Max Davidson

‘I drink more than my daughters’

As a middle-aged, middle-class drinker who has never been in a pub brawl in his life, but would certainly drink more glasses of wine a week than medical guidelines would recommend, I have become all but immune to lectures from the satraps of the nanny state. When the lectures come from my twenty- and thirtysomething daughters, both doctors, however, I take them to heart and, over the past few years, have cut down on my drinking. Three or four large glasses of wine in an evening have dwindled to two or three glasses – occasionally, no wine at all.

To my daughters’ generation, for whom the gym has become almost as important as the pub, I must sometimes seem like a throwback to an age of decadence. But baby-boomers like me have never really been true decadents. We have just been lucky. In an age where alcohol is far more widely available, and at much lower cost, than it was for our parents, it is hardly surprising that so many of us have chosen to take advantage.

In the Fifties, when I was born, memories of rationing were still fresh, and that natural abstemiousness coloured the way my parents and their friends approached alcohol. Wine was an occasional treat rather than a daily habit. I must have been a teenager before I saw my father with a whisky, while visits to pubs and restaurants were very infrequent indeed. Licensing hours were strict. The kind of alcoholic free-for-all you now see in town centres on a Saturday night would have been unimaginable.

The results of the free-for-all are not always edifying and, when public drunkenness becomes a threat to order, the Government needs to intervene. But the moral disapproval with which drinking so often gets discussed is becoming increasingly oppressive.

I have recently been blessed with a grandson, and posted a picture on social media of myself with the newborn in one hand and a pint of bitter in the other, under the caption “I’ve got my hands full at the moment!” It was meant as a joke, obviously, but I was astonished how many of my friends didn’t approve.

There is a more censorious attitude to alcohol than there was 20 years ago. If that leads to more people living longer, perhaps that is no bad thing, but where is the recognition that quality of life is as important as quantity and that, for millions, myself included, some of the happiest, most life-enhancing experiences have been spent with a glass of something stronger than an orange juice in hand?