Basic Bitch

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Why millennials love murder

There was a time when a ‘binge’ was something that might involve a trip to your local pub for a few swift beers, and then, perhaps, a few more beers that you knew you were going to have anyway, at some other pub, and another one after that, until you find yourself at closing time, on your way to a nite club for more drink, a few bottles of wine and maybe a bit of dancing, which, in the way of these things, might lead you eventually to an ‘early house’ to throw a few more into you, and maybe to fall into the sort of company which makes it seem sensible to crack on to the pub where you started the previous day, cracking on and cracking on and cracking on, until, eventually, you might run into someone who makes the apparently reasonable suggestion that these Dublin pubs have their attractions, but really the place to be is in Galway, and as it happens, there’s a train leaving for Galway quite soon, so you get a taxi to the station and you get on that train, and you head for the dining car to sit yourself down and to enjoy a few more drinks with your new friend, who takes you around the pubs of Galway for the night, in the course of which, at some stage, you start to get this notion that the place you always really wanted to go was San Francisco… and, by the magic of alcoholic insanity, sure enough, after some feverish endeavour, and a few strokes of dumb luck, and an awful lot of drinking on planes, trains and automobiles, you find yourself, maybe 72 hours after you first stepped into the pub for a few swift ones, still wide awake, and sipping a few cold ones on the west coast of America, as you savour your first view of the Golden Gate Bridge. That, my friends, is a binge. Or at least it used to be, until, for a variety of very wrong reasons, a binge was redefined by outfits such as the WHO as “six or more standard drinks in one session” with “standard drinks” being the equivalent of “three or more pints of beer”.

Suddenly, we were hearing a lot about ‘binge drinking’ from serious-sounding folk, who were telling us that a binge was now just ‘the few pints’ rather than the epic misadventure that it used to be, and who must have thought that lowering the bar in this way would persuade people to exercise more caution in their drinking life.

But I don’t think it did any good at all, and, if anything, it may have done much harm.

Always I am uneasy when people start messing with the meanings of words, particularly a word such as ‘binge’ which was so obviously right in its original usage. When applied to some alcoholic atrocity of the type that might start quite casually in your local lounge bar and end up, several days later, three sheets to the wind in California, it sounded right, it looked right, it felt right.

Disrespect for language is a universal malaise, but in the area of addiction, it is particularly odious. Terminology is of the essence; there are these moments of transcendental awareness in which people feel able for the first time to name what is wrong with them as alcoholism; there is a kind of precision required at all times, an acute sensitivity to the subtleties and the idiosyncracies of the experience of each individual.

And you’re not going to get that, by making a quasi-official decree that a binge is not what it used to be. Because at that point, people stop believing you; your words do not have the gravity that they should have. And if you set the bar low enough, you are starting to imply that almost everyone has a drink problem — which means that no one has a drink problem. Good news there, for our man raising his glass to the Golden Gate Bridge, and cracking on.

“A binge was now just the few pints, rather then the epic misadventure it used to be”