WHAT?!? Why wasn't I informed of this? Damn, I'm so out of the loop.... So has Yorkshire reclaimed them? (Not Avon, obviously).
I guess I've been lucky then - none of my groups of friends have ever felt pressurised to drink, and they never put me under pressure to do so. In fact, for about half a year after I went to university, our standard order at the bar was "Four colas." But yes, I do think that the drinking culture is out of hand. However, I also think it's a (growing) minority who engage in it to the extent that it becomes embarrassing or dangerous.
The town that I'm in, there's two distinctly different drinking scenes. There's campustown, where the majority of the people are students, and regularly drink a ridiculous amount and make total asses of themselves and are puking in the street and all that. I tend to avoid campustown. Then there's downtown, which has way fewer students and more dive-y bars. The bar I usually go to is mostly townies and older people, and it's rare that I don't know at least 3/4 of the people there. We do drink our fair share, but it's less likely to walk down the street and see someone bent over puking on a tree. With work and drinking...when I worked at a university book store, every once in a while (birthdays, holidays) our boss would take us all out to a restaurant and pay for everyone to eat and drink as much as they want. When I worked at JoAnn Fabrics, most of my old lady coworkers would look at me like a leper if I mentioned I'd gone out to drink the night before. Now where I work (pizza place) pretty much all of my coworkers drink...I went out with them last week, and one of my managers got really huggy with me toward the end of the night. The next time I worked with him, the conversation went like this: Him: Did you stay til close the other night? Me: Yeah. Him: I blacked out around 12:30. Me: Oh yeah? So you don't remember the last part of the night? Him: No, did I do something embarrassing? Me: *laugh and walk away* I hope I made him really paranoid.
I say he protests too much.... I have used that line before when I knew I did something really stupid. "Really? I DONT remember that!" I am pretty sure he knows and he feels like a douche for it.
Funnily enough, the English have that reputation of not being able to handle alcohol well over here, too. It's usually blamed on the allegedly sorry state of their beers. But we're incredibly snobbish about beer, even among ourselves. A friend of mine once went to a pub that only served "Kölsch" (beer from Cologne) and this is what happened: Friend: A beer, please! Waiter: A Kölsch? Friend: No, a real beer!! Anyway, back on topic: I'm not so sure British drinking culture is really that unique. Rather, it strikes me as being a bit "old school". Here, social activities revolve around alcohol, too, and it's not unusual to be seen as kind of weird if you don't drink. Hell, the Bavarians even believe their culture solely consists of drinking (and wearing funny looking clothes). It's possible that this attitude is on the way out but my friends are probably not representative. Binge drinking among youths is quite popular, too, and it sometimes end in deaths. I used to binge drink, too, when I was younger but now I rarely drink any alcohol.
Yeah, I thought about that. He invited me to come out tonight too. At least it's not as bad as my roommate. Every male coworker she's gone out drinking with has tried to make out with her at some point. And they all know very well she has a boyfriend.