Why I’ll never buy a round of drinks for more than three people again!

From a woman left virtually penniless by every trip to the bar...

That will be £64.50, madam!’ said the young man serving me. I nearly fainted. Nope, I wasn’t buying a smart Dualit toaster, a new duvet, or even the weekly groceries. this was the total for a round of drinks for seven people at a fancy bar in Liverpool last November, following a jampacked professional conference.

true, a number of my companions were drinking aperol Spritz, the bright amber concoction drunk in fashionable circles, but they’re mixed with prosecco and soda water, not solid gold leaf. Others were on double vodka and tonics, while Muggins here was having a humble glass of house red wine.

In my head, I’d been braced for closer to half the total, which would still have stung my pocket in these inflationary times.

It proved a bit of a landmark moment for me.

I realised that as a single-wage household

( my husband’s only income is the State Pension) with two teens, where my yearly earnings have never hit the threshold needed to register for Vat but can veer into the 40 per cent tax bracket, I am the living epitome of the squeezed middle. and right now

we lemon-like middles hear our squeezed pips rattling every time we step out of the door.

So, no, I cannot and will not buy a round if the number of people exceeds three. If it’s more than that, not only will several of them inevitably slope off before their own round, but there’s no way I’m shelling out on martinis, ‘fizz’ and bloodorange gin while I sip a small glass of house cabernet.

In fact, I stand with the Manchester University academic who recently offered a trigger warning to students when the topic of buying rounds cropped up in his sociology lecture.

While it initially sounds like the wokerati gone mad — young people can’t handle the stress of getting a simple round of drinks in — I’d humbly suggest those who were most indignant clearly haven’t been out to a bar or pub recently.

You’re not a soppy snowflake if you feel yourself having a minor panic attack when faced with shelling out for five bottles of craft ale, brewed in a garage in

London’s hoxton, that appear to have a tourist tax levied on them. Especially if, like me, you drink at a third of the pace of most of your thirstier acquaintances.

In no other country on Earth does etiquette dictate that a decent human must turn to their mates ideally twice in an average pub evening and ask, ‘What are you having?’.

Yet Britain demands it. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis has left your average student steeped in debt and barely able to cover the cost of their Co-op pasta. My older son is in his first year at Sussex University and barely a day passes without urgent requests for cash for basic food and transport. Student loans simply have not kept pace with the recent rise in rent and energy costs. Furthermore, this is a boy who — unlike his old-school parents — barely touches alcohol. he gives a hollow laugh when I ask if he buys rounds, ‘Nah, Mum. I’m not a tech billionaire.’ he says he asks for water when he goes out in Brighton. the bar tab dilemma was brilliantly brought to life in the film Saltburn, when Barry Keoghan’s character, Oxford student Oliver Quick, is put in the awkward position of having to buy a round for his posh friend Felix and a big pack of braying chums. It’s clear there’s no way he can cover the cost (no spoilers here), but it’s equally evident he can’t admit to it. Only Felix’s largesse in slipping him a £ 20 note stands between Oliver and social suicide. and the film is set in 2006 when inflation was a small fraction of what it is today.

Many of us will have adopted certain time-honoured strategies to avoid Quick’s discomfort — either holding back to buy a later round, when some friends may have left, and others switched to a trusty pint of diet Coke as they’re driving.

Or my own favourite course of action, which involves teaming up with a similarly impoverished friend to buy a round together and making sure your own bevvies are dirt cheap.

It pains me to admit all this in public. I feel mean just articulating these thoughts. throughout my life, I’ve upheld a near-religious belief in the importance of the Great British Round.

at university in the 1980s, I was outraged by a friend from Leeds who would only ever buy his own drinks, although he always had spare cash for albums and holidays — taking the legendary penny-pinching stereotype of Yorkshiremen to a new low.

I made it a rule never to date anyone who thought that kind of miserly behaviour was acceptable. My kind of people have long been those who would spend their last tenner on a bottle of wine and share it with you.

and no wonder: I was brought up in a traditional country pub where customers were rated by my parents and fellow drinkers —as if on the Dreadful Day of Judgment — on their willingness to spread liquid largesse. We all whispered darkly of certain tightwad regulars, who were so stingy they wouldn’t even buy their neighbour half a shandy.

But that was back in the Seventies, when standing your round was still a realistic proposition. a pint of beer was 40p and no one was drinking fancy Italian spritzes. Babycham was as glam as it got.

If you go to the website of the Office for National Statistics you can watch the average price of a pint soar from 1987 (around £1) to 2024 (closer to £5), way outstripping the low inflation of the period. For no treat is more vulnerable to taxes and duties than our precious wine and beer.

the Government often justifies its booze taxes in terms of health and the cost to the NhS of excess drinking, but you wonder who factors in the mental health toll on a nation stripped of its traditional delight in carousing with friends. We’re depressed enough as it is at the moment, with the war in Ukraine and grim loss of life in Israel and Gaza, without being confined to our homes with a tinny.

So, it’s surely time to call for a national armistice on buying rounds — a new social pact in which there’s no dishonour in refusing to pick up the bill for four

Back in the 70s, Babycham was as glam as it got

Pubgoers were judged on their liquid largesse

‘Hang on, that’s more than my grocery shop!’

pints of Guinness, an Old Fashioned and two brandies. Where you can say, ‘hang on! that’s more than a week’s groceries in aldi.’

I must admit some friends have been showing me the way for a decade. OK, they are all people who’ve given up booze, so avoid getting a round as they’re ‘just on soft drinks’.

and why should they fork out for other people’s excesses? By and large, the group accepts this. But every now and then a teetotaller orders a non- alcoholic mocktail full of exotic juices and ground ginger that costs a king’s ransom and still tries to avoid contributing to the bill. that’s the kind of behaviour that starts revolutions. What about swallowing your pride and letting a kindly, wealthier chum take a bigger hit at the bar? Providing they volunteer it, I’m hugely grateful to wellheeled friends who recognise I’m the Oliver Quick in their circle.

there’s no denying the difference in disposable incomes between people in professions such as teaching, journalism, healthcare and the creative industries and those who are working in finance, tech, corporate law or for big corporations. I always tell my generous pals that if the magazine I currently edit, Perspective, makes it big, I’ll fill their baths with champagne. But, until then, mine’s a small vino.

My parents will be turning in their Kentish village graves at these words. I can still remember my mum casually mentioning, some 25 years ago, that tony Blair visited our family pub.

‘What was he like?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied tartly, ‘he didn’t buy a round.’ It was a black mark on his character as far as she was concerned. But nowadays, to have done so would be a slide into the red on your bank account.