks.
Look at the way it and beers like it are packaged. It’s a delivery system. It’s artillery designed for an assault on the grey lowlands that is modern living. You ride it like Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove to get where you want to be as fast as you can.
To look for any other reason as to why and how children drink is like expecting an unexploded cluster bomb to double up as a nursery. Sometimes things have only one reason, one purpose, to exist.
The government plans to give parents guidance on how much their children should drink is at least an admission that you can’t and won’t stop kids drinking overnight. A change of mindset is needed but just how you do that when 11- to 15-year-olds look to their elders see a large number of us also rolling around out of our skulls is a tough one. Take Michael Rock, Chairman of Conservative Future, the Tories’ youth wing, for example. He spent last Saturday having a drinking competition.
That the government doesn’t have the imagination or ideas to suggest or provide alternatives to getting pissed at age 12 is the depressing part. But then I’ve come to realise that modern government is much like being at the centre of a herd of wildebeest trying to cross the African savannah. You expect those on the fringes to get picked off by predators or fatigue or or disease or just sheer bad luck. And, of course, we can’t discuss individual cases.
Those at the centre of things will be fine and the tragedies are too far away to have any real emotional impact on them. I’m not condemning them - we all have to hide from something to get by day after day after all. We’re all in denial about something - it’s the emotional armour that allows us to get out of bed in a morning whether you’re the Prime Minister or a parent losing their son to boredom and cheap beer.
It’s just a question of keeping moving forward and hoping that nothing too serious threatens the herd as a whole. The rest of us just need to keep jostling to make sure we don’t find ourselves on the edge, whether that be jobless, homeless or legless. Rescues are rare and not guaranteed.
So what to do? Wine appreciation on the National Curriculum, anybody? Tupac Shakur as the new face of Vimto?
Posted on June 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 am
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Why did the other two-thirds drink?
ejh’s latest blog post… Aspirations
To get drunk, obviously. It’s just they were sober at the time they were asked the question - unlike the other third - and weren’t entirely honest with their questioners. In vino veritas, etc.
I did wine appreciation as part of the General Studies at school - far more interesting than any stupid PSE lesson.
http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com
Not just a drinking competition, a drinking competition with a convicted drink-driver currently under curfew. The party of law and order!
I think boredom is a bit of a false explanation to be honest. We’re not talking about loners unable to socialise and drinking whisky in a bedsit. These teenagers get drunk in large groups for entertainment value, it’s bizarrely seen as something to boast about and a subject for discussion.
The real problem is the drinking culture, drinking to get drunk is not just an adolescent thing and attitudes will take years to change. It is something they do differently on the continent and it has virtually nothing to do with the price of drink or licensing laws, both of which would suggest that drunkenness should be higher there. I think matters would improve if the big beer monopolies were smashed and the chain pubs along with them.
“I think matters would improve if the big beer monopolies were smashed and the chain pubs along with them.”
Done in 1989. Didn’t work all that well.
Anyway, 11-15yo’s don’t drink in the chain pubs. They drink in the park, on the pavement, by the river, at parties, and in the alleyway at the side of my flat. Some of the girls, and a very few of the boys (not that they’d want to), can get into uber-cheesy nightclubs; but they’ll get tanked up away from licensed premises before they head out, because they’ve hardly got any money.
ID checks in pubs are much stricter even than when I was a kid in the mid-90s, never mind in the 1970s. I suspect this may be part of the problem - if 15yo’s were drinking in pubs with their older brothers as per tradition, they’d be much soberer and more sensible than when surrounded by equally clueless vodka, cider and spesh drinkers in the park…
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Yes, I agree with you to some extent about age limits being too rigorously enforced, in more local pubs at least.
I think the problem with many chain pubs is that they contribute to the culture of ‘uncivilised’ drinking. Yates’ Wine Lodges are terrible, for example.
It is something they do differently on the continent and it has virtually nothing to do with the price of drink or licensing laws
I’m inclined to ascribe it to the weather. If you tried to drink in Zaragoza in July the way they do in (say) Nottingham you wouldn’t last half an hour, let alone round a tour of the city centre’s vertical drinking establishments. This being so, people learn a diffrent apporach.
ejh’s latest blog post… Aspirations
I should point out, though, that there is Stella and there is Stella. The imported stuff isn’t bad.
And why do our yooves get more pissed than their continental counterparts? To the extent that it is true, it is because they can afford it, that’s all.
Any idea what a bottle of wine costs where I live? Rather less than you’ll pay for a pint of lager in much of Britain.
ejh’s latest blog post… Aspirations
“I think the problem with many chain pubs is that they contribute to the culture of ‘uncivilised’ drinking. Yates’ Wine Lodges are terrible, for example.”
Agreed on both points, but that’s a 16-25yo issue not a 11-15yo issue.
“If you tried to drink in Zaragoza in July the way they do in (say) Nottingham you wouldn’t last half an hour, let alone round a tour of the city centre’s vertical drinking establishments.”
I’ve been to one of the many summer fiestas in Donostia (or San Sebastian, for the imperialists among us), at which the resident Basques were easily outdrinking, not to mention out-street-pissing, English small-town-ites. The only significant difference seemed to be the lack of people beating each other up…
john b’s latest blog post… Automatic comment generator
Not just a drinking competition, a Guinness drinking competition with Paul “I Guess That’s Why They Call Him” Staines. I’d pay to be a fly on any other wall.
“Why did the other two-thirds drink?”
Obviously not the ‘55, but the ‘61 accounted for all but 10% of the remainder.