Time, gentlemen, please?
fancy a pint? increasingly, the answer to that most companionable question is a polite but definitive, “no”. And even when it’s, “Go on, then”, the pint might have a crucial difference from all previous pints you’ve ever sunk. There’s a missing ingredient, a significant one: alcohol.
While booze sales drain away, pubs are shuttered, and the liquid lunch goes the way of the office romance (they still happen, but management no longer approves), a cottage industry is thriving, serving drinkers of beer and wine and spirits who are interested in the taste and the ritual, but the buzz, apparently, not so much. “Sober-curious” is the mildly infuriating buzz-phrase. “Mindful drinking” is the other.
And while zero-alcohol beer, previously soapy and unconvincing, alcohol-free wine and the dreaded mocktail have long been available, alongside water and juice and tea and Diet Coke, for those who abstain for reasons of religious observance, or because they are recovering addicts, or pregnant, or designated drivers, the new low- and no-alcohol drinks are aimed not so much at them, but the rest of us: drinkers who wish to moderate, or temporarily suspend, or even end entirely, our alcohol intake, just because.
Just because what? Well, I’m sorry to tell you and your renegade uncle, but the consumption of alcohol is not especially good for your health. And being drunk, in 2023, is nothing to shout about, if it ever was. It’s not considered cool, or clever, or sexy. It might even be a bit sad.
Senior readers will wonder if, like a pub-bore’s joke, they haven’t heard all this before. And they’d be right. Assuming the unlikely role of an impatient publican at the end of a long night, the British press — not famous for its ascetism — has called time on alcohol on more than one previous occasion.
Your correspondent’s memory flashes back to the autumn of 1991 when, a callow stripling in inadvisable trousers and a please-notice-me jacket, he joined a queue of his peers, fake IDs at the ready, in a sketchy south-London side street. This was the opening night of the Ministry of Sound, the first venue purpose-built for the rave generation. Acid house was going legit. Later, the Ministry would become synonymous with corporate clubbing, the merchandising of rebellion. But right then, it felt necessary to be there.
The big news for us revellers was the line-up of imported DJs and the much-vaunted sound system. The story that drew attention from the mainstream media had nothing to do with music: the Ministry of Sound didn’t have a liquor licence. Not an oversight on the part of the owners. There was no bar because it was thought one wouldn’t be required. The Ministry clientele were not going to be drinkers. House music was the soundtrack to drug-taking, not drinking. Ravers drank water or energy drinks. My own tipple at that time, I blush to recall, was a carton of strawberry Ribena. Beer was for lumpen townies. Wine was for Thatcherite pseudo sophisticates (and French people). Gin and tonics were a relic of Empire. It would be another decade before I sampled a “cocktail” — a category of libation I’m afraid I still find hopelessly Abigail’s Party.
We didn’t need booze. We were, to paraphrase the Clash, so pilled up that we rattled. We liked it that way.
Cue hand-wringing from the tabloids, bafflement from our elders, and panic from the drinks industry. Here was behaviour that, to British minds in particular, seemed subversive in a way that wearing silly clothes, dancing to impenetrable music, and freaking out on drugs — all of which had very much been done before — could never be. It was infantile. It was unpatriotic. It was just plain weird. We didn’t want to drink? What was wrong with us?
The brewers responded with alcopops: bottles of sugary nectar marketed directly at teens. But that’s not what brought this very brief, and in truth always rather niche, flirtation with sobriety to a halt. Instead, pop culture did what pop culture does best. It changed the record. What followed was a decade and more of bacchanalian carousing. The anthem was unequivocal: “lager, lager, lager”. British teens and twentysomethings still took drugs. But we went back to drink, too.
So, yes, we’ve been here before. But this time something feels different. It’s not just abstemious young people, more health conscious and less blithely hedonistic than previous generations. And it’s not just ancients like me, seeing the error of our ways, and putting the brakes on, doctor’s orders. Although it is that, too.
Beginning on page 88 of this issue, Finlay Renwick investigates the rise of no-alcohol and low-alcohol drinks, meeting brewers and sellers and talking to sociologists and historians about this potentially seismic shift in the way we live, and especially the way we socialise.
I am not now and never will be an abstinence advocate, still less an abolitionist. But I find myself, for the first time, persuadable on this. Purely in the interests of research, I bought a “taster pack” from Nirvana, the east-London brewers who Fin met for his story. I must tell you, I drank the whole thing and I feel… fine.
WHAT IS THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN AN ACTOR AND a star? Writing about Paul Newman in the New York Review of Books last year, Simon Callow, among our most incisive guides to the craft and meaning of acting, attempted an answer.
“Crudely put,” wrote Callow, “an actor does something: he or she plays a character. A star is something: in their own personas they embody aspects of the human condition that have a deep resonance for us.” He went on to list a number of these, besides Newman, from Bette Davis to Tom Hanks.
Callow is himself a wonderful actor, but he’s not a star. He plays characters. He doesn’t take something of his essential self — even if that essential self is a fictional persona — from film to film, like Jack Nicholson or Julia Roberts or John Wayne. Those people, in the phrase of the American film historian Jeanine Basinger, are stars because they make myth out of themselves.
In the age of streaming, and showrunners, and superhero movies, where IP is more important than individual players, we are often told that the era of the movie star is at an end. Is Joaquin Phoenix the star, or Joker? Does Phoenix make myth out of himself? Or is he just a good actor, in service of an indelible character?
