DRINKING heavily, if you’re British, is not so much a vice as an expectation. Nonetheless there are certain locations it’s a mistake to arrive at already pissed:
The hire car desk
There’s a lot of waiting around and paperwork to get a hire car, so understandably it’s an advantage to be smashed up until the bit when you have to drive an unfamiliar car away. No matter how many of their special protection schemes you sign up to with a drunken flourish, staff will still have reservations.
Buckingham Palace for an investiture
The King has never met a drunk person with a worth of less than £100m, apart from our last-but-one prime minister. He has no idea it is allowed. You thundering in from the Bag O’ Nails bringing your six new best mates will meet armed resistance.
Dubai
You can’t arrive pissed in Dubai, though you’d need to be shitfaced to want to go to f**king Dubai. You can get rat-arsed in private, which is how Brits working here survive, but walking through the airport arms aloft wearing a Chelsea away shirt with a can in each hand? No.
The Northumberland coast to see a rare grey-headed lapwing
A bird which normally summers in Japan is here and hundreds of twitchers are silently waiting for it to emerge as you pay off your Uber driver, slap his roof with an intoxicated ‘Oy oy!’ and turn to them asking: ’Where’s this f**king bird then?’
Dublin
If you arrive in Dublin swaying on the travelator, your next memory of Dublin will be swaying on the travelator facing the other way as your plane is called.
An intervention
When confronting a friend, family member or lover about their excessive use of addictive substances, it’s plain tactless to have a few sharpeners first. And also to drink throughout it saying, ‘You want to stick to the booze, mate. Oh, it is the booze? Sorry I thought it was coke.’
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Based inside a mountain on an island in a remote Arctic archipelago, this vault stores seeds at -18ºC. What are you even thinking, rocking up there 12 pre-mixed Pornstars to the good? How did you even get there? Why in f**k are you tapping at the window trying to order a kebab?