Trouble At A Tavern: Wales’ Relationship With Alcohol
4000 Years Of Booze
In the fourteenth century, Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote a poem called Trafferth Mewn Tafarn, or Trouble At A Tavern. The protagonist drinks wine, tries to seduce a comely lass, stumbles over bar stools, and narrowly avoids an altercation with three Englishmen before slinking off to bed alone, asking God to forgive him. Alcohol leading to lust, violence, foolishness and shame are pretty familiar themes, even in 2016. Many people who are alcoholics are going to Detox of South Fl, to get help. Throw in a verse about the queue for Wok To Walk and you’ve got a pretty acceptable poem about St Mary’s street on a Friday night.
As a nation, we’ve been getting plastered on a regular basis for at least the last four thousand years. There is historical evidence that Bronze Age inhabitants of Wales used to brew their own beer, which they would have binged on by the beaker after a stressful day of hunting and gathering. Historian Dr Russell Davies addressed our historical relationship with alcohol in 2005 when he wrote ‘the real opiate of the Welsh was alcohol, alcohol was a thirst quencher, a reliever of physical pain and psychological strain, a symbol of human interdependence, a morale booster, a sleeping draft and a medicine.’
Sometimes it’s important to analyse our history to see how far we’ve progressed as a society; we look back at the Victorian consumption of legal morphine and it seems almost incredible that a drug so dangerous was once abused so easily. But even though modern society is painstakingly aware of the dangers of alcohol, our relationship with booze remains the same. Alcohol is still the opiate of the Welsh, and we have some urgent sobering up to do.
Cardiff After Dark
In 2012 Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz published his shameful yet fascinating Cardiff After Dark series, a collection of photographs showcasing a typical night out in the city centre. For such a cool and cosmopolitan city our nightlife looked like a slightly more modernised version of Hogarth’s Gin Lane, featuring dizzy tableaus of nudity, vomit, unconsciousness and brawls with the police, all set against a backdrop of discarded Subway wrappers.
Wales is renowned as the binge drinking capital of the U.K, and the idea of downing as much alcohol as possible within a single trip to the pub is hardly a new one, in fact Wales’s first three- for-one offer was first recorded back in 1836. Binge drinking gets a lot of media attention because it causes obvious and immediate harm, not just to individual health but to our environment as a whole. Increased violence, public urination and mountains of litter can turn town centres into no-go areas. Binge drinking causes all kinds of health and social problems, including increased car accidents, alcohol poisoning, and uninhibited sexual behaviour that can lead to unwanted pregnancy or STD’s.
One in seven of us drink a week’s worth of alcohol in a single sitting because it produces immediate gratification. The release of dopamine, the feel good hormone, is an addictive feeling. Who doesn’t want to experience increased confidence and relaxation? Who doesn’t want to escape their anxiety? The fact that Wales has some of the worst statistics regarding stress, anxiety and depression gives us a clue as to why we get drunk on a regular basis, but despite the short lived feelings of self worth and confidence, alcohol is a cruelly efficient depressant. Those lovely hits of dopamine will have vanished into the ether by the morning when feelings of shame, worthlessness and worsening anxiety will kick in. This is a serious problem for the people of Wales. The charity Alcohol Concern Cymru is trying to highlight the link between alcohol misuse and suicide in Wales, claiming that alcohol is implicated in a fifth of all suicides, and binge drinking is a stepping stone to alcohol abuse and dependency. Not only is the release of dopamine addictive, but the resulting depression may urge you to reach for the bottle again and again and again in a misguided attempt to regain a sense of happiness. Bingeing increases your tolerance to alcohol, so over time you’re going to need harder booze, in larger amounts.
And then there’s the risk of blackouts, when you binge so hard that your brain quite literally stops making memories. Entire conversations, fist fights, sexual encounters, all lost to you forever. A lot can happen during a blackout, dangerous things, and you won’t remember a moment of it.