Tom Cruise, it is said, is the exception that proves the rule: the star who is still bigger than any single film. But, actually, Cruise is not alone. A handful of these fantastic creatures still exists. Idris Elba is a star. He has convincingly and compellingly portrayed cops and criminals, rich and poor, British and American. He’s been Nelson Mandela, and Shere Khan, and a Baltimore drug dealer, and a London detective and an African warlord. And in each of those roles he has also been Idris Elba.
He is, as true stars are, the ideal person to appear on the cover of a magazine. It possibly says more than I intend it to that I have been doing this job long enough to keep a list of the stars who have appeared on multiple Esquire covers, over the years. Until this issue, leading the pack on three covers each, a quartet of commanding, above-the-title British leading men: Daniel Craig, Tom Hardy, Robert Pattinson and Idris Elba.
With this issue, Elba pulls ahead: this is the fourth Esquire cover he’s appeared on during my tenure. I realise this is a completely arbitrary countdown that matters only to me, but still, it is perhaps instructive of something: we don’t repeat ourselves in this way because we have run out of ideas. (Ahem!) We do it for the same reason directors and producers and movie-studio bosses keep returning to these actors. Because they are appealing, and intriguing, and they represent something: they have entered our dreamlives.
Contra Callow and Basinger, Idris Elba has his own theories about what makes a star. These are typically self-effacing, in that they
discount such ineffable qualities as presence and charisma, and even more concrete virtues, such as talent and technique. Elba takes a scientific approach. What makes a person appealing to others, he told me this past December, is “something about the size of the forehead”. It’s in the distance between brow-line and eyes. And as much as possible of the whites of the eyes must be clearly visible. And a gummy grin helps. Put all that up on a big screen, cross your fingers for luck, and you might have a star.
Elba goes further. His resting face, he knows, gives the impression he is deep in profound thought, even when he may be contemplating nothing more pressing than what to have for lunch. Think of Stringer Bell, Elba’s breakout character, from The Wire: still, watchful, calculating. All Elba needs to do, he says, to achieve this effect, is to stare into space.
It’s not just a question of good looks, then. Some people just have faces we want to look at, faces we see ourselves in, or the selves we wish to be.
ADAM GOPNIK IS A STAR IN MY BUSINESS. A STAFF writer for the New Yorker and an author of many warm and witty books, Gopnik’s is a name to conjure with in magazine journalism. But, despite a childhood flirtation with professional acting, he’s not a star, in the world-famous Idris Elba sense of the word. Until now, that is. In cinemas right now, you can see Gopnik playing himself, alongside Cate Blanchett — one of the most magnetic stars of our times — in the acclaimed cancel-culture drama, Tár. On page 146, Gopnik moonlights for Esquire with a typically entertaining and perceptive piece about his adventures in filmmaking. Like Nirvana’s Hoppy Pale Ale, I recommend it.
More great writing: in our Journal section, Tabitha Lasley has a very funny and pointed piece about the difficulties for a writer of maintaining romantic relationships when your best material is the fecklessness of the men in your life. Dylan Jones has disobliging things to say about Kansas, of all places. Like Toto, he’s not there anymore, and I can’t imagine the good people of that state are disappointed to hear it. Over lunch (it pains me to tell you but I suspect no zero-alcohol drinks were consumed), Tom Parker Bowles pays court to a legend of rock journalism and publicity. And, in her account of a calamitous recent weekend in New York City, Miranda Collinge, Esquire’s resident Timothy Leary, coins a phrase to describe a certain sort of person (her, for one), temporarily liberated from humdrum domestic duties: Gummy Mummy. It’s a term that deserves to stick.
Elsewhere, Miranda delivers another in her occasional series of profiles of men embarked on quixotic adventures — “quixotic” in this context being a euphemism for “bonkers”. This time she hangs ten with Matt Formston, a champion bigwave surfer who happens to be blind. Finally, the brilliant Joanna Kavenna offers a crystalline short story for our times, “World Peace”.
AN AWKWARDLY PROPORTIONED PARCEL UNDER my sparkly tree this past Christmas morning. I picked it up — the parcel, not the tree — and juggled it from hand to hand. I felt its weight (light) and its consistency (hard). Was it a frying pan? Nope. An electric ukelele? No! A spade with a ridiculously short handle? A spatula with an extremely engorged head? Sweet baby Jesus, just open the bloody thing! I tore off the wrapping to reveal… a padel racquet. Or bat, or club, or paddle, or whatever; I’ve not quite got the terminology, yet.
An appropriate present for me, and gratefully received, since my interest in padel — tennis meets ping pong meets squash, for people, such as me, not athletic enough to master those, but not yet ready to hang up our Nikes — has been growing since last summer, when I first had a hit, at a friend’s place in France.
I cannot believe I was alone in receiving a padel racquet/bat/club/paddle/whatever for Christmas. Since lockdown ended, those of my type and acquaintance — semi-mobile duffers in early middle-age — have taken to padel as we once took to dancing in uncatered nightclubs.
The fast rise of both padel and its rival, pickleball — the former most popular here and across Europe, the latter dominant in the US — are notable for many reasons, as Tim Lewis writes on page 106, not least the fact that almost all our favourite sports, both those we play and those we watch, were invented more than a century ago. Suddenly, along come these two whizzy rivals to make football and cricket and golf and the rest seem as modish as billiards.
All that remains for me is to sign up for lessons. Get in training. Make the switch to no-alcohol beer permanent. Failing that, reacquaint myself with strawberry Ribena. That way, surely, stardom beckons.
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