A good reflection on New Zealand's drinking culture, written by journalist Guyon Espiner. Guyon had a relatable relationship with alcohol as a younger man, and I found his descriptions of life with less (or in his case, no) alcohol refreshing. This book also dives into the activity of the alcohol lobby in New Zealand, which was interesting to learn about.
For us, the most coveted venue was the Firehouse on Colombo Street in Sydenham. It was a converted fire station with a downstairs bar called Matches. (It burned to the ground in the early 1990s.)
I didn’t have the off switch — the signal that says ‘Enough is enough.’ I’d be having a great time and the next thing I knew it’d be morning and I’d be trying to piece the night together while fighting down the feeling of shame. If you’re a drinker you will recognise the weight of that shame, knowing you need to apologise to someone even if you don’t know who that person is.
(Up to 35 per cent of ED presentations are estimated to be alcohol-related, rising to as much as 70 per cent on the weekends.)
We worked flat-out over three or four days, filing stories and broadcasting live from Antarctica, and on the last night I hit the bar at Scott Base hard. The drinking continued into the small hours; in my defence, the 24-hour January daylight meant I never realised how late it actually was. We ended up drinking in an area that doubled as the breakfast common room, and my final resting place for the night was slumped on a couch with a glass of red wine at my fingertips. The next morning there I lay, like some stuffed Adélie penguin, as a roll-call of the greatest living New Zealanders bustled in for a hearty breakfast before the flight home. Mountaineering legend Sir Edmund Hillary, Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force Sir Jerry Mateparae, Prime Minister Helen Clark, and others great and good were greeted with this pitiful sight.
The first thing the New Zealand Parliament did – the very first thing when the House sat for the first time in 1854 – was pass a law allowing MPs to drink alcohol at Parliament.
Resveratrol has been found to offset the negative impacts of high-calorie diets in mice, according to research by the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Ageing, published in Nature in 2006.1 But the mice were given 24 milligrams of resveratrol per kilogram of body weight — and according to a New York Times analysis of the study, a 70 kilogram person would need to consume between 750 and 1500 bottles of red wine every day to get a similar dose.
I'm James—an engineer based in New Zealand—and I have a crippling addiction to new ideas. If you're an enabler, send me a book recommendation through one of the channels below.
