Lack of jobs and Covid lockdowns fuel boom in cheap but lethal hooch made in backyard stills
It is 7pm and inside the shebeen, or unlicensed bar, in Harare, men and women clutch small bottles of “whisky” and talk animatedly as they dance to loud music.
One man staggers and falls over, to the amusement of other drinkers. He mumbles inaudible words as he drifts into sleep. Nearby, two other men doze after spending hours in the bar on a sweltering September day.
Continue reading...Alcohol’s allure was powerful when we were growing up and those born after us consume far less. Now booze is falling out of fashion, is it time to assess old habits?
My first job in journalism was editing a free magazine called Rasp. In 1995, we ran a competition for a year’s supply of Two Dogs lemon brew, the Australian alcopop. Two Dogs tried to send us 365 bottles, and I negotiated them up to 1,000, indignant that a bottle a day could constitute a “supply”. It is the only time I’ve ever played hardball. Nobody entered the competition because we didn’t have any readers, and nor did we have any staff. The two of us, me and the designer, drank the whole lot in the space of two months. A constant drip feed of 4.5% ABV, all day. If anybody asked – there was a much larger team upstairs running TNT, a freesheet for expat Australians – we’d say it was a British tradition, going back to medieval times, when workers would sip ale because of the contaminated water supply. “But medieval ale would have been more like 0.5%,” they might have protested, except they were also constantly drunk, and at lunchtime we’d all go to the pub, 60 people in crocodile formation marching down the street, like a misbegotten nursery outing.
So the cliche of the drunken journalist happens to be true, but in the early 90s it was also true of teachers. Dave Lawrence, 56, co-author of Scarred for Life, of which more shortly, remembers his teacher training: “There was a pub across the road and at lunchtime, all the teachers would head over there, and all afternoon they would reek of booze.” It wasn’t really sectoral – this was just generation X. Colin Angus, a senior research fellow in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group, is 39. He’s not generation X, which is usually defined as those born between 1965 and 1980. But in his pre-academic career in electrical wholesaling, “Everyone was always talking about the good old days of long, boozy lunches.”
Continue reading...Women’s protests led to prohibition in Bihar but can alcohol bans end domestic abuse and harassment?
Holding sticks and brooms, the women marched to the liquor shop in the centre of Konar village. It was a rare ambush in the staunchly patriarchal Bihar state in eastern India. But they were at breaking point.
“In every village women were troubled by alcohol. Men harassed them on the streets. Husbands beat them at home,” says Sunita Devi, 52, a former seamstress who led the crowd. “When they saw us they gained courage that we can come together and fight.”
Continue reading...For many of us, a getaway means sun, sea, sand and… alcohol. But what if you drink so much at home that a break is a chance to go booze-free?
A couple of years ago, before a two-week holiday to the Algarve, I decided I wouldn’t drink. I thought it would be difficult. There would be no more vinho verde to wash down a charcoal-grilled bream. It would be adeus to the icy Sagres lager that goes so perfectly with those fat, yellow Portuguese chips. Aside from the gustatory pleasures, I worried about being the sober one. Drinking is part of the routine of the British holiday. If I didn’t participate, it might endanger everyone else’s fun, too.
Besides, it was part of my “personal brand”. It wasn’t that I was an alcoholic, but I did think that being gregarious, and generally up for a good time and a pint in the sun, was part of the reason people wanted to go on holiday with me. At 32, I worried that I risked projecting Big Midlife Crisis Energy years before my time.
Continue reading...Drinking at home was once a guilty pleasure. Now everyone from bored homeworkers to professional influencers is swapping cocktail recipes and photos of colourful aperitifs. Is gin o’clock turning into unhappy hour?
The shadow of a palm frond falls on a young woman in a bikini, holding an emerald-coloured cocktail in one manicured hand. A negroni glows from the depths of a darkened bar; a tray of fruit-laden glasses sits beside a swimming pool. The #cocktail hashtag on Instagram is a passport to a magical land of aspirational drinking, where everything comes garnished with rose petals and nobody ever seems to get hangovers.
Its inhabitants are a mix of amateur enthusiasts reviewing their latest discoveries, and professional “ginfluencers” making a living from creating lusciously photographed cocktail recipes or sponsored posts promoting this rhubarb gin or that new tequila. Colourful drinks are popular, says Inka Kukkamäki, a full-time drinks influencer whose @onthesauceagain account has 21,000 Instagram followers. “Something a bit interesting and unusual, or just something simple like a negroni – any kind of negroni twist becomes popular. The Italian aperitivo culture has really spread into the UK in the last year.”
