OFF: Reefer Madness?

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 12:35:47PM -0400, Stephen Swann typed out:
> Yeah a lot of Brits I've known don't view having a couple of
> pints with lunch as "drinking" at all.  "Drinking" seems to
> start somewhere around the 3-4 pint mark, which they often
> stopped for on the way home work.  I used to go out to the
> pub every couple of weeks with some friends, one of whom was
> from London.  *He* used to view 3 or 4 pints as warmup for
> an evening of drinking...  ;-)

	I work in a museum where a substantial portion of the menial 
staff is Polish, which seems to be a growing trend in the UK just now. 
At Christmas I got briefly into conversation wth one of the Polish 
girls, who said that what she found most frightening about the British 
was their drinking. A colleague who was also in the conversation was 
living next to a Polish family at the time and said that he'd not 
really picked up sobriety as a Polish virtue given the number of parties 
going on into the small hours he'd had to ask to shut up. And she 
conceded that often Poles get their drinking on pretty good when there's 
an occasion, but that what she meant was the kind of habitual drinking 
Mike's talking about, the couple of pints after work, the bottle of wine 
with dinner, the spirits afterwards, *every day*. It is a phenomenon, 
but somehow I think most British drinkers think of Eastern Europe as on 
the vodka in the same way as they're on the beer whereas the Eastern 
Europeans I've met all goggle at how much the British drink becuse of 
this difference between occasion and habit. Yes, OK, off topic, but I'm 
just back from the pub and I was just sayin', yours,
						     Jon

ObLP: Deep Purple - _Who Do We Think We Are_
-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk