by Jill Stark
We talk about drinking, too. That’s been happening a lot lately. My sobriety, already old-hat in Melbourne, sparks new conversations here — not the usual, ‘You were so pished last night!’ war stories, but a real conversation, about how much we drink, why we drink, and how Scotland is a nation with a drinking problem. Granddad’s story is not uncommon: nearly everyone knows someone who has struggled with alcoholism, whether it’s a neighbour, a relative, a colleague, or a friend. I’m amazed at how common these tales are, and wonder if it’s always been this way and we’ve just never talked about it, or if I’ve been too busy getting drunk to notice.
The next morning I hear Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, interviewed on radio about Gerry Rafferty, the singer-songwriter who wrote ‘Baker Street’ and ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’. Rafferty died in January from liver failure, after decades of heavy drinking. Salmond talks about Rafferty’s ‘enormous talent’, and adds, ‘Unfortunately, like many people in Scotland, he fell victim to the bottle.’ It’s a throwaway line, but it says so much. Scots poetise alcohol, turning it into a predator poised to devour the unwitting; the ‘demon drink’ can be our mortal enemy, but also our closest friend. Our national bard, Robert Burns, thought to have died from complications related to excessive drinking, wrote the epic ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, a gothic tale of a man who spends too long at a public house and is plagued by nightmarish visions on his way home. But it’s his many poems celebrating alcohol, including one that posits ‘freedom an’ whisky gang thegither’, that we cling to most as proof that our tradition and cultural identity are inextricably linked to booze.
On a radio phone-in the day after the interview with Alex Salmond, the topic is the nation’s record of sporting failure. The presenter asks what Olympic sport Scotland would win gold in; the resounding response from callers is, of course, drinking. The host laughs and makes a quip about our legendary boozing reputation. But Scotland’s unenviable title of the sick man of Europe is no joke. In the country responsible for the deep-fried Mars Bar, obesity and heart-disease rates are soaring. Smoking is not yet out of fashion, with 27 per cent of men hooked, compared to 21 per cent in the rest of the United Kingdom, and 18 per cent in Australia. Life expectancy in Scotland is two years fewer than in Great Britain’s other home nations. But the most insidious killer of all is booze: 15 of the 20 areas in the United Kingdom with the highest number of alcohol-related deaths are in Scotland. In some parts of Glasgow, men are lucky if they live beyond their fifties. Over the last two decades, liver-cirrhosis rates have increased by 450 per cent, at a time when rates in most of Western Europe have been falling. A recent analysis of alcohol sales found that the average Scottish adult is knocking back the equivalent of 46 bottles of vodka every year. If health experts in Australia are worried about the binge-drinking culture Down Under, they should take a trip to Scotland to see how much worse things could be. The population is four times smaller than Australia’s, but every year the same number of people — more than 3000 — die from booze-related causes. As a race, we are drinking ourselves to death.
Public concern is so heightened that the once-sacred tradition of happy hour has been banned in Scottish pubs. Buy-one-get-one-free deals in off-licences have also been outlawed. And in a sign that the party truly is over, Scotland looks set to become the first country in Europe to introduce a minimum price for alcohol. A bill to be put before the Scottish Parliament in 2012 aims to end systemic discounting, which has allowed retailers to sell a bottle of cider more cheaply than a bottle of water. It will mean that a unit of alcohol cannot be sold below a set price (thought to be around 45 pence) and will make stronger drinks, associated with heavy drinking, less affordable. Announcing the legislation, health secretary Nicola Sturgeon vowed, ‘It is time for Scotland to win its battle with the booze.’*
*The Scottish Parliament passed the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) Bill in May 2012, setting the minimum price for a unit of alcohol at 50 pence, meaning that the cheapest bottle of wine would be £4.69 and a four-pack of lager would cost at least £3.52. The law is set to come into force in April 2013, but the Scotch Whisky Association and the European Spirits Organisation have been granted judicial review of the legislation, after claiming it breaches EU trade rules.
I arrange to meet a woman on the front lines of this battle. Evelyn Gillan is the head of Alcohol Focus Scotland, a charity set up to reduce alcohol harm and create a culture where moderate drinking is the norm. It’s a daunting task in a country with whisky as one of its most lucrative exports, contributing £3 billion a year to the national economy. But when we catch up for coffee in Edinburgh’s New Town, I realise that if you’re going to fight a war, you’d want Evelyn Gillan in your corner. She speaks quickly, in urgent tones, with a broad Scots accent. Immaculately dressed and with her hair in a neat bob, she doesn’t look much like a warrior — but make no mistake, she’s locked in combat. Her enemy: the alcohol industry. When she describes the industry as ‘disease vectors’, I laugh. She doesn’t. ‘Seriously, it’s a hazardous, harmful product. It’s a drug, and we’ve allowed the producers of that hazardous product unfettered access to young people. Now we’re concerned when we see 12-year-olds being hospitalised on a Friday night. Why should we be surprised, when we actually look at what we’ve allowed to happen over the last 30 years?’
Just as Robin Room argues that a reputation for binge drinking is part of Australia’s national myth, fuelled partly by market forces, Gillan says Scotland’s drinking problem is a corporate-born epidemic. Alcohol consumption in the 1960s was relatively low, around five litres of alcohol per person over the age of 15 per year. Today, it’s more than 12 litres. ‘Increasingly, we have to name and identify the role of the big multinationals in fuelling this epidemic, instead of just saying, “It’s our culture — we all love our drink.” That’s not happened by accident. There’s very specific action that’s been taken with deregulation, liberalisation, proliferation of new alcohol products, and massive spends on advertising.’ Gillan says that booze has, since the 1970s, become cheaper, more heavily marketed, and more readily available. ‘When I was young, you couldn’t afford to drink at home. A litre bottle of vodka was the equivalent of £35. If you had anything in the house, it was for New Year’s Eve. At the supermarket, alcohol and tobacco used to be screened off behind a separate section. There’s been a big push by the industry to make alcohol an ordinary commodity, and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.’
There’s a quiet fury beneath her words. She talks about the need to ‘protect’ young people from the ‘normalisation’ of drinking, led by an industry bombarding them with alcohol advertising at sporting events, at music festivals, and, increasingly, through social media, where there are no restrictions on how to market alcohol products. She says that not only is this type of viral marketing big bang for the industry buck, but also that Facebook or Bebo groups which promote funky new drinks create a sense of belonging in an audience desperate for peer acceptance. Young people are much more likely to pay attention to brand messages if the recommendation comes directly from their friends.
Internal marketing documents from British beer giant Carling, obtained during a 2009 House of Commons Health Select Committee inquiry into alcohol advertising, revealed that the purpose of the company’s sponsorship of music festivals was to ‘build the image of the brand and recruit young male drinkers’. The document stated: ‘More people are attending live music than ever before. FACT. Which is great for Carling as beer and live music go hand in hand. FACT.’ The company sought to make Carling ‘the first choice for festival virgins’, and enhanced its brand during the event through a range of promotions, including handing out free tents, and offering a campsite morning-delivery service of a can of Carling and a newspaper. ‘Great way to start the day!’ the documents stated.
This form of insidious marketing, Gillan says, is a powerful way to attract new drinkers. ‘What we’re trying to do is turn
that around and start protecting people from alcohol marketing, and empowering young people — like the tobacco-truth campaigns, where once young people have got access to information about how the industry is trying to manipulate them and dupe them, they say, “I don’t think so.”’ Gillan says that she wasn’t always this combative. But as the industry fights moves towards regulation — particularly minimum price, which alcohol companies claim won’t reduce problem drinking and will penalise the majority of Scots, who drink responsibly — she’s been forced to defend herself. ‘I’ve had personal attacks. I’ve been called a neo-prohibitionist. I think my current nickname within the industry is Dr Evil Glam. I’ve been shouted at in rooms. If they can’t win the argument, they attack the organisation. The industry is fantastically organised; very successful lobbyists. It’s a David-and-Goliath battle.’
As an example, she cites the Scotch Whisky Association, one of the most vocal opponents of minimum price legislation, which has appealed to national sentiment by claiming that Scotland’s most iconic export will be threatened by the move. But the group is not what it seems. Far from being a collective of local distilleries fighting for Scottish jobs, its 56 members include some of the world’s largest multinational alcohol companies. It was until recently chaired by Diageo, a global spirits giant that produces brands such as Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, and Baileys. Gillan claims that the industry is fundamentally opposed to any moves to reduce consumption because if people drink less, these companies make less money.
