Wednesday, January 03rd 2018 (Have Your Say)
I'm up a little later again this morning which is okay still – I'm not about to start worrying about that. So many bad habits can be started up in December and continue into the new year. I broke off from work and college on December 22nd for two weeks and so I don't start back up at college until this coming Monday and work the following Wednesday. It feels like a long time. Long enough for bad habits to start up but hopefully not long enough for them to stick. Thankfully I am still in the position where I am motivated to try to continue learning good self-care practises. Looking around at my fellow countrymen it would appear that eventually something of indifference overcomes us and we let ourselves slide, stop caring about our personal development and physical and mental welfare. I have to try to avoid this as I get into my forties. It has happened to so many of them so it can happen to me.
That was the quietest New Year I have ever known. Normally I would be out and about. From 2007 – 2010 I was out in pubs or clubs with friends to celebrate the coming of the new year. After that it tended to be in people's houses. Even in 2015 when I had been sober since the February but smoking weed on and off since the July, getting back into a daily habit around August, I purchased a couple of ecstasy pills for that night, it's New Year after all, and went out to a small gathering in a house. Last year I was off all drugs and went with Lindsay to the AA gathering. This year we went to Edinburgh for the ice hockey match with Lindsay's brother and his wife and got home about seven in the evening and never left the house for the rest of the night.
Is this what getting older is all about? Barry the Bullet said to me just before we broke off for the holidays that he always says that Christmas is for the kids while New Year is for the adults. I don't really know if I agree with this. I think that Christmas feels as though it is for everyone whereas New Year is for the kids. Children are obsessed with the ''getting'' part of Christmas. Hey – I don't blame them. I blame us for worshipping the television set for the last sixty years and now replacing it for the phone. This has allowed advertisers into our young minds. But I also found that the child in me enjoyed Christmas this year. Little Stevie enjoyed being allowed to watch Christmas movies and get into the whole interest and excitement of it all, albeit not until close to the last minute. The adult part of me enjoyed reconnecting with my nieces for the first time in months. It felt this year as though Christmas was a time that had something to offer every part of me.
New Year seemed a little different. Without the booze there doesn't seem to be anything left. In England they have been going mad with the Drunk Tanks for a few years now but for some reason we aren't getting them in Scotland. These are mobile hospital units designed to keep drunks out of Accident and Emergency. If they are badly hurt (and I am sure that a great many people last night were) then they are sent to A & E. If they are only drunk and require sleeping it off then they are kept in the mobile drunk tanks and sent home when they recover. It's all about trying to keep people out of the hospitals when they are steaming drunk. I also believe that part of it is to try to keep them out of the police cells as well. Fuck working for the NHS or British police last night.
BBC has a Have Your Say series on its website on the subject of drunk tanks and British drinking culture nowadays. These are just columns that are open for members to comment on. I have been browsing some of these comments and, as always when such a thing is done, my faith in humanity for the coming year has taken a battering.
One guy is saying that these problems with drink are down to a very small minority who the media hype up. I don't know about that. I'd love to think so but I see loads of people with drinking problems these days. Maybe it's just the company I keep. I think that there are more people who don't drink at all, or at least drink very sensibly at in moderation, than there are those who drink to excess but I don't think I'd go as far as to dismiss it as being a ''very small minority.''
Others are blaming football (I've always said that football, and any national sport for that matter, reflects the attitudes of the country it is in. Racism and bigotry does not begin and end in the football grounds – it comes into them from the streets.) while others are saying that children now can see easily past the outdated drug deterring strategies deployed in schools these days and are making their own choices based on education about drugs that they can get elsewhere. Drinking may go down as drug-taking goes up. Young people now know how dangerous drinking alcohol can be. There are much safer drugs out there. We all know it. There's a huge cultural shift happening. We are in the middle of an enormous cultural revolution at the moment.
''Send them all a bill!''
''Anyone who lands up in a drunk tank should be charged for the privilege. Enough to make them think before they indulge next time.''
''Simple – fine irresponsible idiots for being over a certain limit in public and/or charge them for the public services time they are costing taxpayers.''
''I don't mind the NHS treating drunks but I don't see why the sober majority should pay for it.''
It always comes down to this, doesn't it!? Start fining people on an individual basis. We're always moaning. Always trying our hardest to create and ''us and them'' mentality. Anything to create a divide. The thought of looking towards a solution of any kind does not crop up in any of the hundreds of comments I browsed through. It's just mostly people demanding that those responsible should pay for the treatment. If that should be the case then we should abolish taxes and everyone should just pay for everything only when they themselves need to. We'd be just like America then. The ultimate in ''every man for himself''.
It's the way we seem to be heading.
On one section of the Have Your Say there are several people commenting about how much healthier young people are today because they are all at the gym and don't drink as much and one guy put up this, which I quite liked, and so gave it a thumbs up.
''Yeah, kids today are so much healthier than we ever were, now it's all meths, skunk and synthetic drugs, Ipads and Facebook.
Progress, isn't it great''
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Stevie
Can't see much progress.
1230
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