Morning:
8°c
“I can't do a long boozy lunch,” I told the friend awaiting me in a Soho restaurant.
“I've got an article to write on women and alcohol.”
The work stopped me drinking yesterday lunchtime but the story behind it — the death of PR executive Emma Pycroft of undetected liver disease at 33 — wouldn't have.
I'll still get invited to launches and lunches by Emma's colleagues.
Like hundreds of her peers and mine, I moved smoothly from cheap booze at university to free booze in London's media world — at private views, evening screenings or dinners.
I've had sherry for breakfast and 100-year-old beer before dinner and called both work.
When I go to an event, I expect there to be half-decent wine lasting at least a couple of hours, regardless of the news value of what is being launched.
I have a horrid sense of entitlement, and it's PRs' job to feed it.
PR isn't just a largely female profession — it is, in the old-fashioned sense, a feminised one.
Any PR, male or female, is expected to bustle around like a retrograde helpmeet, ensuring client and journalist are both as happy as the husband and his boss at a career-enhancing Fifties dinner party.
And when the event is over, they probably kick off their heels and drain every bottle in swigging distance.
But the answer isn't yet more huffing and puffing about binge-drinking women.
First, we should ban all talk of alcohol units, with a wry acknowledgement that drink is a drug — a confidence booster, a dream enhancer, a life destroyer — and therefore not terribly susceptible to packaging of this kind.
It's like pouring smoke into an ice tray, and about as helpful.
If you're an alcoholic, you're beyond caring about units.
If you're a social drinker, you don't count your units, because that's what alcoholics need to do.
And if you're a woman who likes a drink, you harbour a strong suspicion that the whole concept is simply a form of misogyny.
Otherwise, someone would have satisfactorily explained to me where these numbers (14 weekly units for women, 21 for men) actually come from, and how they factor in such variables as a five-foot-two-inch woman like me who has no trouble drinking six-foot men under the table. Should my unit allowance go up, or theirs down?
Second, we should teach young people to converse, drink and eat — and to connect correctly the three.
At university, I was expected to sound intelligent in supervisions and bubbly at cocktail parties — and at dinners, I was continually in trouble for being audible at all.
Apparently, I should have been shovelling my stomach-liner — sorry, dinner — faster and concentrating on getting out of halls and into the nearest pub.
If we don't learn to link these three vital functions (and yes, I consider drinking vital) at an age when we have nothing much else to concentrate on, when will we?
Certainly not when we have the pressures of work or the demands of partners and children to consider, and to escape into a quiet — or a raucous — drink.
And third, we should acknowledge the joyous variability of people.
Some prefer Picasso, some Vermeer; some drink pints, some fine Burgundy, and some don't drink at all.
London caters to every variation — and we should let it do so. Emma Pycroft was not a “PR party drinker”, as one newspaper called her: she was a successful career woman who was grievously unlucky.
Implicitly blaming her, or a drink culture, is simply trying to control the vagaries of existence — which is far more foolish than enjoying the odd drink.
Life is short and invariably fatal: savour it, glass in hand, while you can.
Nina Caplan is Arts Editor of Time Out.
Reader views (1)
If you have a weak liver and continue to drink heavily then you will die - it's nothing to do with bad luck or you being a bad person, just cause and effect. It's not just a matter of continuing to drink and be merry until one day you fall lifeless from you bar stool. Go visit a liver ward and see where that road ends.
- John, Welling, 12/06/2009 12:03
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