Liverpool has a binge drinking problem

cymrococh · October 23, 2007

http://society.guardian.co.uk/drugsandalco...2197217,00.html

'This weekend's going to be mad," says my five-months-pregnant taxi driver. "Last weekend I only made £40 on Saturday. It costs me £20 to rent the cab for the day and seven quid in diesel. It was hardly worth getting up. I'll make hundreds of pounds this weekend. Everybody's going to be on the lash. Everton-Liverpool. The rugby. Lots of Irish people over for the weekend, spending money like crazy. Cream's 15th anniversary. Weekends like this, it feels like the whole city is drunk."

It's Friday morning and I've just arrived for 48 hours in what the Liverpool Daily Post this month called England's "capital of the binge culture". But it isn't just that: Liverpool is remaking and remodelling itself with construction cranes, as it prepares to become European capital of culture next year, and the Turner prize exhibition is opening at the Tate Liverpool.

Last week, the NHS's hospital episodes survey revealed that Liverpool had the highest number of alcohol-related emergency hospital admissions in 2005-06 of any English council. Some 1,708 men per 100,000 and 874 women per 100,000 were admitted to hospital following physical assaults or accidents related to alcohol. By contrast, Wokingham in Berkshire, which will never be a capital of binge, culture or (one suspects) anything, came bottom of the booze league of shame.

To be fair, Liverpool only has the slight edge on many other English cities in this respect (Manchester, for example, had 1,581 men per 100,000 and 815 women in alcohol-related admissions in the same period). In terms of booze, as in so many things, Liverpool is like everywhere else in England, only more so.

Minutes after my cab ride, I am walking past the Liver Building. Four twentysomething lads are strung out intimidatingly across my path. Each is carrying a half-full pint glass of lager they have taken from a pub. It is just after noon. "Is the Tate gallery down here, lads?" I ask. "Absolutely," slurs one of them amiably. "We've just come from there. The Mark Wallinger installation is amazing." Drinking and culture. Welcome to Liverpool.

Enticements to drink are at every corner. If I ordered two salads at the pub outside the Tate, I could have a bottle of Pinot Grigio Blush for only £4.95. Of course, I would have to ask the barman to pour the wine down the sink if I was to truly enjoy my salads, but still.

In the gallery, I find myself downwind of a cackling woman and two male friends, one of whom is pushing her in a wheelchair. They are finding Sarah Lucas's installation Beyond the Pleasure Principle hilarious, while I'm not enjoying inhaling their exhaled stench of booze. The cackling pursues me around the Turner show. Perhaps she is a piece of performance art, shortlisted for the prize. In Liverpool, as I find out in the next few hours, booze-fuelled self-performance is the biggest show in town.

As the sun sets on the Mersey, I explore England's binge capital with our photographer, Sean, whose last assignment was in Iraq. Walking down Berry Street, Sean is besieged by glammed-up revellers demanding he take their picture. It's a brilliant, mostly friendly, parade of weekend partygoers, a scene far more vibrant than London, say, can offer. And the very visible police presence is for the most part reassuring. But if you're over 30, you stick out. "Lads," says a small boy, trying to lure us into a bar on Concert Square. "Bud's £1.50 a pint, yeah?" I'm getting old: even the booze jockeys seem pre-pubescent.

At one point, I interview a swaying but beautiful woman in a nightclub queue who is dressed in a low-cut, short-skirted parody of a nurse's costume. We're getting on until I suggest that alcohol-fuelled narcissistic display is one of Liverpool's chronic diseases. She takes it personally. "Don't f***ing judge me," she snaps. "This is the best party city in Britain, probably the world. I love it here and I wouldn't live anywhere else. So if you don't like the way I dress or the way I drink, you can f*** right off to wherever it is you come from."

"Where are you from?" her friend asks me. Wolverhampton, originally. "Ooh, you poor f***er," she giggles and both women collapse in laughter. They both turn out to be nurses, though I suspect the first one doesn't dress that way on duty.

At 2.30am I find myself with Sean in a bar called the Jacaranda in Slater Street, after we leave two other places that are closing. We've moved from red wine to Guinness. A man approaches me and says: "Where you're sitting has a history." Oh yes, I respond wearily, expecting another Beatles anecdote. But no. "That's where Christopher McBride was killed."

Two years ago, the 24-year-old Oxford graduate was sitting in my seat when he was punched twice in the face by 24-year-old John Frazer, possibly because McBride refused him a cigarette. McBride, a pacifist, did not fight back. Nine days later he died in hospital after suffering a fractured skull and brain damage. Frazer had drunk seven pints and several shots before the assault. It's time to call it a night.

At 12.30 on Saturday afternoon, I'm with Everton fans outside the Winslow Hotel in the shadow of Goodison Park. A middle-aged man has draped his arm around my shoulders and is telling me that Mikel Arteta will run Jamie Carragher ragged. I ask how much he has had to drink. "Seven pints," he says. You'll miss the game because you'll be forever going to the toilet, I say. "Nah, I've got this," he says, reaching into a plastic bag." It's an empty two-litre bottle of Fanta. "Never need leave my seat."

