There are a number of symbolic staging posts along that often-traumatic journey into adulthood. Some have evolved public ceremonies that have become ingrained into cultures and passed down through generations. Other significant events are thankfully left to the privacy of the individuals concerned, but these issues are subject to the shifting sands of social change. To this day, eighteen year-olds across the land are ceremonially presented with ugly, tin foil-coated keys, an image to represent the unlocking of the door to life's great adventures. Marriage too, with the bride ‘given away’ in virginal white, signifies the passage into genuine ‘womanhood’.
But whilst the key of life for eighteen year-olds maintains, the secularisation of Western society in the past three decades has largely negated any notion of marriage as the union of innocents in the eyes of God. Similarly, whilst turning eighteen is undoubtedly a time of some legal significance, in practical terms it means little. By the time you are eighteen you may already have experienced the pleasures of killing for your country or driving a car. My eighteenth birthday started with a nasty shock – a letter from that blue-and-white fake Jack Straw, lecturing me on how my right to vote had been won by the blood of the workers and how I should be sure to exercise it. I imagine that securing the right to trial by jury was no picnic either, eh Jack?
Outlawing such activities as smoking and drinking on the grounds of age has one iron consequence: to give every adolescent in the country the impression that these activities are glamorous. Indeed, so glamorous that teenagers everywhere are compelled to break the law and / or lie to their mates in the imperative interests of appearing grown-up. This is problematic. Not, of course, on health grounds, but because youngsters often can't appreciate the real beauty of something until life provides the context: a bit of spin, I suppose, on the old adage that youth is wasted on the young.
Drinking is such an activity. Along with your first football match, first fag, first snog, first time you heard your favourite band and so on, the first time you put a pint to your lips on licensed premises remains a defining moment, something that transcends the mundane and stays in the mind’s eye. And although many people experience all of the above whilst still in their mid-teens, it remains the case that time lends these activities an additional social dimension, long after the exciting teenage frisson has subsided. To give a personal example, I appreciate social drinking now far more than I did as an absurdly lanky fifteen year-old. Then I signified the quaffing of pints as both an act of rebellion and a symbol (so I thought) of my acceptance in the adult world. No wonder they say adolescents are confused. Now, however, drinking is purely a communal activity, to be shared and enjoyed with people whose company and friendship is valued.
I think football also offers a similar lesson. When I was led as a nipper of six or seven onto the Bee Hole End or the Crown Ground, little did I realise that a lifelong commitment was being forged. From what other social activity can you first derive enjoyment as an infant and, in much the same manner, continue to draw pleasure throughout adulthood? But although one may begin one's relationship with football well before an attachment to the bottle, as with drinking there still exists a qualitative difference in the football experience that only the passage of years and the perspective it brings can supply – the most obvious being that disappointments can be viewed against happier times or against even greater regrets in the past.
I'm not saying that youngsters shouldn't drink or go to football matches, just that age brings a more rounded and spiritual dimension to such activities. Perhaps all the more reason then, for defending a mature appreciation of beer and football. We have enjoyed youthful indulgences in both without really appreciating their true meaning. It would be tragic if the onset of advancing years somehow dictated that we should abstain just at the moment we can comprehend the richness of experience it provides.
In our 24-7, judgmental times, it's not stretching the point too far to argue that the consumption of alcohol, drugs and tobacco is an expression of freedom in the face of government guidelines about how we should live. The cool, unhurried exhalation of smoke into the face of the bully and the tyrant has been the sound retort of the common man for centuries, and more than the odd scholar has praised the English for their resistance to such oppressive measures. In Victor Kiernan's Tobacco: A History, the author pays tribute to the subjects of James I for puffing stoically through the best attempts of the monarch to impose his authority by issuing edicts against smoking.
Motivated by a similar love of liberty (and beer), GK Chesterton poured scorn on the Temperance movement of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn was set in a fictional England made teetotal through the influence of Islam and misguided do-gooders. The story details the adventures of three heroic characters who roam the countryside with an inn sign, a large cheese and a barrel of ale, thereby circumnavigating harsh new temperance laws. It was in the pages of The Flying Inn that Chesterton published one of his most famous drinking songs, where the mobile landlord declares:
And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or chapel or Eisteddfod,
For the curse of water has come again because of the wrath of God,
And water is on the Bishop's board and the Higher Thinker's shrine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.
The hard stuff is, of course, different from tobacco in that the effects of drink are often very funny, though it's also the case that when drink isn't funny its influence can be somewhat grim. I hope at least a few people reading this who happen to be within a tube ride of Tate Britain managed to take in the recent Cruikshank exhibition. Cruikshank, an inspired illustrator of Dickens’ novels, turned teetotal in his forties after having previously shown a commendable dedication to ale and port. Upon his conversion, he poured his considerable creative energies into temperance propaganda, and his extraordinary Worship of Bacchus is a huge canvas that appears to depict the entire population of London riotously pissed in Trafalgar Square. Incidentally, Cruikshank’s temperance beliefs did not indicate moral rectitude. Instead of going down the pub, he chose to spend his sober evenings in the company of a mistress, with whom he sired a large family outside of wedlock. Another illustration, I suppose, of his creative energies, but also evidence that alcohol remains Britain’s most effective means of population control.
Whilst I think we’d all agree that there’s little point in romanticising the melancholy soak, there's an undeniably deep and attractive connection between booze and laughter. Burnley's recent rise in the football world has rarefied the occurrence of that most quintessential of London Clarets moments - falling drunkenly down muddy slopes at decrepit lower league grounds - though I still live in hope to see someone do a boozy header on the way to the Kings Cross Tandoori. In such moments we can understand why the Italian expression for flask is fiasco. It also reveals the legal tautology that is ‘drunk and disorderly’. Since when did one not mean the other?
