Mr Eugenides on binge drinking:
if you have two glasses of wine tonight, dear female reader, you are a binge drinker. If you have three beers with friends after work, be-testicled browser, you are a binge drinker. And binge drinking is defined as doing this just once a week. You can be dry till next Friday, then have another three pints. You’re still part of the statistic.
Comments
0 responses to “My binge drink hell”
I got worried when the news was full of calls for the government to “tackle” binge drinking.
Fuck, and indeed, off.
If I ever have money I think I’ll leave this country.
Did you see the calls to ban vertical drinking? Not in terms of, pubs with a capacity of thousands, but *drinking while standing up*. It’s a violent time-bomb, apparently.
At the risk of sounding like Littlejohn, you couldn’t make it up.
To be fair the people I heard talking about this when it was all over the news last week all started by pointing out that the biggest problems are that the so called ‘guidelines’ are completely out of touch with reality.
A comment from the linked article:
The recommendation is that women drink 14 to 21 units a week – set intentionally low, because that amount will do little harm. And it’s a weekly target, with the assumption that you don’t drink every day. So dividing it by seven to get a daily figure is a bit of a nonsense. Then multiply by two – a completely arbitrary figure, as far as I can tell – and hey presto, binge drinking.
What worries me about this stuff is – as with the smoking ban – half-truths and dodgy stats become hard evidence that’s used to demand legislation [insert usual “in favour of a ban but appalled by the way we were lied to about it” disclaimer here].
David, I think you’d like the Devil’s Kitchen blog (linked to the right). Language NSFW though.
Surely vertical drinking is a much better way to judge if someone has drank too much as they rapidly become horizontal and can be ejected.
I wasn’t planning on going for a pint tonight but I think I might. And do it vertically.
What does it count as when you are sitting at the bar on a stool with people who are standing? Vertical drinking tourist?
Sorry, I mean linked from the blog front page.
Yeah, I’ve seen it before.
I’ll happily admit to being a binge drinker (not only in their new-fangled definition) and I’m a bit overweight but I’m also 3 months (today) off the fags so I think on the big scheme of things they should all just piss off.