Brits, the bottle and a losing battle on airline booze
It was 6.50am on a recent flight to Marseille when the drinks trolley started making its way up the cabin. “A G&T please,” I heard a male voice behind me ask – and I turned to stare through the gap between the seats. I realise it’s always 6pm somewhere in the empire but I’m genuinely curious: what kind of person starts drinking before breakfast?
This guy had the sort of overbite and mustard-coloured chinos you only get in W3. His idea of rowdy behaviour was probably dad-dancing to Rihanna on New Year’s Eve and, aside from that one incident at the office party years ago, he wasn’t the groping type, so in all likelihood neither a threat to my peace nor the air stewardess’s behinds. Hell, if he wanted to wash his reconstituted egg wrap down with a bucket of Tanqueray, where was the problem in that?
Well, according to a BBC Panorama investigation broadcast on Monday night, the problem is in the following statistics: arrests of passengers suspected of being drunk at UK airports and on flights have risen by 50 per cent in a year, with a total of 387 people arrested between February 2016 and February 2017, up from 255 the previous year – and I’m betting not all of them looked like the cast of Prison Break.
In fact, some will have looked liked the Mancunian mum-of-three who, earlier this summer, decided to give a stranger a drunken lap-dance on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza, others like the vodka-swigging young couple who, in June, forced an easyjet flight to Turkey to make an emergency landing. It’s possible one or two will even have looked like Bertie Wooster behind me, and a lot won’t have been troublesome enough to be arrested either: over half of the cabin crew questioned by Panorama claimed to have witnessed disruptive drunken passenger behaviour both at UK airports and on flights departing the UK. All of which has left the Home Office considering calls for tougher rules on alcohol in airport bars and on board aircraft, and prompted airlines like Ryanair both to ban the drinking of duty-free alcohol on flights and enforce a two-drink limit.
That you could once coolly hop aboard a plane with a litre of dutyfree Jägermeister and proceed to work your way through it somehow cancels out my outrage at the two-drink limit here. And, anyway, Ryanair only do short-haul: how many doubles were you planning to squeeze into a couple of hours? As many as it takes to dull the pain? Drown out both the memory of the exorbitant excess baggage charges and the repeated attempts to flog you a scratchcard over the deafeninglyloud tannoy? I hear you.
Whether they’re dad-dancers or thugs, hen-nighters or harassed mothers-of-five, people drink on flights for the same reasons: because they’re demob happy, stressed and bored. Because after getting the last of the work they needed to do done and locking up the house and going back once for the ipad charger and spilling the Calpol at check-in, they’re then forced to undress and unpack and re-dress and re-pack at security before throwing away hundreds of pounds’ worth of outsized gels and creams. They then get scammed at duty-free and lost in the departure terminal, so by the time they climb aboard – assigned seat or not – it’s often a case of “move aside coffee, this is a job for alcohol.”
Only here’s the thing – and I’m slightly confused because I thought this was a given: Britons don’t know how to drink. I mean, we are literally like non table-trained toddlers with our booze.
We still do not know when or how much it is appropriate to consume in any given situation, and there’s always the possibility we might throw it all up. So to think that we would somehow become civilised about our greatest Achilles’ heel, most famous weakness and glaring blind spot in this weirdest and most pressurised of environments seems a little unrealistic.
You see, one of the great pluses of air travel in the British psyche is the suspension of all normal rules of behaviour. Once airside, you’re not quite in Britain, and in the air, you’re not quite in Alicante, Ibiza or Palma de Majorca (statistically the most drunken routes), so how much does anything you do really count?
If planes ever really were “nightclubs in the sky” – as one stewardess claims Brits see them – they’re certainly not now, when, thanks to terrorism, fear is the most pervasive emotion from the moment you arrive at the airport to the moment you touch down. And doesn’t that make you long for two fingers of bourbon?
Panorama points out that the voluntary code the UK aviation industry brought in a year ago – in which airports and airlines work together to limit disruptive behaviour and sell alcohol responsibly – should help curb these worrying new figures, and that high fines could also be introduced as a deterrent to would-be unruly passengers. But I’m inclined to think that with Brits and the bottle, you’re fighting a losing battle, and that in 10 years’ time we’ll look back at in-flight boozing with the same nostalgic horror as on-board smoking.