It’s November 2024 and my puritanical American children are attending their first autumn fair at their new English primary school. There’s a laser show and hotdogs and a raffle. There’s also a bar for the parents, which makes my two pull up short. Newcomers to this country experience many cultural differences but perhaps none as striking as this: “Is that alcohol?” says my child, scowling up at me like a tiny member of the Taliban. “At a school thing?” I’m two Baileys hot chocolates in at this point and give her a smile 10% broader than necessary. Yes, my darlings; welcome to Britain.
Or at least, welcome, possibly, to the last vestiges of how Britain once was. For a while now we’ve known anecdotally that people in this country are drinking less than they were. My own generation X is deep into middle age and many of us – save for the odd life-saver at a school event and the biggest occasions – have given it up. Where the anomalies fall more glaringly is in the generations below us, among young people whose behaviour differs from our own at their age. This week, official confirmation came in the form of a survey of 10,000 people commissioned by the NHS that found almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.
The top line, of course, is that this is a good thing. Not for the drinks industry, obviously, but for the NHS, and also for people trying to maximise their life expectancy, which is all of us. Rigorous self-optimisation via application to the data is how we spend our leisure time these days, on the strength of which, after reading a piece about cancer-reducing foods this morning, I bought a “wheatberry, lentil and green vegetable salad” that I’m almost certainly not going to eat. What even is a wheatberry? Nobody knows. The point is we’re trying.
If I sound sarcastic, I don’t mean to. I love not drinking. And it’s important not to join the ranks of those people in the generation above mine who, in the 1990s, when smoking bans took hold across the US, wrote long pieces arguing that cigarettes represented the buccaneer spirit of the country and, as a result, smokers were more interesting than people who drank “green juice”. These were, objectively, the worst people in the world and, while no one likes a teetotaller, it’s important to resist turning into them.
My interest is more in what youth culture will look like without alcohol. The new survey results, which were commissioned as part of the Health Survey for England, found that women are slightly less likely to drink than men and that across the age groups young people are the most abstemious. In the 2022 NHS survey, gen Z reportedly contained the lowest proportion of people who drank frequently (10%), compared with 34% among 55 to 64-year-olds and 37% of 65 to 74-year-olds. Some of this is cost-of-living related, but most of it is likely to be cultural. It’s just not cool to be wasted.
In my own case, the calculation to cut back had less to do with cultural trends and more to do with the sudden, sad collapse of my metabolism, plus the fact I changed primary-care physicians. During the intake interview a few years ago, my new doctor made a note of what everyone in my family going back three generations had died of, before giving me a very stern look. “If I were you I wouldn’t drink,” she said. “At all.” This was harsh, but she was right.
And yet, still my imagination falters. I look at my two and wonder what, when they’re 25, a Saturday night out will look like if it doesn’t terminate in them lying half off the sofa crying to Elaine Paige doing the big ballad from Chess. Where will their war stories come from? (Actual war, probably, but let’s not think about that.) What will they reminisce about when they are my age?
There’s nothing funny about my friend who threw up into a heating vent and, for the rest of her tenancy, couldn’t expunge the smell of sick from her flat. Standing, swaying gently, in the middle of a busy A-road trying to work out a strategy for getting to the other side that didn’t involve putting one foot in front of the other isn’t funny, either. I told my children this story and they were horrified. “You could’ve DIED,” they said, which was precisely the teachable moment I was after.
Meanwhile, the new findings aren’t anything to grow complacent about, since, even with these reduced numbers, we’re still sufficiently a nation of alcoholics to cost the NHS in England £4.9bn a year in alcohol-related illness. In the spirit of which: I’m actually quite looking forward to eating my salad. I’m going to put an egg in it because, while not drinking is extremely good for you, as everyone knows it’s actually protein that will save us.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
