Anne Perkins: ‘I don’t get drunk, and I don’t recall being really drunk since I was about 17’
35-40 units per week
Sally Davies knew what she was up to, heaping guilt on to bleary revellers and allowing we dry Januarians a moment of public preening before friends start the eye-rolling again. Like the Ikea boss who was a self-confessed alcoholic but dried out for a month a year, it is possible that I stop in order to reassure myself that I can. Alcohol, who needs it?
But the boundary between enjoying and needing is even hazier than the number of units in a glass of wine. I know I drink more than the old guidelines recommended, and much, much more than the new ones: probably about half a bottle of wine most nights, enough for my GP to be reminded by her computer to ask me how much I drink each time I see her. If I don’t drink, it is because some conversations are better when you are sharp. Just as some are more fun when you aren’t.
I don’t get drunk, and I don’t recall being really drunk since I was about 17 and spent a day on a beach with no food and a lot of cider. We grew up in a cheery guilt-free drinking atmosphere. Each evening one of us poured our father a glass of gin (“just wave the Martini bottle at it”). We drank wine from an early age. In our 20s, we drank more regularly than my daughters do now. We admiringly shared friends’ shocking stories of excess, but not many of us got plastered, not often anyway.
We definitely didn’t do that pre-drinking thing that kids do, not least because drinking was a pricey way of having fun in the 70s. Now the culture is becoming simultaneously more abstemious and more drunken. A large glass of wine at the theatre is the size of a vase, and if you order four glasses, it’s cheaper just to buy the bottle. Meanwhile friends with whom I have shared so many long, joyous and boozy lunches are slowly, and disappointingly, drying out.
Mark Rice-Oxley: ‘Drink was second only to air, a badge of honour, a rite of passage’
25 units per week
Drink has always featured. It was there in half pints as early as 1984, easily siphoned off from the murky depths of the kitchen beer sphere. Living in the Soviet Union in the early 90s, it was there in drinkware filled with vodka through a bitter black earth winter. It was there in flutes and highball glasses to take the edge off the parenting. And for a parent of young kids, 14 units is nothing. Units are in the kitchen, for standing bottles on.
But I was never too worried about alcohol. I think it’s a generational thing. Fortysomethings are the booziest people in the UK. I have no data to back this up, just decades of anecdotes. Our parents deal in G&T measures, or bottles of plonk rarely drunk to the bottom. They drank halves in pubs, never binged. Our kids are different too. They’re too scared of the future to be too dissolute. I’m having a devil of a time getting my oldest to even drink shandy.
But Gen X is different. Drink was second only to air, a badge of honour, a rite of passage, a tremendous bonding agent, usually hilarious. We have little to fear from common sense drinking. The really dangerous thing is habit. It’s the same with cigarettes, pastries, caffeine, red meat, cheeses, all the things we’re supposed to give up: when they become habit, we cease to enjoy them and they start to enjoy us.
And so I am generally to be found doing battle with habit and not with any particularly commodity. A day a week, a week a month and a month a year off the drink works nicely. Dry January is a bit gimmicky now but it works for me and it’s actually rather straightforward and quite interesting.
Maybe I’m a lucky drinker. But few people I know who drank to excess in the 80s and 90s seem to be regretting it now. A Russian roommate died at 23. But that’s Russia. This is Britain. My circle now will look at the 14 unit advice and laugh: it’s our life, we’re healthy enough, something’s going to get us in the end, but we’ll drink heartily until it does. Drinking guidelines are an ill-judged attempt to protect people from themselves, to help them live an extra 30 years in misery.
But life itself is dangerous. No one survives.
Hannah Jane Parkinson: ‘I know there’s a link between excessive drinking and breast cancer. I just don’t think about it’
35 units per week
Prosecco in the summer. Mulled wine fireside in the winter. Cocktails with random men whose job one does not fully understand the rest of the time. Defiant shots after the last tube. I drink a lot.
David Hockney, though not a heavy drinker, is almost as famous for his pro-smoking stance as he is for azure Los Angeles swimming pools. Defending his cigarette habit, he once said: “We are all going to die, and this luckily comes at the end of life.”
It’s an aphorism I hold close to my heart. I’m 26 and thanks to the myopic sense of indomitableness that comes with youth, I am not haunted by the long-term health effects of too many nights in the pub. I know that there’s a significant link between excessive drinking and breast cancer; I just don’t think about it.
As a quasi-libertarian, I’m not too keen on overbearing state intervention. The French, for instance, have no alcohol guidelines. You probably guessed that. But we cannot deny the burden alcohol-related illness places on the NHS or the success of the smoking ban.
There’s an argument that raising taxes might help lower consumption, but I doubt that. Some say this would hit the poor hardest. This might not be true, simply because there’s evidence it’s the wealthier middle-aged who are getting trashed on a nightly basis.
Anyway, something incredible has happened. I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in two weeks. It’s nothing to do with “New Year, New Me!” (stop it), nor government guidelines, but rather that after a succession of December booze-ups I needed a break. It was a personal choice.
I realised it was not advisable to be living as though the Kinks’ Have Another Drink is the soundtrack to the film of my life. I don’t know how long this will last, but I want it to be longer than the month. And so far – I’m doing well. Raise a glass to me.
