I am trying to digest the hard facts on hard drinking

No sooner had I parked the passion wagon and unloaded the fishing gear than she was out in the drive, this newspaper in her hand and pointing in the general direction of a front page headline which read something along the lines of people drinking too much.

It transpired, as I was made aware when I emerged from putting the gear away in The Shed, that in Herself’s view – unshakeable when she’s in that sort of mood, I’m afraid – my references to Calvados over the last couple of decades or so has encouraged the remainder of the population to drink too much. Additionally, (when she says that she’s just getting into second gear so I’m resigned to a long journey), she said, no less an authority than the Medical Officer of Health had virtually said as much.

I doubted in the extreme whether Dr Susan Turnbull had ever heard of me, never mind her attributing Jersey’s age-old problem of booze to yours truly, but experience has taught me never to introduce either logic or probability into discussions initiated by the opposite sex, particularly Herself.

Eventually she calmed down, although she was still muttering to herself while cooking the fish I’d caught, so I thought better of asking her if she wanted me to open a bottle of Muscadet to go with our evening meal. Let her suggest that particular course of action, I thought. She didn’t, although I bet she’d have liked to.

Of course it didn’t stop me having a halfway decent slug of the apple juice later that evening – I got a bit of a black look for my trouble when I asked if there was anything I could get her – and nor did it stop me reflecting on whether she had a point about what I wrote perhaps encouraging people to drink more than was good for them.

Can I say right now that I don’t doubt that there is a major medical problem caused by people drinking too much and nor do I doubt that Jersey is up there quite near to the top of the Premier League, so to speak, although I’m told that despite its relatively small population, Alderney manages to punch well above its weight. I can only assume, therefore, that they don’t feature in the Guernsey statistics produced by Dr Turnbull. I’m told that hotel breakfast menus in the northern isle start off by offering lightly-poached paracetamol.

As an aside, can I register my own personal protest at the reference to Jersey hospital admissions (for alcohol related matters) being the second highest in Britain. If, as it is generally accepted, we are not part of the United Kingdom then it follows that neither are we part of Britain because the United Kingdom is made up of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I know I get a bit hot under the collar about this but given the way we are being treated by ‘Britain’ – passports and the lack of a level playing field for VAT-free exports are just a couple of recent examples – the less we have to do with that crowd, the better.

As is generally known, I go to the pub and drink among friends who, in the main – although there are a couple of exceptions in their 50s – are well over pensionable age. Although we tend to keep ourselves to ourselves in the ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ corner, we do notice what others in the bar do and we sometimes comment on it.

Generally speaking, we drink in moderation – certainly not so little that we could or should drive but equally certainly not so much that we can’t get home without attracting the attention of the thin blue line which lies between us and anarchy.

I wish I could say the same about people much younger than us. To illustrate the point; the landlord before the one our pub has got now tried to attract custom from the early 20s crowd and did nothing to discourage their foolish games – foolish games with alcohol, that is. Inevitably, there was rowdiness, drinks getting spilled, people falling over in the bar and vomit (and on one occasion worse) on the toilet floor.

Equally inevitably, the pub lost custom from its regular clients (people just stopped going there) and what these silly little boys and girls spent on one evening a week certainly didn’t equal what the landlord/manager lost on the other six by his regulars’ absence. There was no surprise when the pub’s owners intervened, the drinking games stopped and things got back to normal – with a new manager, I might add.

The trouble is that my words are more likely to be read by an age group closer to mine than to those in their 20s. Indeed, I can recall reading an online comment (on thisisjersey.com) not that long ago in which a youngster had obviously taken my highly exaggerated comments about my own consumption seriously and called the column ‘a Calvados-fuelled rant’.

I read that Dr Turnbull said we drink on average 14 litres of pure alcohol a year. Well, at 40 per cent proof, I reckon that’s probably a litre of Calvados every ten days or so. Despite what I write, I probably get through much less than a litre a month, and that includes the visits to the pub.

So, if my generation is a problem then I feel sorry for Dr Turnbull’s successors who’ll have to deal with today’s 20 and 30-year-olds.

And finally,

Mark Boleat thinks another 10,000 people living here in ten years time wouldn’t be a disaster. Probably not, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as pleasant as it is now.