Continue reading...Investors fear sectors may be next target after Beijing’s crackdown on digital gaming and tech companies
China’s liquor and e-cigarette companies have emerged as the latest market casualty in Beijing’s crackdown on “vice industries” after reports from state media that suggest they could be the next targets for stricter regulation.
Shares in e-cigarette and liquor makers slumped on Thursday after reports in the Chinese media of adolescent e-cigarette use and links between alcohol and cancer spooked investors who fear the state may be planning to broaden its crackdown on digital gaming and technology companies.
Continue reading...Imperial College London researchers also find that drinking coffee protects against liver cancer
Consuming alcohol increases the risk of getting more cancers than previously thought, according to a major study, which also found that drinking coffee protects against liver cancer.
Alcohol consumption is linked to several cancers including those of the head and neck – mouth, pharynx and larynx – oesophageal and bowel, along with the more widely known connection with breast and liver cancer, according to an international team led by Imperial College London.
Continue reading...After 40 UK drownings in July, national park says TikTok and Instagram are leading visitors to isolated party spots
Drunk swimming is becoming an “increasing challenge” in the Lake District this summer, a national park spokesman has said, as visitors try to replicate boozy foreign holidays at home.
An estimated 40 people have drowned in the UK since the heatwave began on 14 July, triple the normal rate of water deaths, according to the National Water Safety Forum.
Continue reading...She cooked, watched Countdown and was mentored by the legendary singer. Now, 10 years after her death, Dionne Bromfield has finally addressed the grief she couldn’t deal with aged 15
Dionne Bromfield is leaning into the screen as we talk on Zoom, recounting the moment 10 years ago when she received the news that would change her life for ever. On a sunny July day, the 15-year-old singer was waiting to go on stage. She was supporting the boyband The Wanted on tour in Wales, the atmosphere backstage fizzing with energy before each show. However, that day something felt off. People were unusually quiet, and no one would meet her eyes. Eventually, she was told something was wrong: “It’s Amy.”
Amy Winehouse, whose remarkable, all-too-brief career ended with her death a decade ago this month, had been the teenager’s godmother, friend and mentor. Winehouse had nurtured Bromfield’s burgeoning vocal skills and helped her break into a notoriously competitive industry. For years after her death, Bromfield couldn’t listen to Amy’s music, let alone think about her. After two albums and a stint presenting the CBBC show Friday Download, the singer who had been marked out by many as one to watch and performed on live television with Winehouse, stepped back from music.
Continue reading...Researchers behind estimate say more needs to be done to raise public awareness of link
Alcohol is estimated to have caused more than 740,000 cancer cases around the world last year, and experts say more needs to be done to highlight the link.
There is strong evidence that alcohol consumption can cause various cancers including those of the breast, liver, colon, rectum, oropharynx, larynx and oesophagus. Research suggests that even low levels of drinking can increase the risk.
Continue reading...The legendary actor reflects on her riches-to-rags childhood, confronting depression and alcoholism – and dancing with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire
Leslie Caron and her companion, Jack, greet me at the front of their apartment. They make a well-matched couple – slight, chic, immaculately coiffured. Caron, the legendary dancer and actor, is 90 in two weeks’ time. Jack, her beloved shih tzu, is about nine.
Caron heads off to make the tea, with Sidney Bechet’s summery jazz playing in the background. I am left alone with Jack to explore the living room. It feels as if I am tunnelling through the history of 20th-century culture. Here is a photo of a pensive François Truffaut; below is a smirking Warren Beatty. The centrepiece on the wall is a huge watercolour of Caron’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, painted by his partner, Don Bachardy. To the left is Louis Armstrong, to the right Rudolf Nureyev, with whom she starred in 1977’s Valentino, and further along is Jean Renoir, who she says was like a father to her. And we have barely started.
Continue reading...Psychologists in Scandinavia have been researching how people in bars rate their own attractiveness as the evening progresses – regardless of how drunk they feel
Name: Sexy time.
Age: Not important, this is all about attractiveness.
Continue reading...UK study of 25,000 people finds even moderate drinking is linked to lower grey matter density
There is no safe amount of alcohol consumption for the brain, with even “moderate” drinking adversely affecting nearly every part of it, a study of more than 25,000 people in the UK has found.
The study, which is still to be peer-reviewed, suggests that the more alcohol consumed, the lower the brain volume. In effect, the more you drink, the worse off your brain.
Continue reading...This week sees the opening of the first UK high-street clinic offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. Could popping psilocybin be the future of mental healthcare?
In the summer of 1981, when he was 13, Grant crashed a trail motorbike into a wall at his parents’ house in Cambridgeshire. He’d been hiding it in the shed, but “it was far too powerful for me, and on my very first time starting it in the garden, I smashed it into a wall”. His mother came outside to find the skinny teenager in a heap next to the crumpled motorbike. “I was in a lot of trouble.”
