A Tangled Web

About Time, Too

 

I've recently had a custom made transfer printed on a plain black T-shirt.  It says: 'Halifax.  Two million pubs, not one cinema.  What a pathetic indictment of the locals!'   My friends have asked me not to wear it in their company as they think I will become a sitting target for the kind of cavemen who have given my home town (and countless more towns throughout the UK) such a bad reputation.



Halifax is the largest town in the UK without a cinema.  Its modest population of 97,000 was insufficient to keep afloat a small 3-screen picture house.   At the same time, it boasts the highest proportion of drinking dens per population in the country.  Although this town has many good things going for it: impressive Victorian architecture; spectacular scenery (William Blake was inspired to write 'Jerusalem' whilst looking down on the town from Beacon Hill); and good links to nearby centres of good repute, it is not easy finding opportunities for social outlet here when one is a tee-totaller.  I have nothing against moderate drinking in others.  However, when one works in a job where the evils of alcohol over-indulgence are shockingly apparent, one is disinclined to have so much as a shandy.



For years I have complained that my town centre has become a weekend preserve for lunatics who honestly equate 'getting rat arsed'  (as they so eloquently call it) with enjoyment.  These are the same people who insist in wearing short-sleeved shirts in minus 40 degree temperatures, and crowing their interpretation of a hedonistic night on the town by firing short, sharp, vomitus remnants of a kebab and 14 pints of lager into the nearest municipal grate.



Now it seems the local police are about to strike a blow for we cultured types who have been effectively banished from our town and city centres during the explosion in binge drinking culture over the last decade or so.  One of the great pleasures in holidaying abroad is the enjoyment of walking around local towns at midnight and observing sober, cultured, intellectual people fulfilling their social lives without the excesses of alcohol.   It is high time we should be able to do that in our own country.