Think Drunk Tanks

So the Conservative Government claim they to go to war on binge drinking. Partly as a measure of economics, to save the NHS the costs of sewing up people injured while insensible, the Police for dealing with the drunken violence and vandalism and generally to reclaim the centres of cities and towns up and down the land for 'decent' citizens. Binge drinking they say, is a symptom of the country's moral decay, another indicator of "Broken Britain". As analyses go, it's probably not too wide of the mark. But where do they think it stems from? This moral decay and Broken Britain. One doesn't have to go too far back into recent history to trace its genesis. And oh yes, it almost certainly arose during the last time the Conservatives held power, though ensuing Labour Governments did nothing to halt its inexorable tide.

After the post-war austerity of the 50s, there rose a new economic class with purchasing power, that of the young. Music and fashion, though overseen by Svengalis, was largely generated from the grass roots, as this new class flexed its creative and purchasing muscle.

In the 1980s, again a new class was empowered through their earning capacity, as Conservative economic policy targeted bringing the upper strata of the working class into a home and share- owning Shangri La. This was not grass roots generated in terms of what the money was spent on. Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney" character, a get-rich plasterer satirised the times with laser precision: all spending power and no idea what to buy. Apocryphal tales of banners being unfurled at the opera bearing the legend "Bring On The Fat Bird", city floor traders necking champagne in bars as if it was lager, with spritzers for the ladies and the rise of the brand and the label as some sort of proof of material Election.

The 80s heralded the consumptive age. When aspirations were met through material purchases and pleasure was measured in terms of quantitive units. Yet for one not insignificant part of the country the 80s were as blighted as their communities, with job losses and a benefits dependency culture. Yet the aggressive acquisition culture was still being broadcast to them as worth striving for (and perhaps reached its apotheosis with the riots of last Summer). Between both the culture of excess and the culture of deprivation, the British ceded the arts of pleasure. That is we could no longer rely on our own creative energies to summon up a good night out. Not one that wasn't soused in drink anyway. Alcohol somehow was supposed to provide all the entertainment one could wish for. It was the genie that granted wishes, or at least unlocked the inhibitions to such wish fulfillment.

The Labour government that followed did nothing to reverse the trend, continuing to neglect those in need and doing nothing to tamp down the excesses of those with money. If anything they made it worse through loosening the legislation on alcohol, by permitting alcopop drinks to be sold to under 18s and allowing 24 hour licensing of premises. Teenagers who had experienced cheap, accessible foreign holidays, brought back their copious drinking habits to Britain with them and helped turn our city centres into no-go areas at the weekends. Girls as well as boys now embraced the abuse of alcohol too.

I wrote about all these trends in my debut novel "A,B&E". Part of the novel is narrated by a nurse in Casualty, stitching up all the pugilists to return to their drink-fuelled fights. The other is narrated by a woman abroad, watching the staggering amounts drunk by British youth on holiday, with the inevitable consequences. I started that novel over 12 years ago. There is nothing new that Prime Minister Cameron is talking about, though as usual the politicians look at the conspicuous symptoms and a quick, superficial sticking plaster, rather than the deep underlying causes. I would and did go so far to say that we are an unhappy and unfulfilled nation. We don't know what makes us happy, or possibly even more worrying, we don't know what happiness is. And with the current economic stringencies, we have just got a whole lot more unhappy as we feel the pinch so we can't even buy the white goods in such prodigious quantities as we used to.

Cameron, or someone in his cabinet, ought to read my book. Of course they won't. But his lightbulb moment of 'we have a problem here with binge culture' is something that artists, writers and cultural commentators have been expounding upon for many years, only to fall on deaf ears.

"Alcohol, the paint stripper of civilisation’s veneer. Bottled up rage, uncorked and decanted"

"The trouble with A&E is that it’s full of insensible people. Those off their trolleys and straight on to ours. Out of their minds with alcohol or drugs. Or a Carefree in the Community policy. Simultaneously anaesthetised and adrenalised, oblivious to the pain signals radiating from within their bodies"

Digging For Australia #fridayflash 650 words

Why is it, when the weather's not even particularly warm, ice cream nonetheless melts? Runneling through your fingers before you've even stepped away from the vendor's stall. More pertinently, why is it that my son even hankers after the chill fruit smack of frozen ice? Like a desperate old bar soak, he has dragooned me into also having one, to keep him company. Even though I know its frigidity will inevitably sting and set my teeth on edge. But seems I must render him some penitential reparation, for having dragged him out here to this fitful pleasure zone in the first place.

There he sits on the desolate sand. Like an unturned out sandcastle huddled in its plastic mould. His body is still spasmed for, and from the city. Our tower block on stilts, which merely serves to channel the wind beneath such vaulting limbs. A piercing, penetrative force that pinballs us backwards and keeps us from successfully escaping its concrete flippers. Until today that is. When I ferried him here, solely to be embraced by the lapping waves as they lay feeble supplication at his feet. But he is yet to unfurl himself toward their anointing. Rather than spreading his being into the limitless expanse of space, he is hunched like a panhandler who has been working the streets too long. And him only six years old.

Where he's plopped himself down, he straddles the sand's water table levels. The dry, powdery grains too wispily diffuse to hold any integrity within his actual bucket. And the darker stained grist that offers solid architectural possibilities. The long-handled spade stands unmanned (unboyed?) within the lighter strain. Redundantly wafting in its own thin rootedness. A miscalculation on my part. Far too unwieldy for his little arms. A grasp of physics or geometry whichever it is, far beyond my reach. Maybe he'll inherit a natural comprehension of the world from his father. But we've no way of ever knowing that now have we?

However, he is no more frozen, nor less motile than these rippling ice creams. There appears some synergy between him and the sand after all. His hands kees burrowing into it at the borders of his seated self. Scooping out handfuls, and casting them away. Casting a rune around himself, or building a moat? To fend off whom exactly? And still he pilots his hand down. Hoping to strike oil, or water perhaps? But he is too far from the lip of the sea for it to mine through the sand and fill his trench. He has beached himself up in dry dock.

The pace of his digging noticeably increases as I approach. He has fully encircled himself now, ready to see out a siege? If he had preserved straighter lines, then I could convince myself he was limning a magic carpet for him to take flight. All I can apprehend now, is him trying to tunnel through to Australia on the other side of the world and as far away from me as possible.

The transfer of the cream-slicked cone into small fingers gritted with sand, conspires to deliver the inevitable fall to earth. An Icarian fusion on a day devoid of sun. We both stare down dumbly at the lugubrious cone, presently performing a reasonable impersonation of a large whelk shell. Then I see his eyes crinkle towards the encompassing of all years of future disappointments held out by the world. Quickly I proffered him my cone and cradled his fingers around it within my own. One always needs a back up, a plan B, a second option. A stand-in. Unfortunately I had just the one child and said child had just the one mother.