Off Centre | Careless drinking - an antidote to Hong Kong's unhappiness?
The city often rates highly in the unhappiness index. Kenny Hodgart suggests a drink or two could be good for us.
The birthday boy had settled on eating Sichuan food. We were about 10 of us, almost all Westerners. The restaurant had mostly positive emoticons on Open Rice and the peppercorns were doing their work: around our table, endorphins zipped like firecrackers.
It's thirsty work, though, Sichuan food, and no mistake. The BYOB policy, and the birthday, dictated we each arrived clutching wine; but what you really want is cold beer, to refresh the palate and de-numb the head. So we ordered some on the premises, leaving ourselves with rather a surfeit in the wine department.
Well disposed to the world, we cheered the appearance of a birthday cake, which the birthday boy's wife resourcefully produced from some hiding place. And that is when a party similar in size to our own gave notice of its presence from across the room. We sang Happy Birthday; men and women of middle age, they echoed our rendition. Two things were clear: firstly, they were quite drunk; and secondly, insofar as we had given it a moment's prior consideration, it was immediately obvious that they were not in fact locals but Japanese.
Having stumbled back to their table with not one but (on our insistence) two bottles, they quickly downed it among themselves, ikkinomi-style. They're pretty good at drinking, the Japanese, aren't they? And they make a virtue of it. I have never been to Japan, but I understand there is no such crime as being drunk and disorderly – drunkenness will instead be taken into account as a mitigating factor in most trespasses.
We each of us tend to have both an individual and a cultural relationship with alcohol. Where I come from in Scotland, drinking is so much a part of life that there's bound to be both good and bad in it. “The quality of life matters more than the quantity” – that's how the writers of the television sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt had their eponymous alcoholic mainstay, an impoverished Flagstaff, frame Glasgow's dissolute tendencies. The irony was not lost that Rab's quality of life was, by most standards, vestigial; and yet his sentiments were not lacking in nobility.