We Need To Talk About Dad

The demographic most likely to drink to excess isn’t unruly teens or sleep-starved students, but middle-aged men – or, to put it another way, potentially you. With an estimated 3.5 million of us drinking too much, MH asks whether it’s time we all had a quiet word…

- Richard Godwin

If you read the words “Booze Britain”, what image pops into your head?

A marauding band of lads urinating into a municipal fountain in Peterborough? An improbably skirted Northumbrian woman waiting for a night bus in a frozen puddle of vomit? A group of teenagers launching bottles of blackcurrant-flavored Hooper’s Hooch across a suburban park?

These stereotypes are time-honored staples of the tabloids, and their roots go back at least to William Hogarth’s 1751 etching Gin Lane. Lord knows you can still find evidence of debauchery and dipsomania aplenty among Britain’s youth: the Portaloos that are now a feature of our provincial town centers; the annual lettings of bodily fluids in Magaluf and Ayia Napa.

What “Booze Britain” doesn’t tend to conjure are well-groomed Generation X-ers pondering which case of Pinot Noir to buy in Majestic; a mother of toddlers pouring herself a craft gin and tonic once the kids have gone to bed; the working father slumped on the sofa, snoring himself awake at 2 am, before quietly sloping off to bed. According to the evidence, however, those are precisely the images that should spring to mind.

Last November, Public Health England released figures showing that the number of problem drinkers over the age of 50 had almost quadrupled in the past 12 years. In 2006, around 10,000 over-50s received treatment for alcohol-related problems. By 2018, that number had increased to 37,000. Meanwhile, those much-maligned young ’uns appear to be doing quite well. For those under 20, treatments fell by 30%; for adults between 20 and 24, the dip was 8%. All of which is bound to prompt another well-worn platitude: the lightweights!