If you don't start drinking at 5pm on a Friday, puke up twice, consume your body weight in kebab meat and then go for a greasy fry-up in the morning, you're basically a boring sod.
For the benefit of foreigners, i will note that this is actually optional for most people. My experience, living in London and working at a few different tech companies, is that you might go out for a "quick beer after work" one to three times a week (and almost never on fridays), stay out for one to three hours (you're rarely still there for closing time), and over the course of the evening, drink two to four pints of pretty nice beer (you can usually find either a craft beer place or a normal pub with a good selection).
You will probably get some food at the pub, maybe only some bowls of chips to share, or maybe something a bit more substantial. If you do make a habit of getting a kebab, you will eventually manage to find the one place in your territory that is actually pretty good (Best Mangal for the Old Street posse, Damascu Bite for the Spitalfields massive, etc).
In my case, i'll also go out for cocktails a couple of times a month, but that's a similar experience - the cocktails i like are so bitter and so expensive that you drink pretty slowly!
Yes, drinking culture in the UK is stupid and everyone knows it's a problem. The cost to the health service means that it's not really something that should be tolerated in the long term.
If a national health service is an excuse to tell people how to live, I've pretty happy Obama fucked it all up here and just institutionalized health insurers.
How about the people who engage in that big killer - sedentary lifestyles? If you want to sit in front of a computer all, day, why should everyone else pay for your lifestyle choice? /s
Obama and his advisor Cass Sunstein are ostensibly pursuing "libertarian paternalism", as is Cameron in the UK.
I'm guessing you like the sound of "libertarian".
Alcohol consumption is one clear case of people harming themselves. There are a lot of other areas in which the government in fact doesn't know what's best, so I don't think you can generalize about liberties either way.
No it's not !!! I don't drink much! Because I don't drink during the week. I start drinking really late on Fridays (about 7pm) and finish early (about 3am), and only repeat that again Saturday nights, so really 5 whole days without alcohol is like really good. Kebab is meat and meat is healthy. Anyway what would we do if not drink?
