The Toppling of the Work Tipple

Let’s raise a glass: I’ve recently completed 20 years as a teacher in the same sixth form college. No, please, really – it was nothing (insert gif of faux modest actor in your head). In recognition of my sterling effort, a letter arrived from HR thanking me for my service and asking me to pick a John Lewis gift worth £100 to be presented during a pre-Christmas staff get-together. I could be churlish and point out that that’s a fiver for each year of my Herculean contribution to the education of the nation’s youth, but hey, I’ll take whatever’s being doled out.

So what to choose? My mind inexplicably conjures up a carriage clock, that staple of a million retirement presentations of the past, but that’s all a bit too Terry and June for my liking, so I start scrolling through the John Lewis site, increasingly disheartened by how little a hundred quid can get these days. My wife helpfully points out that we’re in need of wine glasses, so I pick out a modest set for £40, and with a glorious epiphany realise that the remainder could be used for a bottle of something really nice for Christmas Day, like that £60 bottle of Veuve Clicquot there, and send off the links to the college secretary who’s coordinating it all.

Within seconds of my email the secretary pings back with: “Sorry, I should have said but the Trust won’t allow college funds to purchase alcohol.” My sardonic reply, “But… but… it’s the only interest I have,” doesn’t warrant even a smiley emoji, but the flat bat of, “We had someone last year who wanted a very expensive whisky, but ended up with a steam iron.” A steam iron? That’s the first thing to go in the bin when I finally retire from my well-pressed endeavours. Well, how about a voucher for the remaining amount? – I’ll buy my own booze, thanks. “Sorry, no. Tax rules won’t allow it.”

Couple this with a recent missive reminding teachers of the pitfalls of Christmas beanos, and it’s becoming clear that I’m up against the frowning prohibition of a puritanical HR department, and I can’t help but reflect on how attitudes to drinking have changed beyond recognition during my working life. The past truly is a beer-soaked foreign country when I consider how my first proper job – working in a British Telecom drawing office during the 80s – was spent in a state of near alcoholic marination. Flexible working hours, or Flexitime, was manipulated to accommodate early starts, an intense morning shift of noses to the drawing board and then a lengthy liquid lunch. Afternoons – a soporific period of watching the clock until the pub doors opened again – were less productive, but then, aren’t they always?

Even when I started teaching, the attitude to alcohol was more Cavalier and less Roundhead. Occasional weekday early evenings and certainly Fridays were deemed essential decompression times at a local hostelry, a place that cemented a genuinely warm workplace cohesion. We might even have caught sight of a bunch of students in there, but a shared ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was deemed a more than healthy position to adopt. Parents’ evenings in all their interminable drudgery required at least a pint, followed by a Trebor Extra Strong Mint as a digestif. I suspect that parents felt the same and were probably half-cut themselves. Nowadays, staff visits to a pub are as rare as a good bottle of Blue Nun and, when they do occur, come with a nervous sense of wrongdoing as if we’re sitting in an illicit speakeasy.

But those were the bad old days, I hear you shout – we’re so much healthier and productive now. Hmm. The graphs will tell you that productivity and GDP have both increased in the 40 years I’ve spent in the working world, but the idea that this – in a period of dizzying technological change – is down to less drinking in the working week is contentious. Indeed, since the introduction of the 2003 Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy – a nannying nudging of workers towards sobriety – evidence suggests that productivity has stalled, even declined. I can’t help imagining that the same tutting policy wonks who would deny the British working man and woman their pints and half pints of frothing ale are probably charmed by French peasants quaffing gallons of their own wine.

So here’s to the furtive half-pint in the car park, the emergency hip-flask at the Christmas do and the quiet rebellion of those who still believe work should occasionally feel like play. Bottoms up – while we’re still allowed.

Dave Summers is a sixth form teacher and his name is a pseudonym.