For those London Clarets who undertake regular train journeys around the country to watch the team, it is an undeniable fact that alcohol plays a valuable function in easing the drag of travelling. We all know journeys back are never as long and frustrating as journeys to, and that's because you see the world differently after ten pints of mild and a red-hot kebab. But it's also the case that the best way to ease the boredom of the morning journey is by dipping into our store of anecdotes and indulging in some good, old-fashioned story-telling, almost all of which, of course, are tales of alcoholic excess.
Essentially, if we didn't drink, we'd have nothing to talk about. We might even have to talk about tactics, formations and likely line-ups. This would be a nightmare for me as I'm completely illiterate about these things. I remember sitting on the train back from Birmingham last year listening to Paul's clinical analysis of the game, complete with theories about the psychology of substitutions and the influence of the media. I sat silent and overawed (and possibly a little wasted). As far as I'm concerned, when we score it's a great goal made possible by skill, pace and movement, and when they score it means our defence has made a balls of something.
The other great virtue of alcohol in the world of the London Clarets is that it makes possible many of the things we do. For Firmo, the whole Barry Kilby baby llama hair coat affair was powered at each stage by booze. If any of us were in any doubt about the necessity for alcohol, last season provided us with the proof when the atrocious train services meant that we got to Burnley at five to three - and had to watch them without a beer. Which, according to Firmo, was terrifying.
Consider some further, rather compelling arguments for an appreciation of the grain and the grape. Dean Martin observed that it must be wretched being a non-drinker, because when you woke in the morning that was the best you were going to feel all day. The exception to this is what Kingsley Amis characterised as the metaphysical (as opposed to the physical) hangover:
Bear in mind that if you do not feel bloody awful after a hefty night then you are still drunk, and must sober up in a waking state before the hangover dawns.
Another all-too-realistic observation of the metaphysical hangover is James Fenton's verse, which will probably remind a few of us of the Monday morning at Norwich last season:
And then… you know how if you've had a few
You'll wake at dawn, all healthy, like sea breezes,
Raring to go, and thinking: "Clever you!
You've got away with it." And then, oh Jesus…
It is encouraging that although I have met many London Clarets in denial about the virtues or otherwise of our football team, I have yet to meet one in denial about his or her drinking. This seems to me a vindication of my contention that football and drinking are the most sturdy and natural of companions.
On the one hand, the philosophising that too much alcohol occasionally brings on can always be relied upon to put football into some kind of comforting perspective. Adrian Chiles, during his Radio 5 interview with Alastair Campbell, noted that time hadn't healed as he thought it would the painful memories of West Brom's catastrophes through the eighties. The obvious comment is that he should have tried being a Burnley fan, but his observation serves to highlight the haven of the alcoholic haze in times of deep football-related distress. On the other hand, the sheer length of the English season is a clear warning against the dangers of an early alcoholic burn-out.
Being in denial tends to be one of the indulgences enjoyed by drinkers, whereas smokers are in no real position to engage in this. I reckon covert tobacco smoking must be pretty rare, though perhaps professional sportsmen provide the exception to this rule. It came as a surprise to a number of people when Jeppo’s nicotine addiction came to light, and the recent revelations about the Man City drinking culture revealed that quite a few of these vulgarly remunerated Premiership stars had a 10-a-day habit in addition to all the lager.
Simon Rae's Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking (from which James Fenton's verse was taken) deals with the issue of denial. In his review of Rae's book, Christopher Hitchens notes the eye-opening contribution from Byron, who wondered: "was it the cockles or what I took to correct them?" about his insurgent interior, when it turns out that what he took to correct them, after a heavy dinner of shellfish and wine, was three or four large glasses of brandy. Mind you, as Hitchens slyly suggests, it could have been the cockles, couldn't it?
My favourite part of Rae's book is a chapter called Rock Bottom, in which he gives us the tales of those who know what it is like to spill more than most people drink. Believe me, these are the people who have gone out and done the hard drinking for all of us. Charles Jackson's maxim from The Lost Weekend ("Never put off till tomorrow what you can drink today") seems to me to be a rather good London Clarets motto. John Berryman's prelude to the general confession he made at his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where the sufferer relates the harm he has done himself and others, is rather scary:
Passes at women drunk, often successful…. Lost when blacked-out the most important professional letter I have ever received…. Made homosexual advances drunk, 4 or 5 times…. Gave a public lecture drunk…. Defecated uncontrollably in a university corridor, got home unnoticed…
Also worth a mention is Auden's On the Circuit:
Then worst of all, the anxious thought,
Each time my plane begins to sink
And the No Smoking sign comes on:
What will there be to drink?
Here Auden touches on a problem that even a mere social drinker like myself can understand – namely: Where's the next one coming from? To return to my theme of the perfect symbiosis of drink and football, the answer might very well be: At the game. What better motivation for a couple of days, or even an entire working week of abstinence, that the Saturday brings drunken merriment in the Burnley cause?
Our weekend experiences in the pubs and football grounds of the country teach us that, as with money, only a fool expects drink to bring happiness. The fact of the matter is that, like money, drinking and watching your team are happiness, and people cannot be expected to pursue happiness in moderation. This is a thought worth holding on to as we begin the new season. We have our own unique community whose identity is defined by the most convivial pleasures of football and drinking. No matter what triumphs and tragedies await our team this season, this fact alone is worth an alcoholic celebration in its own right.
Phil
Whalley
(with help from Firmo)
November 2001
