warning: drinking can severely impair your judgement about whether something is funny

woolpackdave has written a great post about this topic which covers the issues very well. and while i don’t have children of my own to corrupt, i did want to write a few incoherent rambles from my own perspective.

to quote from the bbc article on the story, sir draconianson says that:

“the science is clear – drinking, particularly at a young age, a lack of parental supervision, exposing children to drink-fuelled events and failing to engage with them as they grow up are the root causes from which our country’s serious alcohol problem has developed”

seems to me like a much more complex problem than children being allowed a rare glass of wine (with or without water) and that the bits about lack of parental supervision and failing to engage with children as they’re growing up are maybe a little more important here. in fact, without wishing to turn this into a rant about bad parenting, i’d hazard a guess that children who aren’t given the occasional drink at home but whose parents fail to engage with them as they’re growing up will probably turn out to have a few issues anyway. like i say, i’m not a parent, but if the government can oversimplify issues then so can i.

what i can talk about is my own experience of drinking as i was growing up. i was allowed the very occasional (and very small) glass of wine; the occasional sip of beer or glass of (very weak) shandy; and as i got older an odd glass of sherry or port at christmas. now i’m not going to go down the route of saying it never did me any harm (anyone who knows me can probably refute that statement quicker than i could type it…and calling myself ginsoak probably gives the game away) but i never sat on a park bench as a teenager drinking myself into oblivion. the first time i went to a party that didn’t revolve around jelly, ice-cream and musical statues i considered telling my mum that i was just going round to a friend’s house - but i knew she’d probably rumble me when i got home, so i fessed up. i was 14 and was fairly certain that she’d tell me i couldn’t go. instead, she offered me and my friend a lift there and back. at this point i was *really* worried -i figured  she was probably either going to try and drive us to a nunnery and lock us up forever; or  she was going to abandon me and change the locks before we got home; or, worse, she might come in with us and wait in the corner of the room until the party was over. the truth was much less sinister: she drove us to the party, talked to us about the dangers of drinking, told us to be careful and not to have more than a couple of drinks…and said she’d be back for us in a couple of hours.  we tried protesting that the party would be going on much later than that, but she gave us one of those looks. actually she gave us several of those looks all at the same time (i never figured out how she managed to do that) so we muttered thanks and sloped off to the party. i’m never sure whether she waited around the corner in the car just in case something kicked off, or whether she did go home, but even as we were plotting ways of getting drunk and staying out later, a strange thing happened. we’d had a few glasses of cheap cider in the first hour when we both realised that the party wasn’t as much fun as we’d expected. people we knew from school were behaving really oddly and being quite annoying. plus they were all sweating quite a lot, which probably explained why they all seemed to be so thirsty. we had another couple of glasses of cider before, cinderella-like, we realised our time was up and we left, saying how much we’d enjoyed it, and making our excuses. as we stood outside on the pavement, agreeing our story about how much we’d actually had and swearing never to admit to our parents about how damned freaky the whole experience had been, i was suddenly glad for the early lift home.

it was a couple of years before i went to another party like that. in the meantime, i was still allowed the occasional drink at home. and there was clearly some reciprocal sneaky arrangement between my parents and those of a few close friends that if we got together for sleep overs we were allowed to have a small glass or two of something while the adults were around. and, yes, we did ever so occasionally sneak into town and drink in pubs while we were underage (safe in the knowledge that we wouldn’t be caught out – our parents weren’t and never had been big drinkers, and pubs were never part of their scene) but we were always aware of our limits. and of the fact that if we rolled in drunk we’d be subjected to a humiliating round of being talked to.

at the same time, most of the other people we were sort-of-but-not-really friends with at school would bunk off lessons to get drunk so they could go home and sleep off the effects before their parents found out they’d been drinking; or they’d hang out drinking in parks/on street corners/in the houses of people whose parents were out of the way, then sneak home to avoid their own parents.

sure, i drink more than the government would like me to drink these days. and yes, on occasion i’ve been completely and utterly plastered. but my drinking has never got me into trouble; i’ve never hurt myself or anyone else as a result of drinking (except possibly for that time when i sprained my ankle falling out of a taxi, but it was icy, ok?); and much to the annoyance of people around me i’ve never had a hangover despite exceeding my weekly limit over the course of a few hours. and above all, when i look at my own drinking habits and those of people whose parents forbade them from drinking in the house – or ignored the fact that they were doing it anyway – i’m fairly certain that the very occasional glass of wine when i was growing up did me less harm than the government would have you believe.