Sunday, July 06, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: 'Tagaytagay' By Erma M. Cuizon
ON BBC was a news item about more London pubs closing these days. There’s such an organization among Britons as the British Beer and Pub Association who reported that 78 urban pubs out of London’s 3,879 closed shop in the last six months of 2007. The closures have increased to each year.
Pubs are “historic watering holes” whose decrease in number could make the difference in “the character of high streets” in the way of one British lifestyle. It’s a painful twist in communities used to pubs for hundreds of years.
The reasons for closure include the smoking ban in the middle of the same year, besides the rising costs of alcohol and alcohol duty, according to the association.
The effect of the smoking ban on pubs is interesting; it makes you wish there were such a law here at home. The smoking ban discouraged pub patrons from going on the usual fanatical rate, it wasn’t right to drink beer without smoking. One pub called JD Wetherspoon, for example, lost 13 percent of profit in the first months of the ban.
But we can also use a law that would ban drinking at certain hours, although it would affect business at the corner drinking store as much as the restos in town. Although drinking among the guys in town after work---at sundown until past midnight to dawn---has been part of the Filipino lifestyle in coastal lands and mountain villages, we could stand some discipline here, and a bit of self-control.
Even in Britain, it’s said that 44 percent of violent crimes is due to over-use, so to say, of alcohol. Some 70 percent of hospital emergency services go to “booze-related mishaps.”
Of course, this could probably be the same in our experience. The crime news is mostly described as crime committed during or after “a drinking spree.” With this could go the singing by drunken guys of “Alkohol.” The Bikol song is “Plastado sa Bangko” (down and out on the bench). The Waray drunken guys sing “An Parainom.” Cebuanos would be able to recognize the sound of “Uhaw Tagay” and “Dandansoy.”
An interesting development for pubs in London was when the local authorities changed their closing time from the traditional 11 p.m.-shut time to later, but not past the time stated in the license as approved by the authorities. .
Those who cheered the new closing time law think that it finally ended “one of the most restrictive drinking regimes in Europe.” And it would end the quick drinking done in the last minutes before the old closing time at 11p.m.and diminish “alcohol-fueled violence.” Britons could learn the culture of gentle sipping, considered Continental, instead of guzzling because time is running out. It seems that there was a “flood of drunks” in city streets just after 11p.m. in closing time.
They’re kidding here, of course. If you increase time to spend in drinking, there will be more drunks. Some London newspapers said that the round-the-clock drinking would increase the number of drunks plaguing the streets at dawn. In English dialect, the papers called these drinkers “drunken yobs” and “booze-fueled louts.”
In our case, we would need a much earlier closing time of fiesta dances and videoke hours (for neighbors to be able to sleep), but especially so we’d not be confronted with news in the next morning about murders committed at dawn.
Drunken guys could go home before midnight after a drinking spree probably without incident with more people still up, there to help the victim or to stand as witnesses. There’s less chance of anyone going on a binge.
And despite the social value of men in town coming together in laughter and drinks, you would not want to read sad news in the papers which in the Google research would say, for example: “Suspect of killing a plumber on Sikatuna St. after a drinking spree…”
In Barili, “he was at the crime scene, having a drinking spree with his co-accused ...”
Then there’s the usual story which goes this way---“After downing several bottles of beer, the accused, without a word, stood up and left.” The next thing that happens is the man coming back in a drunken spell, with a knife or a bolo or a gun on hand.
