COLUMN: Chugging away responsibility

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Point: London Cast," Fall '98 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Point: London Cast," Fall '98The line of reasoning goes something like this: Europeans can drink at a younger age than Americans without going to the hospital and doing stupid things because they take much more personal responsibility. My British friends know very little of personal responsibility. A maid goes through my dormitory every day and cleans the kitchens and the bathrooms and vacuums the corridor. Once a week my room is also hoovered (as they say here) and my sheets are cleaned. Students are "strongly encouraged" to actually make their own beds for the convenience of the cleaning ladies. A more accurate point of contrast is that instead of having events which revolve around alcohol to the exception all else, as in the States, the British have alcohol at the center of a variety of truly cultural events. The smoking and cigar bars which have begun to pop up in American metropolitan areas are the best parallels for the level of society which exists, nay thrives, on lager, stout, cider and spirits in the United Kingdom. But while those American clubs are a response to government persecution, the English drinking scene is vastly more mainstream than even McDonald's. At every corner lies a classy, well-decorated pub. Some look the way you dream an English pub might look, while others look as if they were constructed to trump any fantasies you might harbor. Bigger. More ornate. And with finer calligraphy (in Middle English style, of course). And the names! The Slug and Lettuce. The Prince William IV. The Rat and Carrot. All aimed at filling you with awe or a fine sense of the absurd. Anything to get you in. Somehow Murph's just doesn't have the same allure. And heck, these places are legally authorized to serve 18-year-olds. Different pubs have different styles, from the well-lit social clubs, which often have historically delineated areas to separate the business and working classes, to the darker murkier varieties, home of darts and snooker tables. I'm still not sure what snooker is, but judging by the rapt attention that it draws from crowds, I must assume it is similar in many ways to dwarf bowling, only perhaps more violent. At these pubs, ritual is the only true monarch. Bartenders are more than just the purveyors of potables; they are the guardians of such crucial secrets as how to draw a pint of Guinness. Going to a Center City drinking establishment, you would be apt to get the impression that Guinness is just another beer to be slid down the hard wooden bar, generally poorly poured and flavored. It is rumored that in Ireland, a bartender can get beaten up for dispensing a Guinness in less that five minutes. It is the patience -- the agonizing ticks of the aged clock as the first pour settles, a cloudy light brown shifting into a darker tone, until the pint is ready to be topped with the ample, but never airy head -- which makes the occasion, which makes the rite. And the liquor is everywhere. Many pubs serve as more than gathering places, often housing museums or even theaters upstairs. Walk out of work, drink for several hours, catch a show with a pint in your hand. Even if the play is bad, you've drunk enough already that you feel no pain. At a play I attended last weekend, a patron, obviously bored with the proceedings, took several deep drinks from his brimming plastic cup of beer and began to belch, fidget and finally crumple the cheep container. Somehow, no one told him to stop and no one hit him. In a column a few weeks back, Karen Pasternack observed that while alcohol was readily available, few of the students she saw while studying in London overdrank. I am living on a hall of first-year British students (like the Quad experience I never had). They do over-drink. In fact, on the average they go out drinking five or six nights a week, getting drunk nearly every time. It's like nothing you've ever seen before. British pubs as a rule must close by 11 p.m. There are several exceptions too complicated to go into, but the fact remains that well before midnight, the Brits are back on the streets fairly drunk with the whole evening left to go. And more often than not, students head back to their dorms where they attempt to achieve a whole other level of drunkenness. The results are not good. Eighteenth Century British novelist Henry Fielding wrote that "With them [the British], to drink and fight together are almost synonymous terms." But my neighbors don't fight. Nor, strangely, do they throw up in the hallways or in the sinks. But they do have a strange tendency to drop their trousers. Never do they go further than that, and rarely do the trousers go much below their knees. But this gives a simple impression of both the state of the modern British student drunk and of the rather pathetic influence of The Full Monty. Still, the mentality is bad. An article in last week's Guardian referred to Bobby Brown's drunk driving conviction. It said that he had drank the equivalent of five pints before wrecking his Porsche. My hallmates laughed, saying that they were usually past five pints by the early evening. And it's true. Somehow, though, even while antics are totally-out-of-control, the alcohol-related health crises are far less common over here. Perhaps the ceremonialization of drinking leads to a healthy (or not so healthy) respect for the endeavor which places its own restrictions. Or else, at a certain point in the evening, the cleaning ladies come round to cut students off. Truly, they may be the personal responsibilities of the culture.