This country in the iron grip of a pandemic; one that strikes down the young and the old alike with little regard for social strata or circumstance; one that our lawmakers, doctors and social scientists are doing their best to strategise against in pursuit of the greater public good.

I’m not talking about the coronavirus (although the two have become connected): I’m talking about alcoholism – specifically the pervasive cultural alcoholism in which we’ve all been drowning for most of the last century. Possibly even since time immemorial.

It isn’t until you break the spell of alcohol by ceasing or reducing your intake that you realise its ubiquity; how it’s stitched into the very fabric and rhythms of your life and conversation; how you’re likely to be viewed with suspicion or derision if your social life doesn’t revolve around some description of flavoursome, mind-altering douche-soup.

I defy you to scroll through an average thread on social media and not find at least one classic shot of a manicured hand gripped around the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps it’s ‘wine o’clock’. Maybe it’s been a ‘hell of a week’. You might even see a group-shot of some perfectly coiffured, elegantly dressed women huddling on a couch or around a cocktail-laden table, raising a toast to their own self-satisfied sophistication. Men are just as guilty of normalising problem drinking on-line and in person, although generally they don’t tend to put such a soft, Instagrammic sheen on things – cravat-wearing city slickers and snooty whiskey onanists being the clear exceptions.

Then – here in Scotland at least – there’s the cultural component. A Scotsman not taking a drink is like a Texan not standing for the US National Anthem. Or a Parisian not setting fire to things in response to a mild civic restriction.

So what’s this got to do with the coronavirus?

Well, as you’ve doubtless noticed, by government decree all pubs, clubs and restaurants must close their doors at 10pm, a decision that has precipitated a flood of memes and sarcastic comments along the lines of, ‘Aye, Covid only comes out after dark, right enough’. I must admit, there is indeed, on the surface of it, something comical about the thought of the virus donning a cowboy hat, kicking in the saloon doors at 22:01, firing its guns in the air and shouting, ‘Ye’v bin warned, varmits, this here is a Covid bar now! YEEHAW!’ Or the thought of the Purge alarm blaring into the night sky as bands of terrified drunken revellers try to dodge past legions of heavily-armed Covids on every street corner.

But, really, if you think about the curfew, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine what impact a 10pm curfew would have had on pre-corona Britain, never mind our present reality: fewer numbers of booze-ravaged men and women roaming the streets between 10pm and 6am, rubbing shoulders and various other body parts with friends and strangers alike, getting into arguments, getting into fights; sharing saliva and semen and sexual regret as if they were office Christmas cards.

If you’re looking to curb the excesses of human contact, both positive and negative, that prolonged exposure to alcohol brings, and to free up the hospitals from the depressing cavalcade of head-wounds and bleeding knuckles and alcoholic collapse that characterise an average weekend in this country – wholly preventative medical scenarios that  divert attention and resources from more serious medical cases, or make hospital-based transmissions of the virus more likely – then a curfew for licensed premises is a no-brainer.

I get that pubs are more than just places to get drunk. Pubs in small villages and towns can double up as social centres, places for people to meet, play cards, read the paper, sing and dance – the real life-blood of the community. My question would be, great: but why do we have to be pissed to do this?

Cultural Contrasts

Social media can be a cesspit of unsolicited opinions, simmering violence and half-baked half-truths (often helped along by the cyber-agents of other countries), but it’s still occasionally capable of smuggling hard nuggets of sense and reason into a debate. I suppose the cesspittyness of any given corner of the internet at least partly depends upon the people whose virtual call-signs you surround yourself with.

In any case, I stumbled onto a debate on Covid, masks and civil disobedience on a friend’s Facebook page the other week, and found it to be interesting and enlightening. A good chunk of it was about the difference between mask-wearing habits in the west and the east; how community spirit, compliance and cohesion appear to be hard-wired into, for example, south east Asians, perhaps on account of their long history of rice-cultivation for food and export, a field (forgive me) in which the key to success and survival was, and still is, co-operation.

Here in the UK we’ve a long tradition of embracing the malignant, mutant sense of individualism that has sprung, no doubt, from centuries of industrialisation, unfettered free-market capitalism and consumerism. It appears to be challenging for many people in the UK to imagine a world bigger than their own individual drives and desires. It wasn’t always thus, but it’s certainly thus now. We reject unity, nuance and sacrifice in favour of doing, well, whatever the fuck we want.

Ah’m no daein that!

There’s a sub-section of male society that regards the exercise of caution as tantamount to effeminancy. For example, Health and Safety exists and is enshrined in law – and upper management usually pay lip service to it – but in male-dominated industries, especially down at the literal or figurative coal-face, it exists in the same way that Norse legends do. Complaining about a ten-metre-long spike sticking out of a wall at head-height is less likely to lead to a change in company policy, and more likely to result in you being labelled ‘a wee cry-baby poof’.

A similar thing is happening with Covid. There’s a widespread feeling that the prissy egg-heads and boffins – with their glasses and their little dorky white coats – are a bunch of pussy-whipped scaredy cats who don’t have a bloody clue about how the real world works, and have no right to tell real men how to live their lives. Load ay shite aw that science, anyway. Ah saw a video on YouTube and it’s aw bollocks. Mair chance ae bein’ hit by a bus than getting’ that Covid, CAUSE IT DISNAE EXIST!

These are men who are distrustful of and resistant to authority as a baseline, whose reaction to most obstacles or restrictions, or even their own feelings, is a dismissive wave and a ‘FUCK OFF’. Just add more rules and try to subtract alcohol and witness the results.

Back in 2018 the World Health Organisation noted that Scottish alcohol consumption is among the highest in the world, with Scots guzzling more than 13 litres of pure alcohol a year. When considering alcohol unit pricing The Scottish government was even moved to concede that ‘alcohol is an integral part of Scottish life’, a rather depressing, and sobering, thought. Although it qualified this by saying that there is ‘clear evidence that for a large section of the Scottish population their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful – to individuals, communities and to Scotland as a nation’.

It is these people – many of whom are locked in a cycle of physiological, psychological or cultural dependency – that are perhaps strongly to blame for the further corona-curbing restrictions we’re facing: the problem drinkers souring the city streets; the students and younger people having raucous, jam-packed house parties; the chattering classes brazenly hosting large dinner parties.

It’s madness that our right to drink appears to be trumping the rights of vulnerable people to live their lives without fear; libraries and sports centres and community hubs to re-open; schools to remain operational. Granted, there are myriad other issues connected with this issue, from income disparity to institutionalised poverty to trauma to addiction, but still, the reality remains.

The biggest mistake the government could have made, in times like these, was to forgo legislation in favour of trusting the great and thirsty British public to police themselves.  Many of us can’t be trusted to think – and especially to drink – for ourselves. And we drink therefore we are

… selfish and disgraceful.

We need to have a long, hard look at ourselves and our relationship with alcohol, and get our priorities straight. And not just for the sake of halting the spread of the coronavirus.