“When did you last have a night in?” I ask.
“I dunno. Last Sunday maybe?” It’s Sunday again.
Not one of these very drunk young women is British. A New Yorker, a Hawaiian and a Pakistani, they all say they never drank as much before they lived here but that British social life revolves around drink.
That drink is getting bigger too. Last week a survey found that 96% of bars and clubs in Britain now serve wine in 250ml glasses; a third of a bottle. That’s two units of alcohol — the maximum recommended daily intake for women is three — in a single glass. Most aren’t stopping at one glass; young women in the UK consume on average 30 units a week or five bottles of wine.
“Everything in Britain is punctuated with a drink,” sighs Kirsten later that day as we sit hungover in a bar while she nurses a “recovery” gin and tonic. A 30-year-old New Yorker studying for a PhD in political science at the London School of Economics, she’s seen a dramatic rise in her drinking since she arrived in London nine months ago. “British women will drink on any day and for any occasion. Go to a New York bar on a Tuesday and most likely it will be deserted. Here it will be packed with women.”
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With more money and more free time, our women are now officially the biggest drinkers in Europe. If binge-drinking is a disease, the foreigners have caught it.
“If someone gets a pay rise they say: ‘Let’s get a drink!’ You finish work, it’s: ‘Fancy a pint?’ You break a nail and it’s: ‘I need cheering up. Let’s go get wasted!’ ” says Lauren, 28, a lively Hawaiian and a PhD student at Cambridge. Lauren now goes out five nights a week and estimates her weekly alcohol intake is more than 40 units.
“It’s just different in the States,” says Lauren. “Even in the colleges, drinking like I do here just isn’t tolerated in the same way. If you’re drunk mid-week a couple of times in the same month people consider you to have a problem.”
Kirsten concurs and says that America’s confessional culture of talk shows and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings makes everyone aware of what constitutes excessive drinking. However, Britain provides few alternatives to the bar. “In the UK, if you’re young and you choose not to drink you choose not to have a social life,” says Lauren. “The only acceptable venues to meet up are in places that serve liquor.”
“At home the coffee shops are open all night and there are loads of restaurants that don’t have licences,” adds Kirsten. “These places are bustling but there are no equivalents here.”
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They fare no better in our homes. “When people ask you over it’s the same,” says Lauren. “A British host will offer you a drink at 11am. If you don’t leave their lunch party loaded up to the eyeballs, it means no one had a good time.”
But getting used to drinking British-style shocks friends and families back home. “Frankly, it was embarrassing,” Lauren admits. “When I last stayed with my parents they put a bottle of wine out with dinner and without thinking I sunk the whole thing before we’d got to the main course. They were horrified.”
I meet Olga, a 31-year-old Russian investment banker working in London.
“In St Petersburg, women would never go out in the way they do here. Women aren’t drunk more than a very few nights a year,” she says, lowering her voice.
“But since I moved here I’ve started drinking three nights a week.
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“When I go out with female friends from work you always head straight to the bar. It’s not just the quantity they drink that is astonishing, it’s how uncouth they all are.”
And then there is France. Elodie, 25, left her home in Lyons and moved to the UK three years ago to take a lucrative job in graphic design. She concedes her teenage years included every cliché, from chequered tablecloths to watered-down wine. “I could walk into a bar at 16 and legally order a pression. Drinking just wasn’t a big deal.”
But soon after her arrival she started drinking pints — and plenty of them. “All the other girls from the office drink them after work. I didn’t want to be the silly little girl with her small glass of wine.”
The final word ought to go to Fatima, a member of the Pakistani elite, who is now settled in London. Though she hails from a Muslim country, she knew how to drink.
“Pakistanis are a load of alcoholics, and often aren’t even discreet about it,” she says. “The difference here is what and where women drink.
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“There’s only one brewery in Pakistan,” she adds, with a grin, “and that was left by the British.”