Passion of the Christ drinking games

Drinking, drinking alcohol to excess, to drunkenness and beyond, is wrong. It’s appalling - a pricey, commercialised and clichéd false sense of elation, a biological deception. It hits your health, your pocket, your life, friends and family. It has devastating and - bluntly - annoying effects for those around you, and on property. Except… despite all of these be all and end all, insoluble problems with drinking, alcohol, drunkenness, and alcoholism are rather like that adage about democracy being the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Alcohol is the worst form of happiness except all the others that have been tried, possibly. Democracy is here all the while it cannot be bettered, and the striving to get drunk and/or stay drunk is here until someone finds a way of guaranteeing the individual’s personal happiness and fulfilment - or even just their feeling real - in the world, financial system and society we live in.

Many other things about alcohol stink of course, such as when it’s used as a rape sedative, or as supposedly Dutch courage prior to fights, vandalism or whatever else people are otherwise ashamed to do sober, like getting their picture in tabloids that are obsessively affronted by Booze Britain drunks. There are also the stated positives, like the daily nip of something that allegedly gets people past 100, or a few drinks with friends in company - the atypical evening of drunkenness that is fun, harmless, and oddly wholesome for otherwise well rounded and fulfilled hard workers.

But I’m talking here about the type of drunkenness striven for by people who want to tear out of themselves in sober life; people who experience a pointless, humourless and ridiculous world inhabited by mindless people or cruel people, all governed by unsatisfying social norms that are followed or broken with equal hypocrisy; people who are utterly in despair in life, or else only ever slightly distracted from that feeling, and who find a better distraction in drink. That they assess things only as potential distractions shows the extent of how bad the world’s array of lifestyles look to them.

It might be easy to think that these people have got it wrong – the be all and end all again. Drinking can’t be classed as happiness; drinkers are losers. They should get a job/better job, have fun, know when they’ve had enough, bother to spend time with their family, or get a partner and start a family, etc. etc. For a drinker, these common sense suggestions sound like a joke alternative. They are in piebald contrast to their experience of sober misery and drunken elation, or at least numbness. Know when they’ve had enough? They know they can never have enough, either to satisfy or suppress the way they feel.

Suggesting the world’s career, familial, cultural and leisure possibilities to a drinker who can’t abide the world as they see it is like a scene in a light hearted drama where a clear-cut normal character has to listen to a geek extolling his or her banal pastime. Someone who tells a drinker that they are missing out on a catalogue of things does so with the same lack of self-consciousness as the caricature geek promoting the virtues of stamp collecting, railways or an encyclopaedic knowledge of anything that insecure writers imagine audiences won’t accept as normal. Both offer the dullest of carrots but present them as, and believe them to be, great. ‘Look, if you lay off the booze you can live in a house like mine and have a family like this. You could be happy.’ Heavy drinkers are a mirror for other people to reveal themselves in. As they pitch for a drinker’s sobriety people reveal their own meanings of life - what they consider as important and worthwhile in humanity.

I remember seeing cool for the first time – I mean seeing it and considering it, rather than letting the all-pervasive stuff go by unobserved. I think it was back in 2003-2004, and I was coming home from work on the train. It was a boy-to-teen who was, fittingly, teen drunk (minimum intake, maximum effect, parental taxi service, no hangover in the morning). He came out into the corridor where I was sitting, dialled a number on his phone and put his head out of the window (this was when trains used to have windows that opened, and manual doors). The young man’s coiffure (barnet) would have invited violent criticism if spotted in our fine country’s more unimaginatively masculine places. His studded belt - buckled six sizes too generous of course - was pulling his jeans down, which showed off his good-name-to-be-seen-in boxers. His drink-slow mouth was struggling with the encouraging words he was offering his friends, trying to further extend his night out. He kept pulling his t-shirt right around his torso as he thought of things to say.

During the journey home he must have called everyone he knew (who am I kidding? They reckon social media gives the average person about 200 contacts in their network. I wonder if they hurt, those iProduct lobotomies). However many of his friends, contacts, or impressive Top Trump networking stats he spoke to, he told them all the same thing: where he’d been, how much he’d drunk and all the crazy stuff that had happened. ‘Cool’ I thought then. I have less pleasant words for it now.

