Hic, hic, hurrray

It’s the party season. All that lovely Christmas cheer. The excitement of getting dressed up, all sparkly and Christmassy. And falling down drunk on a pavement at 3 am.

The days leading up the Christmas and New Year are dotted with parties, parties and more parties. And copious quantities of alcohol.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good glass of red. Maybe even two, three or four - on a good night. But any more, and I’d spend the rest of the evening communing with a toilet bowl.

I have no desire to wake up with no memory of the previous night. Or waste a precious Sunday, nursing a hammering hangover. So I usually stop, when my body tells me to.

Apparently, not everyone else does. Every party I’ve been to this holiday season, glass after glass of wine or champagne is downed with gusto. There is no food in sight – no one else seems bothered about eating except me.

Things start to get ugly after about 4 hours of non-stop drinking. Tempers get frayed. Inhibitions are non-existent. Everything is just one big alcohol-fuelled blur.

Going out in the UK is like worshipping at the altar of booze. A tad dramatic, I know. But real, nonetheless.

It’s not just my opinion. Here are a few statistics to ponder over our next glass of wine:

• 33% of men and 16 per cent of women in the UK drink alcohol at levels that are hazardous to their health
• Two in three under-18 girls (among 1,600 surveyed) needed medical treatment after drinking binges last year
• In 2007, there were 863,000 admissions to hospital in England due to alcohol misuse and 6,541 deaths directly related to alcohol misuse
• The number of British women needing treatment for alcohol poisoning has doubled to 14,000 a year since 2003, according to official figures
• The cost of treating alcohol abuse in the UK is £20bn every year

The statistics are enough to fill a few pages. But I think these will do for now.

So what is it with the British and alcohol? The French and the Italians drink too – but how many of them do you see vomiting outside the pub every weekend and collapsing on the streets?

Most Brits I know have no stop button when it comes to booze. Walk around any high street in any town across the UK, and the same scene greets you. Drunks young and old, male and female totter out of pubs and nightclubs. As a woman, it’s worrying to see so many other women, senseless from drinking - getting into cars and taxis with men they’ve just met. Or attacking each other over stupid arguments that usually start with something like: “Who are you looking at?” (Usually uttered in an aggressive, drunk tone of voice.)

My friends here tell me that most teenagers grow up drinking lots. So by the time, they hit 20 or so – their capacity for alcohol is huge. Compare that with say somewhere like India where I grew up. Over there, it was the other extreme. In our family, drinking was equal to alcoholism. It was weird and irrational. My folks believed that having a glass of something was an un-pardonable sin. So as teenagers, we sneakily drank the occasional rum and coke or wine and hid the evidence. I don’t think that was a particularly healthy attitude to alcohol either.

I hated it at the time – I thought it was so silly. After all, a few rum ‘n’ cokes didn’t mean heading to rehab.  But in hindsight, maybe it was a good thing. All the hiding meant I couldn’t really develop a huge alcohol habit. Unlike the thousands of young British kids stumbling around the streets as we speak, glugging their cans of beer.

There’s something else too. This unspoken attitude: I drink lots. Therefore I’m cool. The more alcohol I consume and the more wildly I behave, the cooler I become. That’s the impression I get from a lot of people around me. And surely, that is wrong. And is responsible for so much of the booze-related binge-drinking culture among British men and women.

I have come to the conclusion that I am un-cool. I’d love to be hip too. But not if it means downing lethal quantities of booze and ending up face down on some concrete high street every Saturday night. So I think I’ll keep my un-cool-ness. Thank you very much.