Zoe Williams: ‘We would routinely drink our week’s units by 5pm on a Monday’
21 units per week
When I started drinking, it was in a very competitive spirit: to be more exact, I commenced drinking as a competition – who can drink this the fastest? – and continued in roughly that spirit throughout my education. When I first started work at the Evening Standard in the 90s, we would all, routinely, have drunk our week’s units by 5pm on a Monday. I probably drank about 70 or 80 units a week. At Christmas 1996, I wrote a drinking diary, amping it up a bit to be festive, and drank 183 units in a week.
It’s just not possible to drink that much without a round-the-clock peer group, so freelance in the 00s I sometimes stuck by government guidelines and mainly didn’t. I always went with the Swedish rather than the UK government – 21 weekly units for a woman, rather than 14 – reasoning it was different because Swedes were more sensible and larger, and I, too, am sensible and large. I got pregnant in 2007 and wrote a lot about the senselessness of the guidelines, which were for the gravid then what they are for the general population now: “there is no safe lower limit”, as if there’s a safe lower limit for anything.
Once I had two children I didn’t have time for my busy drinking schedule, and at the end of 2013 made a resolution to spend more of the week off than on. That was the only time I’ve ever written a book that wasn’t just ripped-off columns I’d already done. When, in 2015, the book failed to have the impact I desired (a peaceful revolution led by 40-year-olds), I went back to drinking whatever I wanted, which is probably about 21 units a week, certainly never less than that, sometimes that in two nights.
These guidelines I mind not because I dispute the raised cancer rates caused by even moderate drinking, but because I find the fixation with self-preservation – this notion that all our efforts should be concentrated on our own longevity – unseemly and solipsistic.
Priya Elan: ‘I was mortified. I don’t think either of us drank white wine for about two years after that’
14 units per week
When I was 14 years old I got hideously drunk for the first time with my best friend Mike. We huddled in my living room watching Shallow Grave, swigging cheap white wine (either stolen from Mike’s parents’ kitchen or bought illegally from the local Budgens. I can’t remember). As we ate turkey burgers, the plot shifted in and out of focus of our increasingly blurry field of vision. By the time Mike’s mum turned up to pick him up from my house, he was passed out in the hallway lying in the foetal position and moaning like a tiny bird. I was mortified. I don’t think either of us drank white wine for about two years after that.
I remember other teen initiations into the world of drinking (swigging ‘G and V’ – gin and vodka – out of a sad water bottle with a friend en route to a party, a tipsy evening that included eating a whole box of liqueur chocolates and sipping from a hip flask filled with Jim Beam: ugh) but this first experience is the one most clearly etched in my mind. Growing up, my dad- who’s from Sri Lanka - absorbed Britishness like a Zelig and drinking was part of that. First beer (I remember big 80s cans of Budweiser lying around the house), then semi-pretentious red wine (he used to love a Zinfandel). Today, as a dad of a one year old, my relationship to drinking can be likened to that of an old friend you see infrequently: weeks go by with no contact and then bang - you have one big night together. But back then I was naive as to how much binge drinking was part of British culture. I found out that drinking wasn’t just recreational, but deeply etched into the DNA of our society, stitching together our closest (male) friendships. We’re not alcoholics, goes the subtext, we’re just relaxing.
That’s why the government’s advice, while important and potentially life saving, will fail. At least in our lifetime. It’s hard to see how it can dismantle so many complicated, deeply woven ideas we have about bonding, most of them male. Alcohol as a social lubricant, as a lubricant to teenage male awkwardness, unfortunately cannot be bettered.
Michael White: ‘I’ve deliberately reduced my tolerance. Drink has helped kill a lot of friends’
24 units per week
When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard, covering anything from murder to Miss World, lunch on the early shift consisted of three pints and a cheese omelette at the Globe across the street at 11am. It’s what Americans, still prohibitionist puritans at heart, call a “British lunch.”
Older colleagues skipped the omelette, but I was always a lightweight by the heroic standards of old Fleet Street. My future Guardian boss, Ian Aitken, a veteran of Beaverbrook’s mighty Daily Express, had hollow legs, though he drank whisky and water with MPs in Annie’s Bar at Westminster because (I learned years later) this particular Scot didn’t much like the taste. It slowed him down.
It is hard to convey the scale of drinking before globalization and IT raised everyone’s game. It wasn’t just journalists and politicians, it was the City and the industrial boardroom, lawyers and judges, a lovable English teacher at my Cornish grammar school who popped out for a couple at lunch. In the 70s I once had to arm wrestle an SNP MP I’d just met (he’d decided I disliked him) well before noon. I easily prevailed, but he won the late night rematch on the floor of the SNP whips’ office.
The other two horsemen that helped tame this liquid apocalypse were growing feminisation of the workplace and the health police. The concept of a unit of alcohol would have provoked Farageish cries of “drinks all round” at El Vino’s, where thirsty women reporters weren’t allowed to stand at the bar until a showdown in 1982.
What would the ghosts of old Fleet Street have made of Dame Sally Davies’s latest warning, let alone of the shrinking definition of a unit, half what it was 20 years ago? Seven pints a week? Even lightweights like me often drank 14 such units during the course of a productive 12 hour day.
In recent years I’ve deliberately reduced my tolerance of drink, well aware that it helped kill a lot of friends. I usually manage to squeeze under Dame Sal’s old advice (28 units, generously defined). After one of my long lunches with Aitken I now come home exhausted and tell my wife: “I’d say Ian drinks too much if he wasn’t 88.”