After the final whistle confirms Liverpool's win, the mood back at the Winslow Hotel isn't for me (Evertonians speed-drinking their sorrows into oblivion, while still micro-analysing Kuyt's two-footed challenge and Lescott's stonewall last-minute penalty). So I head off to Oakfield Road where Liverpool fans' pubs are spilling over into the street from Dodd's bar. Two police vans belt down the street and screech to a halt. There is a fracas as the officers demand that drinkers on the pavement return inside. My pint of Diet Coke gets spilled. Inside a man, whose name I've promised not to disclose, happily takes receipt from me of a pint of lager. "My 10th," he says. I can't drink in the afternoon, I tell him. "No?" he says, with the kind of look that suggests I could overcome this lamentable lapse with a little willpower.

For a man on his 10th pint, he is eloquent. He argues with Sean, the photographer, about whether Liverpool's Derek Hatton or Lambeth's Ted Knight was the more effective foe of Thatcherism (Sean, a Londoner, vigorously maintains it was the latter). "b******s, yer cockney, it was Derek Hatton who stood up to her."

Bored, I wander off down Oakfield Road. "Stop!" says a notice in the window of Bottoms Up. "This offer is too good to miss!" Among the bargains are five 500ml bottles of Bud for a fiver, small 275ml alcopops are 55p, Scorpion lager (5% vol) is 55p, and a 70cl bottle of Gordon's gin is £9.99. Not to be outdone, Bargain Booze opposite offers a similar array.

In Martin and Moira Plant's excellent book, Binge Britain: Alcohol and the National Response, the two experts in addiction and alcohol studies conclude that any serious policy aimed at reducing alcohol abuse must involve higher taxes. "Alcohol education and health promotion campaigns, though often politically appealing, have been shown with some rare exceptions to have little or no positive effects on either drinking habits or alcohol-related problems."

The Plants recommend that Britain follows Australia, which has taxed weaker alcoholic drinks less and stronger drinks more, reportedly reducing heavy drinking and alcohol problems.

But the government isn't contemplating such tax increases: instead, it focuses on worrying drinkers into cutting back on alcohol. Last week, Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, warned middle-class wine drinkers that they were risking their health in the same way as young bingers. One large glass of wine -250ml at 12% alcohol - represents three units, so many people who pour themselves a big glass of chardonnay after work each night were exceeding guidelines, which recommend men drink no more than 21 units of alcohol a week and women no more than 14.

One problem: it's unlikely that many of the target audience took Primarolo's message to heart, not least because last weekend's papers reported that the 20-year-old Department of Health limits had no firm scientific basis, but were rather, according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines, "really plucked out of the air".

Schemes to deal with alcohol's downside are more modest in Liverpool. For example, Merseyside police announced last week that it is to take part in a Home Office pilot project to get binge drinkers arrested for alcohol-related offences to face up to the consequences of their actions. In Liverpool, this will mean that binge-drinking offenders will each pay £30 towards the cost of obligatory counselling.

But will this make a difference? Dr Paula Grey, director of public health for Liverpool, points out: "Alcohol-related harm is closely associated with poverty, social exclusion, mental ill-health and violence." It's difficult not to be sceptical that Liverpool's love affair with booze and its sometimes grisly consequences can be changed much by such programmes.

Liverpool's alcohol problems are, on the whole, much like anywhere else's in Britain, but it does have specific, heart-breaking ones. Alder Hey children's hospital earlier this month reported that 140 children were admitted due to alcohol-related incidents in the past financial year. Some 66% were girls, nearly all of whom had been drinking neat vodka.

"It is not just teenagers on the streets but all sections of society," says Professor Ian Gilmore liver specialist at the Royal Liverpool Hospital. "It is impossible to have a celebration without alcohol and the amount of office parties and single-sex groups you see every night of the week drinking too much out in the restaurants in Liverpool is unbelievable." What can be done? "Prices of alcohol need to be increased. It has never been so cheap or so readily available."

On Prescot Road, there is an off-licence called Not Drunk Enough, which until recently gave out fliers to taxi drivers, promising: "Bring a fare here and get £2.50 per fare."

Such enticements mean that, according to the North West Public Health Observatory at Liverpool John Moores University, more than 8% of scousers are drinking alcohol at levels that will lead them to significantly harm their health - and those of others. It is left to the likes of Paula Grey to struggle against the tide of booze. Next month she will launch another scheme aimed at toppling Liverpool from the top of England's league of alcohol shame. Her aim is to reduce alcohol-related hospital admissions resulting in a 24-hour stay by 5% over the next three years. Whether she or anyone else in Liverpool can have more than a marginal impact on a culture so deep-rooted in this city is less certain.

