Valuable Drinking Time

I mentioned in a comment-reply to my buddy, The British Cowboy, the other day that I considered tattooing "a waste of valuable drinking time".

I think all drinkers have some sense of "valuable drinking time" - time that they'd rather be spending drinking than doing anything else, time that seems somehow more intense and special and important because of that.

In the UK, this awareness of a dichotomy in the day, of two very different types of time, was all the more acute because of our out-moded, restrictive licensing laws (drinking was largely unregulated until the First World War - when the government suddenly became fearful that too many munitions factories were being blown up as a result of young Cockney lasses showing up to work still pissed in the morning and dropping artillery shells on each other). There has been a considerable liberalization of this regime in the last few years, but bars back home still mostly operate on far shorter hours than they do almost anywhere else in the world. When I was becoming a drinker back in the '80s, there was a long fallow period in the afternoon, between 2.30pm or 3pm and 5.30pm or 6pm, when the pubs were all closed - and you had to wander the streets, 'making your own entertainment' (as our forefathers used to say, in the days before television and game-consoles). The 4- or 5-hour period of drinking in the evening was appreciated all the more keenly because it was so woefully short, and circumscribed by dark voids of deprivation (like life itself, you may say).

Valuable Drinking Time (VDT) became a formal 'term of art' during a holiday I took in the middle of my undergraduate days, with my housemates of the time and a few other assorted hangers-on. We rented a narrowboat for 2 weeks, and went on a grand tour exploring the old industrial heartland of England via the canal network. We had set ourselves a formidable task: every day we had to cover a substantial mileage, and negotiate some of the tallest flights of locks in the country. Hard work! But every evening, we'd moor up, go and find the nearest pub, and salve our aching muscles with alcohol. During the day (although our exacting schedule meant that we had to start early every day, and keep up a pretty brisk tempo through the locks) we could cut ourselves a little slack here and there, and wouldn't fret too much if a shopping expedition took a little longer than expected, or we had to wait in a long queue at a lock. But as the day wore on towards 6pm, every action became far more anxiously hurried, and anyone who dawdled or dithered over something could expect to be roundly censured. When, on occasion, we were still underway beyond the magical hour of 'pub opening', then finding a suitable mooring - and all the other little chores associated with the end of the working day on a canal boat - became matters of frantic urgency, and we would exhort each other (well, the more hardened drinkers amongst us, anyway) to keep our focus with cries of: "Hurry up, people. We are wasting valuable drinking time."

The concept has stayed with me ever since.