DRINK! DRINK! DRINK!

24 hour boozing comes to London Town

Well, this week the newspapers have finally woken up to the implications of the new 24-hour-licensing. It seems amazing that it’s taken them so long to spot this important story, especially given the amount of booze most journalists put away, but it set me to wondering just what effect this will have on London.

Will we become, as the government assures us, a Southern-European type of city, where people start their evenings at midnight, drink a couple of beers through the night, while chatting amiably about art and philosophy, and finish up with a plate of oysters by the river, before soberly heading home, their shirts still tucked into their white jeans?

Or will we be the kind of place the tabloids are warning of, a sink of drunken depravity, where every Saturday night Burberry-clad gangs, insensible with alcohol, turn Central London into an orgy of vomit, fighting and public sex?

I can’t picture either scenario myself. Londoners are too naturally reserved for that ever-so-sophisticated Mediterranean way of life. How many people do you know who got together with their current partner while stone-cold sober? I do know men who can pull without a couple of early drinks to lower their inhibitions – but none of them are English.

Equally, we’re way, way too cool to become a city of drunks. Our artfully ripped jeans fall apart at the slightest provocation, our bimonthly haircuts need to be blow-dryed into place and fiddled with ten times a night, and our taste has to be on alert all night long, just in case we stray into a bar that stopped being fashionable two weeks ago. We simply can’t take the risk of staying out drinking too long, and actually letting ourselves go.

I would guess, in fact, that the English will continue to call time at eleven o’clock of their own volition. The only real change that the new laws will have on our lives, is that the tabloid newspapers will fold one after another, as their journalists, incapable of resisting the lure of booze, drink themselves into a stupor every night.

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