I set aside my copy of Binge Britain and head back into Liverpool for probably the city's busiest night of the year. In O'Neill's bar in Wood Street, Donal, the duty manager, lets us take photos of the revellers who have arrived to watch the rugby world cup final. Although Paul, a Belfast-born solicitor, and I have only known each other for moments, I already feel - from the way he has his arm around my shoulder while explaining why England will win - that we will be exchanging Christmas cards this year. Such is Liverpool: a place where firm friendships are forged after minutes and in which civility, not always facilitated by alcohol, is at levels unimagined in, say, London. If only the government produced league tables for such factors, Liverpool wouldn't look so bad. I could be having a very similar time in, say, Newcastle, Birmingham or Bristol, though probably not as much fun. Even after England lose, the mood in the pub is drunken but cheerful.

I'm joined by a contact who will show me two bars that piquantly juxtapose the extremes of Liverpool's booze culture. The 1788 St Peter's Church on Seel Street has been expensively converted into a temple of booze called the Alma de Cuba bar and restaurant. The altar remains, still surmounted with a pediment bearing the legend Tu es Petrus [Thou art Peter ... and upon this rock I will build my church, Matthew 16:18]. But it is flanked by two huge palm trees. In a room off the altar, there are burial plaques arranged on a dado rail, below which a huge hen party is shifting cocktails with a speed that suggests liver specialists such as Professor Gilmore need never fear of being short of work.

Poignantly, one plaque remembers the Rev Vincent Glover who "for 22 years was the faithful pastor of this congregation; delicate in constitution and worn out in the public, he died on 6th of August 1840, aged 49. Requiscat in Pace." It seems unlikely that Rev Glover is resting in peace - not tonight, what with the thumping bass on the PA and the scantily clad Cuban dancers shaking their feathers on an altar table. On the balconies above, the middle-aged and middle-class tuck into roast suckling pigs washed down with rather good tempranillo. St Peter's sacred precincts, the pious understandably believe, have been unforgivably profaned.

We wander up Seel Street to the Blue Angel, also known as the Raz, so belovedly cheap and cheerful that it has two Facebook fan pages devoted to its sticky-floored charms. "If you can't cop off at the Raz," my contact tells me, "you might as well give up." On the smoking terrace outside, a young man is asleep wearing only T-shirt and jeans on this cold night. Downstairs, the dancefloor is heaving with men and women giving it loads. If you have never seen an acne-ridden and trolleyed chemistry undergraduate sing, "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?" you haven't really experienced Liverpool. The mood is again friendly, if wild with alcohol and adrenaline.

The Raz's barmaid offers a bottle of Special Brew for only £1.80. If I had only plumped for that I, too, might be playing air guitar to Bryan Adams' Summer of 69 like the circle of friends to my right. I catch the eye of one of them as his hand slides up the imaginary fretboard. Oh dear. I opt for a soft drink instead.

It's 2.30am and time for venerable persons like me to be tucked up with the new Philip Roth, not larging it while deranged by high-strength hooch. One last assignment. A trip to the Royal Liverpool's accident and emergency department. It has a designated police constable on patrol. Chief Inspector Kevin Johnson says the presence of the officer is aimed at reassuring staff and patients, as well as dealing with more difficult members of the public. "Many of the persons with whom the officer is dealing will have alcohol and drug dependencies and ailments that may affect the way they communicate and act. As with any large city hospital, there is a marked increase in admissions on a weekend, many due to assaults and drink-related incidents."

At 3am, I expect A&E to be a drug-fuelled, booze-swilling scouse version of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's the quietest place I've been all night. A couple of women eat crisps as they wait for their friend to be treated. What has happened? Johnson says there has been a recent decrease in alcohol-related hospital admissions in Liverpool. In the same week as the figures for 2005-2006 alcohol-related A&E admissions made Liverpool England's binge capital, more up-to-date statistics from three city hospitals showed that alcohol-related A&E admissions nearly halved in the past year.

Why would that be? One possible reason is the liberalisation of licensing laws. Merseyside police argue that extended licensing hours have contributed to a fall in levels of violent crime by a quarter in the past year. There are other possible reasons. Perhaps alcohol awareness campaigns such as Pssst! - an anti-alcohol initiative launched in the city last year -have had an effect.

Liverpool has been mad, though not quite as mad as the taxi driver suggested on Friday morning. It has been a weekend of excess no doubt, and one from which lots of people - cabbies, hoteliers, booze jockeys, restaurateurs, off-licence proprietors - have made lots of money and many others, me among them, have had a great time. Though clearly my perspective is distorted by beer - or rather tempranillo - goggles.

The following morning, I plod to Lime Street station, cursing an unforgiving sun. The Vines is open and offering full Irish breakfasts. A Guinness and a Bushmill's chaser would numb the pain in my retina. I wander in. Perhaps not. I turn round and get the train instead, leaving adorable Liverpool to its endless life-affirming, life-destroying bacchanal.

Kahnee · October 23, 2007

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