
A DRUNK girl staggers along the street with her knickers around her ankles - in a shocking illustration of booze-riddled Britain. The picture emerged as experts warned British women are now binge-drinking TWICE as much as any other nation.And it is not just youngsters who are getting out of their heads. The number of middle-class, middle-aged women being taken to hospital with alcohol-related conditions has surged.
Maybe she thinks it's the drink that is preventing her from putting one foot in front of the other. Or perhaps she knows the vulgar truth and is merely trying to impress her friends. Either way, the sight is certainly not an edifying one. This shrieking ladette was photographed staggering through Cardiff city centre late on Friday night.Such scenes are not uncommon, which is why Cardiff - one of the country's worst cities for binge drinking - has just banned boozing on the streets. The crackdown is aimed at late night revellers, targeting rowdy hen and stag parties and generally trying to make the streets safer after dark. Police can use the new powers to confiscate alcohol or arrest anyone who defies them. The ban has been a success in trials in small areas but will spread across the entire city in time for Christmas and the New Year.
There is much more, like this story and this story, which considers "ladette culture" to be a sign that the United Kingdom has forgotten about "tradition, including religion, national pride, or even a sense of certain things being right and other things being wrong".
I think these news reports are interesting on several levels: For one thing, England went conservative just a year before America back in 1979, and this whole hedonism-being-emblematic-of-a-dying-culture thing is a classic conservative power-grab ploy. For another thing: I could totally see some new outlets closer to home totally taking a photo like this and trying to turn it into a crusade. So, you know, try not to take your underwear off in public, ladies, lest a stupid fucking credulous hack turn you into a poster child of everything that's wrong with the kids these days.
*Oddly, an average of 52 pubs are closing in the U.K. each week, so perhaps these young kids are downloading all that beer from the internet?
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