Drinking Across the Age Groups
The best way to tackle social concerns such as alcohol misuse is to focus on the younger generation. It’s the only way to ensure that bad habits get resigned to history. Smoking in young people continues to decline after focused awareness campaigns and widespread information about its dangers were made available to children and teenagers, but this trend doesn’t seem to apply to alcohol.
In Wales, children between the ages of eleven and sixteen drink more than anywhere else in the UK, with seventeen percent of boys and fourteen percent of girls drinking at least once a week. If we want to improve our nation’s drinking habits, we seem to be failing the young in a massive way.
ITV reported recently that Welsh children were exposed to alcohol advertisements every seventy two seconds during the Euro 2016 tournament, a surefire way to link fun, family time, and the enjoyment of sport to the pleasures of alcohol. Alcohol Concern Cymru voiced concerns about the amount of advertising near primary and secondary schools, claiming that children as young as ten are more familiar with leading alcohol brands than snack or food brands. During a presentation at Harris House, Professor Mark Bellis of Public Health Wales commented that ‘the normalisation of drinking at a young age, particularly when associated with binge drinking, sets the patters for harmful drinking behaviour in adulthood’.
But with all this focus on young adults bingeing their way up Chip Alley and youngsters craving a beer during the footie, one group of people is often forgotten about; the older generation. While fifty percent of under twenty-fives drink regularly, sixty six percent of over forty-fives are drinking to excess. In 2015, more than two thousand patients aged between fifty five and seventy five were admitted to Welsh hospitals with alcohol related illness. Age Cymru states that one in six older men and one in fifteen older women are drinking enough to harm themselves. Statistics also show that those who earn more than forty thousand pounds a year drink more regularly than those who earn under ten thousand pounds. These figures challenge the idea of a young destitute with a bottle of cider – we should be focusing more on the fifty year old and his bottle of expensive plonk.
There are many reasons why older people may turn to alcohol as they often deal with significant life problems such as retirement, loss of purpose, bereavement, worsening health and sleep problems. Because the media glare is often focused on young people’s drinking habits, the older generation is being ignored. Excessive drinking in older people is just not seen as that problematic.
Help
Every week in Wales, twenty nine people die due to alcohol use and one thousand are admitted to hospital for alcohol related illness. Aside from the fact that alcohol piles on the calories, dehydrates your skin and decreases sexual performance, alcohol has dramatic and dangerous effects on your internal organs.
The scientific journal Addiction links alcohol to seven types of cancer. Regular drinking increases your risk of breast cancer by twenty percent, and two glasses of wine a day or two pints of beer make you three times more likely to contract mouth cancer. Heart disease, pancreatitis, fertility issues, seizures and depression are all linked to alcohol misuse. The most well known alcohol induced illness is cirrhosis of the liver, a sometimes lethal condition where heavy scarring shuts the organ down. There is also a link between alcohol and dementia, as regular drinking increases brain shrinkage resulting in memory loss.
Most of us are aware of the fact that alcohol is not a healthy substance, but how many of us really understand the full extent of its damage to the body? Cutting down on alcohol could not only save your liver, but improve your mental health, brain function, fertility and life expectancy.
Higher priced alcohol, regulated advertising and a reduction of supermarket deals and happy hours would help to reduce our reliance on alcohol, but it’s going to take a concentrated effort to change the way we use booze as a comfort, a confidence boost, and a happy tonic. Attitudes rarely change overnight, but as individuals we can make informed choices on how hard we hit the bottle.
When you cut back on alcohol, the positive effects can be immediate. You’ll have more energy in the morning, clearer skin, and the pounds will begin to drop. A great place for information on how to cut down your intake is Change4Life Wales, a website full of tricks and tips to ease you into sobriety.
Of course, if you have a more serious relationship with alcohol and the idea of quitting seems impossible, take a trip to your GP. No matter how far you are into addiction, there is always help available and there is always hope. With medication, twelve step programmes, mindfulness courses and help provided by charities, there is an approach that suits everyone.
We may have been drinking for four thousand years, but it’s never been a better time to quit.
words VICTORIA O’HAGAN