Keeping your spirits up

The government has quite rightly declared alcohol the new public enemy number one. Otherwise there might be a very real danger we’ll end up like England, where young people are weaned at an early age on sweetened, mildly alcoholic drinks – alcopops – and girls in offices make it part of their weekly ritual to go out on a Friday night and get roundly drunk. But will we ever totally eradicate it?
___________

By Ashok Ferry

(August 12, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Alas, I was never much of a drinker. When I think back fondly to my barman days, there was always a hardened drinker or two at the bar, flush with cash, who must have felt guilty to be drinking alone.

“Oh, go on,” they would slur, “have one on me!”

Now the facts of life of a barman are very simple. You’re half-starved at the best of times, you’re as poor as a church mouse. Why else would you be doing such a bum job, with long hours and very little pay? So the last thing you want is to waste your hard-earned tip on a glass of booze. As a remedy for this we had behind the counter a whiskey bottle filled with cold tea. When the man said, “Have one on me,” you poured yourself a generous double-tea-on-the-rocks, and pocketed the one pound twenty or whatever it was they paid you. I remember my basic pay was something like eighty pounds a week, but I took home at least a hundred pounds more in tips. Just imagine if I’d drunk all that up in whisky every week! Anyway it made me feel so very good to be abstemious, so very virtuous.

In the fullness of time, of course, I developed (cultivated? encouraged?) the dreaded cholesterol, and it has now become almost an order that I take a glass of red wine every day. But here comes the really sad part. I actually find I can’t. The wine nowadays is so adulterated with sulphites and other chemicals that one glass leaves me with a thundering headache for the next twenty-four hours. Even at diplomatic dos where you might expect the stuff to be good, you find your foreign hosts sticking cannily to local beer or imported gin, while the locals drink up the duty-free wine like they’ve just this minute personally liberated Hambantota. No wonder at times the entire country seems like one big headache.

It used to be that the only drink they understood in Colombo was whisky. If you asked for wine you were served a thimbleful of very sweet sherry or vermouth with your meal. But oh how times have changed, and nowadays they talk lovingly about their Chambertins and their Sauternes as you and I might talk lovingly about our nandas and mamas.

Sri Lanka has probably the highest per capita consumption of alcohol in the world. The official figures put us somewhere near the top; but that is without accounting for all those bottles of distilled floor polish, snails and battery acid that are drunk at every village wedding, served in a back room behind the main house by a wall-eyed damsel who seems to be winking at you all the time.

No country in the world has such a love-hate relationship with the bottle as we do. Nowhere is there such social stigma attached to drinking as here. I know people who drink like fish who’ll never allow themselves to be photographed with a glass in their hand. “Hang on a minute,” they’ll say, putting their glass down before they say cheese. Next day you’ll find them on some public platform exhorting the populace against the evil effects of alcohol. There is a certain hypocrisy at work here, the same hypocrisy that men used to have about prostitution in Victorian England: By all means indulge, so long as you do it on the sly, so long as you roundly condemn it in public.

The government has quite rightly declared alcohol the new public enemy number one. Otherwise there might be a very real danger we’ll end up like England, where young people are weaned at an early age on sweetened, mildly alcoholic drinks – alcopops – and girls in offices make it part of their weekly ritual to go out on a Friday night and get roundly drunk. But will we ever totally eradicate it?

I’m afraid that would be like telling Sri Lankans to stop eating rice.

The other day a friend arrived for dinner. “I won’t eat much,” he warned, “I find I have a very small appetite these days.” He then proceeded to polish off two rum punches, three triple whiskeys, six (smallish) glasses of wine and an almost entire bottle of precious Limoncello that I’d hand-carried from Florence last year. As you can imagine, my spirits were exceedingly low when he left.

Are you going to be able to stop his consumption with an island-wide ban? The answer is no, no, no! These more financially fortunate people will always find a way to their alcohol (or their alcohol will find a way to them). But what will definitely happen with a ban is that you’ll drive poor people further into the back room, further into the arms of that walleyed damsel. And drinking floor polish will certainly make you go blind.

In Saudi Arabia where there is a total ban on alcohol, I understand Sri Lankans do a roaring trade at house parties. We mustn’t forget that we are a nation that takes great pleasure and pride in flouting laws: if there are two ways to an objective, one that is easy, legal and free, and the other, difficult, time-consuming and requiring illegal payment, we will almost certainly go for the second method. I can assure you that if the back room served only legal, decent stuff, the wall-eyed damsel would almost surely be out of a job. Half the fun is in the illicitness.

So how do you control this menace without being a total killjoy? Do you control it like they do with gambling, where casinos entertain Foreigners Only? I was once taken to one of these. Most of the patrons were elderly ladies in sarees and dangling diamond earrings. If they were foreign they spoke Sinhala remarkably well. As for prostitution, let’s not even go there. Across the road from where I live there is a Korean karaoke joint. When it first opened the Wife and I, in our mistaken innocence, went over for a friendly neighbourhood meal. Foreigners Only, they said, and politely turned us away. (Don’t my diamonds dangle enough for you? I wanted to ask.) We felt quite sorry for ourselves. Not half as sorry, though, as we do every morning at five-thirty for the streams of very good-looking Sri Lankan girls that pour out of there to catch the dawn bus home. I don’t actually know the precise meaning of the word ‘karaoke’ and now I never will: it so obviously got lost in translation on the way to these shores.

I realize of course that none of this helps solve our problem of alcoholism: because problem there definitely is. Do we effect a blanket ban, leaving the rich to get round it somehow, and the poor to go slowly blind drinking Château Mansion Wax? Do we lower the taxes on beer as the previous president did, to drive everyone towards a more manageable middle ground? Or do we just muddle through as we have always done? It is very difficult, there are no clear answers. But since I am not a member of the Ruling Classes, I am not the one paid to find solutions. I’m only here to point out the warts, the blemishes, the fatal flaws on the face of other people’s high-minded arguments.

So, as they say every night on television, Over to you Mister Minister!

Ashok Ferrey will be reading funny bits from his book The Good Little Ceylonese Girl at the British Council in Kandy Saturday, 15th August, at 5 pm

-Sri Lanka Guardian