The influence of the multinationals’ massive marketing spend, says Gillan, is contributing to a shift in the way young people are drinking in parts of Europe that have, until recently, not seen the alcohol-related social consequences felt so keenly in the United Kingdom and Australia. In France, Spain, and Italy, where historically alcohol was drunk in the Mediterranean tradition, mainly with food, more young people are now drinking recreationally. ‘They’re drinking branded beers and spirits that were never associated with their cultures. Again, the industry’s got massive presences in these countries. What the public-health people are saying is that if you go to Madrid or other main cities, that’s where you start to see major public drunkenness for the first time. It will be sad if it goes that way because the way they traditionally drink just shows you that it’s possible to create a culture where people don’t think it’s cool to be plastered.’
I’m reminded of an evening with Kath, during our jaunt around Europe last year. We were in a bar in Venice, watching Germany and Spain in the World Cup semi-final. After the game, hundreds of young people spilled out of bars and restaurants, and we found ourselves sitting at the foot of some steps in a piazza, drinking bottled beer and people-watching. Some were drinking; many were not. What struck me was how convivial the atmosphere was. The throng grew, and there was a bit of jostling as people pushed to get through the crowd. But there was no trouble. I’ve spent a lot of time in the city centres of Melbourne and Edinburgh on Friday and Saturday nights, and there’s always that underlying threat of menace. It’s a tinderbox just waiting for a match. But in Venice, I felt completely safe. The difference, I think, is that their drinking seemed to be incidental. Ours is often the whole point of the evening.
Before I leave, I ask Gillan where she’d like to see Scotland in ten years. On her wish list is greater regulation so that alcohol costs more and is less accessible, and children are not ‘saturated’ with drinking messages. ‘If we had all of that, then I wouldn’t expect the number of people to die. I would expect half our jails to be empty because 50 per cent of our prisoners were drunk at the time of the offence. Our accident and emergency departments would not be warzones at the weekend. I’d like low alcohol consumption to be the norm, and I’d like those who choose not to drink to be supported in their choice.’
After we say our goodbyes, I reflect on her crusade. It’s an admirable one. But I’m not sure I share her view that the alcohol industry carries so much of the blame for youth binge drinking. Teenagers are risk-takers; getting drunk is about testing boundaries and experimenting. I started drinking at 13 and, unless the industry marketing machine was so sophisticated that I didn’t realise I was being targeted, I don’t think advertising played much, if any, role in why I did it. Although today’s teenager might be bombarded with colourful alcopops designed to appeal to an unsophisticated palate, when I was young there weren’t any sweet-tasting drinks to mask the foul taste of hard liquor. It didn’t deter me.
I walk back to Mum’s flat via Bruntsfield Links, a green space popular with tourists for being one of the earliest known locations where the game of golf was played, sometime around the 15th century. For me it brings back teenage memories of lazy afternoons lying in the sunshine with friends, drinking a carryout and smoking fags. I throw my bag on the ground and lie down, resting my head on it. Not much has changed. To my left a group of teenagers, boys and girls aged 18 or 19, are sprawled out in a circle, drinking cider and playing guitars. I can smell hash. They’re approached by a German man riding a unicycle, and they collapse into giggles. Before long, everyone is giving the unicycle a go.
Behind me, another group of girls, who look about 15 or 16, are talking about T in the Park, Scotland’s biggest music festival. The T stands for Tennent’s, a Scottish brewery and the festival’s major sponsor since it began in 1994, my last year of high school. Last time I went it was 1995, and The Prodigy, Supergrass, and The Verve were among the headline acts. I was pissed for two days, but I didn’t drink Tennent’s. The girls are excited because they’ve discovered vodka pouches, single-serve soft packs of spirits that they plan to smuggle past security in their wellies. The conversation shifts to the weekend just gone. ‘I was absolutely steamin’. I was, like, still drunk the next day at two o’clock. Then I went out the next night, got home at 5.30, and Sarah’s parents woke us up at, like, nine o’clock. Then I totally had this rash cos I was just, like, so rundown. For two nights I’d had, like, six hours asleep, and I just spewed.’ All three girls burst out laughing.