I don’t know, I might have changed my views towards the lowest common denominator of male cool and matching nights out, but I still have some crass love for those characters and drinkers with a more cult cool (only slightly more cult). Instead of the trendy shirted, wannabe entourage sharing a jug of watery cocktails in the chain club, I quickly switched to loving the spirits and real ale world of Keith Moon, Oliver Reed, Hunter Thompson and the like. But liking them for their boozing is still pretty unimaginative; there’s plenty out there who do, and we all sit around telling each other the same embellished anecdotes about them all. Related to this are your Withnail and I or Passion of the Christ drinking games.

Tolerance, endurance, capacity, resilience… impressive, but then I’ve always preferred the complexity of those who are willing to deal with the pleasures and pains of the submission that comes afterwards. It’s the impossibility of the drinker/writer (literature, journalism, music, art…) to separate the good from the bad, bad from the good in their testimony of alcoholism - surely that is more interesting than watching (or emulating) those chasing oblivion in the most notable way possible.

Voices Out of the Air: King George V

#3432869 / gettyimages.com

The plant in my room is called George V, not because there were four plants called George that preceded it but because it is named after the monarch (1910-1936). It is the centenary of his accession this year (the king, not the plant), yet apart from commemorative stamps and coins there has been little mention of it. As a collector, George V might have been pleased about the stamps at least. King George V isn’t a big presence in our history lessons or national consciousness - he’s certainly not a Henry VIII or Queen Victoria (he was her grandson - and our Queen’s grandfather - if you want to place him that way). His reign consists, in popular culture/public awareness, of forsaking his Russian cousin and hiding away his sickest and youngest son.

That he was King during the First World War and the General Strike seldom comes across in thoughts or accounts of the events. Few directors of TV dramas will imagine that George V can serve as enough of a signifier of the period to merit any mid-montage shots of him looking aghast at it all. Dramas rarely mention him in a throwaway line of dialogue – you know, the clever way they’ll have a fishwife say something about ‘old queen Vic’ or ‘Edward and that Simpson woman’ to jolt us into remembering that Queen Elizabeth II isn’t the monarch.

George V did appear in the television adaptation of My Boy Jack (not the original play). He stood silently as David Haig’s Rudyard Kipling recited poetry at him. But then the audience at home only wanted to see Harry Potter in a serious drama/army uniform anyway. YouTube clips of it generate comments like: ‘i like the moustache guy’ (that would be Mowgli’s dad) and ‘who’s the other guy in the room?’ (That would be the King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India).

The young Prince George wasn’t considered as likely to be future King. He only became second in line at 26, upon the death of his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence [1]. Incidentally, Prince Albert Victor’s easily exaggerated lifestyle continues to get him imagined in all sorts of situations. The most obvious example being the claims that he was Jack the Royal Ripper, or Jack the bastard child fathering/vengefully syphilitic Royal Ripper…or at least the reason why it was a physician ordinary to Queen Victoria who done it, à la Alan Moore’s From Hell.

As for George V, the only highly-likely-to-be-false claims against him were that he was a bigamist and a drunkard. The former was ambiguously suggested by a number of publications before French journalist E. F. Mylius offered more details (soon disproved) and got twelve months for criminal libel. That the largely abstemious King was imagined a drunkard owed to his looks. Red of face and at times loud voiced, as an ex-sailor he could be Monty Python’s rough, tough, jolly sort of fellow (don’t follow that quote to the end) [2].

His looks also excite people because of his seemingly uncanny resemblance to Tsar Nicholas II (personally, I think it’s just the beards and hairline). One Internet user posted a picture of them together, and - judging from their comments - clearly managed to confuse ‘inbreeding’ and ‘being cousins’ (Their mothers had the same father, isn’t that gross?). Of course, having married Princess May of Teck, George V was wedded to his second cousin once removed. Perhaps that isn’t as much fun as comparing inter-cousinly beards for recessive genes.

The better-known things about George V appear during the First World War. Most obviously this was when the Russian Imperial family was executed, but the conflict also saw the European monarchs, with all the bloodshed of their subjects, become cousins at war. Of course, with Wilhelm II being a rather hands-on German Emperor and George V the monarch of a parliamentary democracy they had quite different roles in the conflict. What the King did do was visit and honour:

In four years of war he undertook 450 visits to troops, 300 to hospitals, almost as many to munitions factories and shipyards. With his own hands he conferred 50,000 awards for gallantry’

(Rose, p.179).