Grant hadn’t given this childhood memory much thought in the intervening years, but one hot August day in 2019, it came back to him with such clarity that, at 53, now a stocky father of two, he suddenly understood it as a clue to his dangerously unhealthy relationship with alcohol.
Continue reading...For better and for worse, drinking has been a constant thread running through writer Megan Nolan’s relationships. She reflects on the dual thrills of alcohol and romance
From the very beginning, whenever there was a crush, there was also a drink in my hand. In his novel High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s narrator Rob, an unhappy vinyl obsessive, asks himself: “Which came first, the music or the misery?” Did he learn to be unhappy from the sad songs he loved, or did the songs comfort him after the unhappiness was already a fact? In my case, the question is something like this: which came first, the booze or the boys? Did I just happen to begin my romantic life at the same time as my drinking life? Or were my infatuations and love stories authored – or at least fuelled – by the alcohol that accompanied them?
This is not the story of a tragic, ruined woman who destroys all her relationships through drinking. In some, I drank very moderately; in most others, only to good-spirited excess, which caused no harm. There is no redemption arc here, no coming to the light. I still drink now. It is one of my personal bugbears that we seem as a culture flatly incapable of discussing many of life’s most complex issues without urgently needing to name and solve them, preferably with formal medical interventions. And so I can’t speak about a plodding, hopeless soul sickness that afflicts me at times without being cornered into describing it as depression or an anxiety disorder. This is not to say that these things don’t exist; of course they do, and over the years I’ve taken medication for both. But the terms and the drugs are too blunt as tools to address the infinite realm of human suffering and struggle that they sit within.
Continue reading...Long-term social isolation is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. What has the last year meant for those who don’t share their homes?
When the first headlines about coronavirus began to appear in January 2020, they had little impact on south Londoner TJ, 25. “It seems outrageous now, but I thought: ‘I’m young, I’m healthy, I’ll be fine.’” By the time the first lockdown was announced, his mindset had begun to shift. He’d been single “for ever” and his housemate was spending lockdown with her parents, but he felt that same batten-down-the-hatches optimism many did in the era of weekly clapping and Zoom quizzes. “But that first weekend, the silence of the house and all the hours to fill – I got this inkling… mentally, I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of this. Four weeks in, I was genuinely scared for my mental health, I wasn’t coping at all.”
TJ is one of an estimated 7.7 million people in the UK who lived alone for most or all of the last year. “It’s not a game of Top Trumps, it’s not like my anxiety is more profound,” he says. “But it is different when you’re experiencing it all on your own.” In November 2020 the Office for National Statistics released findings that showed acute loneliness had climbed to record levels, with 8% of adults (around 4.2 million people) feeling “always or often lonely”, and 16-29-year-olds twice as likely as the over-70s to experience loneliness in the pandemic. “You’d never think fear of missing out would exist when we’re all stuck at home,” TJ says. “But I’d be scrolling through Instagram, seeing friends with their boyfriends or housemates, and thinking: ‘I wish I had someone. I feel so alone.’”
Continue reading...Readers explain whether they looked, felt and slept better – or if they turned back to alcohol to cheer up a miserable month
I don’t drink every day, but I do drink every weekend and I usually drink a fair amount. I did dry January (and February) two years ago when my wife was eight months pregnant with our son, but I’m finding it much easier this year because I don’t have the opportunity to go out and socialise. The thing I miss most about drinking is visiting the pub with some friends – without that it’s certainly easier. Duncan Ward, operational resilience manager, West Sussex
Continue reading...Celebrate the life and work of Robert Burns on 25 January with a traditional scotch. But there’s more you can do with whisky than drinking
Traditionally, Burns Night ,which takes place on 25 January, celebrates the life and work of the poet Robert Burns. With Covid restrictions in place, the usual gatherings full of poetry, revelry and haggis will have to be curtailed, but it is still a convenient excuse to drink whisky on a weeknight.
Continue reading...The snacks were deemed by ministers last week to be sufficient to order alongside alcohol in tier 2-area pubs
Suppliers of scotch eggs have reported a surge in demand after ministers said they classed as a “substantial meal”, thereby allowing people to order alcohol alongside them in pubs.
The food wholesaler Brakes, which works with 50,000 pubs across the UK, has seen a 10-fold increase in demand for the pork and breadcrumb-covered eggs since the lockdown in England ended last week.
Continue reading...While virus can spread easily in crowded indoor venues, 10pm cut-off is questionable
Pubs, bars and restaurants in Scotland will be banned from serving alcohol to customers indoors for more than two weeks, while pubs in northern England face the possibility of tighter restrictions. But what does the science say?
Continue reading...