TIME: I have just drunk three-quarters of a bottle of red wine for lunch, all on my own. It is not something I ever do nowadays, though there was once a time when I did it quite regularly in the company of other journalists. But I did it today because, having been asked to write about the rise and fall of the liquid lunch, I was in nostalgic mood.
In London's Fleet Street, in the old days — by which I mean up to about 20 years ago — drinking at lunchtime was prodigious. Three-quarters of a bottle per person would not have been considered a lot. Even two bottles would have been thought unexceptional. And while journalists were probably the heaviest drinkers among London's white-collar workers, they were not alone in liking a bibulous midday meal. Bankers and businessmen, publishers and authors, politicians and civil servants all shared this weakness in varying degrees.
Now, of course, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in any profession in Britain — let alone in more abstemious countries — who orders more than a Diet Coke or a bottle of mineral water at lunchtime; anyone taking even a single glass of wine with his meal can expect disapproving looks. So shocking has the idea of the liquid lunch become that one wonders how it could ever have existed. Second-Glass Citizens (more) By Alexander Chancellor
Mark Alexander
