delusionofgrandeur

Like many people, I like to go out for ‘one or two’ beers at the weekend. Only this is Britain, 2008, so ‘one or two’ beers quickly becomes ‘a few more’ beers and quite often turns into ’so many beers you can’t remember how many’ by the end of the night.

…how did I get home again?

Yes, Britain definitely seems to have a drinking problem, we do it too often, too much and often inappropriately. I’m thankful that I seem to retain the self restraint that keeps me away from the vomiting and violence seen on the old-media news but I’m still none too proud of being part of a such a stigmatised culture.

But I digress, what I really meant to say is that I’ve come to have the opinion that drinking (as the British drink) seriously impacts on productivity. Just using my blog writing as a non empirical metric, I can see that I become almost incable of getting a decent article off no just the following day but possibly for several days after ‘binge drinking’*.

I’m pretty much a wimp now when it comes to dealing with the morning-after hangovers so I do tend to stop drinking long before my friends and associates who seem to drink like there will be no tomorrow, consuming herculean ammounts, mixing their drinks and generally doing all the things your mother told you not to. With my own follow-on alcohol come-down / general malaise post binge, I can’t fathom how some of my own friends can complete a days work the following day. I’d cringe at the thought of my employees turning up to work in such a mental state, imagining all the business disasters that could befall a company staffed by people who are not firing on all cylinders.

So how would I stop this culture? Well, step one would be to avoid the methods the government employs as they clearly don’t work. The extra taxation only serves to make the population resentful. You could tax the British more and more and they’d probably just spend a larger proportion of their income on booze. You also can’t get anywhere stigmatising the general culture as the people seem to have lost their self-esteem. Britain hardly appears ‘Great’ these days on the world stage, everything that made the nation proud seems to have been taken from us.

I think the solution is, in fact, lying with the self esteem issue. Britain needs to be doing something worthwhile. The ’sevice economy’ is clearly a bad idea, in fact it appears to be going down the pan as we speak. We need some serious industry; major stuff. Right now, for example, there is a manufacturer in Germany about to start producing cars that will travel 150 miles on a gallon of fuel. We should be making a car that will go 200 miles on a gallon and cornering the world market!

I’d hope that seeing such results from British ingenuity and labor would get the British into an upward spiral of drinking less and doing more. In effect, just giving the British something really worthwile to live for. I can but dream.

*In the UK, ‘Binge Drinking’ is generally defined as drinking half of the weekly recommended allowance in one sitting ie: 11+ units for men or 9+ units for women on one occasion

Tags: alcohol, binge drinking, britain, business, culture, drinking, great britain, industry, productivity, service economy, uk

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Automotive, Cars, Credit Crunch, Economy, Health and Fitness.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.