Related to the cousinly theme, this was when the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha prudently became the House of Windsor. You can mention the war, but don’t mention the Germans. Kaiser Bill, on hearing of the name change, proclaimed his desire to see a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Rose, p.174).

As for the next decade of George V’s reign, the 1920s saw four general elections and five changes of prime minister, which at times gave the King an increased political role. When Conservative prime minister Andrew Bonar Law retired after a cancer diagnosis in 1923, the King (with advice from ministers and officials) picked Stanley Baldwin to replace him (Rose, pp.266-273). Between 1923 and 1937 the premiership was to be exchanged exclusively between Baldwin and Ramsey Macdonald (prime minister of the first Labour government in 1924). In August 1931 the Great Depression facing Labour government divided over cuts to public expenditure, particularly unemployment benefit. The King, having heard the advice of both Baldwin and Sir Herbert Samuel (acting leader of the Liberal Party), encouraged Macdonald to lead a National Government (Rose, pp.374-6).

The only thing near a scandal (for we must have a scandal) in George V’s involvement with the government came a few months into his reign. In November 1910 the King (reluctantly) made a rather partisan secret pledge to create Liberal peers, should Herbert Henry Asquith’s House of Lords-reforming Liberal government require him to. It was hoped that, when threatened with Liberal peers, the Lords would agree to lose their power of veto. As the relevant bill passed the pledge never had to be fulfilled. Semi scandal (Rose, pp.115-130).

I read Kenneth Rose’s book on King George V and discovered what was there all along. George V was a simple man in the King’s role, a role that he carried out pretty accurately. He did not cause much of a stir, which is a consequence, and perhaps not a definition, of the operation of the British constitutional monarchy. A level of distance from the government’s decisions, with only (only!) advice, concerns and vigilance offered. Dotted Is, crossed Ts and - if you must - gooey eyed BBC pomp and pageantry. Fodder for Keep Calm and Carry On branded ephemera.

He was a sailor with a belated and incomplete royal education; he spoke no foreign language (his wife, however, was able to hear from radio broadcasts how bad Hitler’s German was); his ministers liked that he was unable to question policy as intrusively as other rulers might; he wanted to be a country squire and go shooting; his home life was more middle class than upper; he strove for smaller royal residences and had a ‘flight of fancy’ of tearing down Buckingham Palace and selling the land off as a public park; he had quite a sense of humour; he was a stickler for sartorial detail and royal protocol (though he did make allowances for the first, less flush Labour Government). Like everyone, some of George V’s personal opinions were good (he deplored colour bars in colonial India) and others stank (‘I always thought people like that shot themselves’, he said of a gay former Cabinet Minister) [3].

Commenting after the King’s death, Harold Laski said that George V had a superficial concern for the problems of social and industrial welfare (Rose, p.229). Superficial here is not, perhaps, just for show superficial, but thin/not thorough superficial. George V lived his royal life, and had little idea of the plight of his poorest subjects, or that of workers. He was, however, concerned - and sought to help - as and when he saw evidence of such a plight. J'y pense et puis j'oublie.

I think that gives you some of what lies behind the unsmiling, uptight and haunted thing that sometimes appears in TV dramas as George V, a portrayal that might be seen again later this year. The King’s Speech centres on George VI (played by Colin Firth) and his stammer. Michael Gambon will be George V it seems, and Helena Bonham Carter Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother - I can’t wait for the anticipatory outcry from armchair casting directors). I cynically imagine George V will be used as the old, gruff monarch with which they offset the new, young and more human George VI (more human - a trendy phrase, but surely rather reminiscent of racist discourse that imagines a human hierarchy). But there is always hope, and I hope Michael Gambon, and those realizing the script, give us a little more of George V than normal. Finally, in 1932 George V recorded the first Christmas speech, doing so on the BBC’s Empire Service (eventually the World Service) (Rose, p.394):

I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them…

(Words by Mowgli’s dad.)

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[1] BBC History, Historic Figures: George V <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/george_v_king.shtml>

[2] Kenneth Rose, King George V, (London: George weidenfield & Nicolson Ltd, 1983) pp.81-87.

[3] The information that informed this list was taken generally from Rose, and specifically: p.163 (Hitler anecdote), p.95 (demolishing Buckingham Palace), p. 348 (colour bars in India) and p.366 (on homosexuals shooting themselves).