When I get back to the flat, I start to sift through my childhood. Mum’s living room is strewn with bags and boxes of stuff I’ve collected over the years, retrieved from the attic of our family home last year after my parents sold up. This is the first chance I’ve had to go through it. There are letters from pen pals in Denmark and Australia, and certificates for swimming, skiing, and tap dancing, and a Brownie tea-making badge. I find the order of service for Granddad’s funeral, and a small piece of card that says ‘cord number 3’ — a pallbearer’s instructions. There are several editions of ‘Paw’s Fitba Talk’, a monthly newsletter Dad wrote for me about Scottish football when I was living in New Zealand: twelve editions of pure love. I laugh at handwritten notes Fiona passed to me during history class, her acerbic assessment of our teachers even funnier today given she’s now a teacher herself. There are literally hundreds of photographs of the two of us. We’re pissed in many of them.
When Fiona comes over for dinner and to look through the boxes, I bring up the more outrageous moments of our teenage years — the time we sneaked vodka from my parents’ drinks cabinet at lunchtime and giggled our way through choir practice, or the day my folks came back unexpectedly early from a golf day in St Andrews, and we had to hide beer cans down the back of the couch and tip ashtrays into our pockets. She claims amnesia, joking the next day on Facebook that she’s seeking the services of a libel lawyer. But my diaries don’t lie. It seems that I was drunk for pretty much the whole of the ’90s and most of the 2000s.
One diary entry stands out more than most: October 1992. I was 16.
I feel like I’m growing up too fast. I go out every weekend to pubs and get totally drunk. I have to stop drinking because according to everyone (all guys incidentally) I’m a much nicer person when I’m sober. But it’s a vicious circle. If I’m drunk I talk to people and meet people with confidence in myself and they tend not to like me but if I stay sober I do
n’t talk to people or meet people because I’m too shy and they won’t be able to find out if I’m nice or not. I just want to die. My life is so shit just now. I hate school and I don’t even have anything to look forward to at the weekend anymore.
I stare at the words, the handwriting so messy and childlike. The melodrama makes me smile. It was, and sometimes still is, my forte. But the underlying point is hard to ignore: for 20 years I’ve been drinking like this. And I was questioning it even at the start. I drank for confidence and to chat to guys. It left me feeling depressed, dissatisfied, and bored. How much has changed? I think about Jon Currie’s offer to test my brain and decide I’m going to do it. Maybe it will help me to understand how much of my adult personality — my anxiety and bouts of depression, my impulsivity and short temper — have been caused by getting drunk as a teenager. The results might not be pleasant, but I need to know.
July
MUM AND I are taking a road trip. I’ve travelled to every state and territory in Australia, an island continent that could fit Scotland 97 times, but to my shame I’ve seen very little of my compact homeland. Despite spending the first 25 years of my life in Edinburgh, I rarely ventured past Glasgow, which is less than an hour’s drive away. Yet the yearning to see more of my country grows stronger with every year I’m away. My mum’s family were highlanders and, although she grew up in Edinburgh, she spent many happy summers with her aunt in a small village called Whitebridge, on the south shore of Loch Ness. She wants to take me there; I can’t wait. Perhaps by touring these historic areas I’ll get some clues as to why drinking is such an integral part of my national identity.
The morning we set out is the kind of Scottish summer’s day that has to be seen to be believed. It’s ten degrees and dreich — a Scottish term, invented because no other word could adequately capture the unique brand of soggy, grey misery known only to our shores. It’s pronounced with emphasis on the guttural sound of the last two letters, and Mum maintains that it should be spat out like an unwelcome taste, as if in direct reference to the weather it represents. As we drive out of Edinburgh, towards Fife, on the city bypass, rain teems down in sheets. One of Scotland’s most iconic landmarks, the Forth Rail Bridge is all but obscured, its majestic peaks shrouded under low-lying cloud. The sky ahead is gunmetal grey as we drive north into Perthshire. Douglas firs line the road, their proud silhouettes stretching in neat rows all the way up the ranges to the west. I can smell the pine wafting through the air vents, and immediately I’m back in my parents’ living room on Christmas Eve, sitting cross-legged in the dark before a tree straining under the weight of tinsel and toilet paper–tube Santas. If ever I feel alone, all I have to do is remember that smell.