BBC Radio 4 2016-10-26

Good morning.

A headline that tells us that women are reaching equality with men, is generally good news – but not when the equality is in levels of alcohol consumption associated with damage to health. A survey conducted by researchers at the University of New South Wales pooled the results of 68 international studies and found that whereas historically men were more likely to drink alcohol and to drink to excess than women, women born since 1991 have pretty well achieved parity. Indeed some studies suggest that younger women may be out-drinking their male contemporaries.

In the past I think there was an expectation that when Christianity talked about alcohol, it would be somewhat censorious – my mother used to hide the sherry bottle when the vicar called because she thought he would disapprove - although in hindsight it that may have been because she thought he would drink too much. Either way one of the great and most familiar stories of the New Testament, the story of the marriage at Cana, is anything but censorious.

Many will know how the story begins and ends. Jesus is at a wedding feast and the wine gives out, so he commands some water jars which are at hand to be filled and the water becomes wine – and the steward of the feast (‘the best man’ in our parlance) is overwhelmed by its quality. But notice a detail in the story. The jars to be filled are 6 in number and they hold, so we are told, between twenty or thirty gallons. Let’s call it 25 gallons - so, 25 x 6 gives us 150 gallons, which is an awful lot of wine. Even with three hundred guests that would be 4 pints each on my calculations - and the guests had already been drinking the ordinary stuff for quite some while before Jesus refreshes the supplies.

Well plainly this story provides no grounds for any simple tut-tutting about alcohol consumption as such – but it does, I think, cause us to reflect on one aspect of a culture in which many us, men and women, are drinking too much, too often, at the risk of our health, mental and physical. Researchers offer a number of explanations for an increase in drinking. More women have moved into the sort of jobs where there is an after-work drinking culture; advertising has targeted women very specifically; and alcohol is now cheaper than it once was. But I can’t help feeling, without being censorious I hope, that there is more going on here. Jesus’s miracle provides an excess of wine because there is something to celebrate, whereas when we drink more than we know we should it is often, I suspect, just because we feel there is nothing to celebrate. The wine at Cana was supposed to complement the joy of the occasion, it wasn’t supposed to create the joy all by itself – nor to compensate for a fundamental dismay. De Tocqueville famously found Americans ‘serious, almost sad, in their pleasures’. And if that describes a lot of our drinking, it suggests that we will need to look not so much at price levels and advertising to understand what is happening, but into a deeper social melancholy.