Standouts include Apple Sourz...

November 11, 2015 2:03 PM

The podcast Gastropod explores alcohol through the lens of the peak booze generation in the UK. The podcast recaps Chrissie Giles' article Peak Booze: How My Generation Became the UK's Heaviest Drinkers before jumping into exploring "Synthalol" as an alternative to booze.

Previously on Gastropod: Mezcal

Also previously on Gastropod: The Cocktail Hour

posted by CMcG (9 comments total)

This particular podcast introduced me to a Britishism I wish I'd known in my own American college days, a term for deliberately vomiting during a bar crawl to extend one's viability as a beer receptacle. The term: "Tactical Chunder."

Poetry.

Also my new professional wrestling name.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 2:10 PM on November 11, 2015 [5 favorites]

2013 article on the 'synthetic alcohol substitute' (GABA inhibitors). I didn't look hard enough to find out whether this has gone anywhere in the last two years, but it doesn't look as though it has.

I may be a prude, or I may be speaking from some privilege I don't recognize, but I just don't understand the world where it's necessary to return from inebriation to sobriety in 10 minutes. I also doubt that the society which gives us people who write "We were pre-loading: priming ourselves for the cheap spirits and pints that lay ahead with even cheaper vodka and red wine." will give us people who can't find a way to abuse GABA inhibitors until they kill themselves, or who incorrectly judge whether they need to take their antidote before driving a car.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:24 PM on November 11, 2015

I finished an undergrad degree at the UK in 2004, and the peak booze article brought back a lot of memories. I am not at all surprised to learn that I and my fellow finals takers were cresting on the yellow-and-red-colored wave at the 100-year highwater mark of national alcohol consumption.

It's always amazing the enormous range of lifestyles and diets the human body can tolerate, from sedentary white-collar office worker to sherpa to elementary school teacher to goat herder to sumo wrestler. But the drink-study-drink lifestyle of the modern English or North American college student is one of the most bizarre, and while I treasure some good memories and good friendships I'm not sorry to be on the other side of it.
posted by sy at 3:01 PM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

I grew up in a very sober family. When I went away to college in the early 2000s, it seemed like binge drinking for the purpose of getting drunk was a long and storied school tradition, that it was almost my duty to uphold (work hard, play hard). It never really occurred to me that the traditions of binge drinking may have been a lot more modern than I thought.

I've recently stopped drinking and really started to examine all the social pressures that seemed invisible before. I know that America's relationship to alcohol is different than the UKs for a lot of reasons, but this article was still very eye-opening.
posted by muddgirl at 4:47 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

I also doubt that the society which gives us people who write "We were pre-loading: priming ourselves for the cheap spirits and pints that lay ahead with even cheaper vodka and red wine." will give us people who can't find a way to abuse GABA inhibitors until they kill themselves, or who incorrectly judge whether they need to take their antidote before driving a car.

Absolutely true. But harm reduction is a laudable aim and it seems likely that this may be one means among many. Societal shifts are complex (as the linked article indicates), and this wouldn't be a magic bullet, by any stretch of the imagination, but it would be an option designed to remove as many harmful side-effects as possible, and capable of being adjusted and refined over time. Seems reasonable to me.
posted by howfar at 5:23 PM on November 11, 2015

I just started listening to gastropod and just finished this episode in fact! It's a good show, if a little earnest. I enjoyed this episode as it wasn't all finger wagging which is what I had been expecting going in.
posted by Carillon at 10:29 PM on November 11, 2015

That was really interesting, thanks. I wonder if regulations analogous to those designed to stop smoking will ever be introduced? It seems justified on the base of some of the statistics, though unlikely at the moment, as alcohol is one of the few things that's common to all of the social strata.

Oh, and talking of social strata, "Tactical Chunder" is pretty much only said by ex-public school boys. It's a poshism, not a Britishism.
posted by Ned G at 2:59 AM on November 12, 2015

Isn't the American version of having a tactical chunder "boot and rally"? Is this not something others have heard of? Don't get me wrong, the Britishism is poetic, but it's not like some special German word for which we have no equivalent.

Would like to know the German word though
posted by olinerd at 3:24 AM on November 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

I moved to the UK in 2006, as this was beginning to change. We got the smoking ban and gastropubs and the on-line reviews at the time were livid about the death of True English Drinking Culture™.

"Oh don't go to the Plough, mate. They started serving dinners!"
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:21 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]