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Drinking culture


DZ
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An interesting report was issued today by a charity (Developing Patients Partnerships), according to which nearly a quarter of British people drink "to get drunk", with the figure rising to 59% among young people (18 - 24 year-olds). If you want to see the report, go to www.dpp.org.uk  I wonder if there is a similar phenomenon among the young French people? 

 

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Yes, the drinking culture is getting worse here in France especially in areas that are boring to teenagers with only hanging around to do and their parents not giving a fig as to what they are upto. My own son regales us with stories of his mates getting off their heads at weekend parties and what the females get upto with their clothing (don't ask). So yes, maybe not on the scale of the UK as there is not the same amount of money available here and teenagers don't work until their twenties usually but it will get worse.We've noticed the difference since first coming here 17 years ago.
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All the young people in the UK (including my teenagers) are into the sickly sweet alcopops (I couldn't bear the thought of this myself - pure vodka or a beer or good wine for me please, not mixed, naturally!).  Are these popular with the French as well?
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They have been appearing  on the shelves in the supermarkets for some time now but I think Val2 is right, there isn't the money around for real binges....yet. And here in the biggest town around (Gourdon) there are as yet no bars directed specifically at the youngsters, the only bar that does attract the young still has a large number of young lads and girls just having a coffee late at night, can get a bit more lively around the end of June for the Fete de la St Jean, when the whole town is ringed by a large fun fair, but still a family affair.[:)]

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They don't need much money for binges through.

It has been going on here for a fair while now. Small villages, towns or whatever,

a bottle of scotch costs what from a supermarket costs...8 euros or so

? Cheap but  strong beers are a euro or less, cider, wine, nothing

is too dear to be out of the reach of a few kids clubbing together.

Oh they have a good drink alright, it's just that many Brits will not

see it going on, that's all. Kids are kids, wherever they live in the

world

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Sorry for being devils advocate here but me and my mates could put them away like no tomorrow.  I have two children now who are 16 and 14 gulp[blink].  I think we are painting a worse picture than it actually is when we get things into perspective.

Sorry but it's the only comfort I have with my kids at the moment.

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[quote user="davieszak"]

I wonder if there is a similar phenomenon among the young French people? 

[/quote]

As others have said, it does exist.   If you read the French press, you will find exactly the same concerns as in the UK press.   The Nouvel Observateur this week had an article called "La Vérité sur la Violence des Jeunes", all about the alarming spread of extreme and gratuitous violence among French yoof, including some very nasty examples of happy slapping.   Drinking is just part of the wider thing.

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Teenagers around here do not appear to have much of a social life. The local town is completely dead at night except for one bar, where a few studenty types go. Then there are a couple of out-of-town discos. But you never see teenagers out and about in the evenings, not even hanging around getting drunk at the bus stop. If they do, they must hide themselves very well.

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If they do, they must hide themselves very well.

Not really Jo, you don't look for them, understandably but, they ain't all at home reading a good book every night !

The main reason we left the Dordogne was the lack of anything to do for

the kids in our local village, which didn't entail a few hours drive there and back to

pick them up. They would find enjoyment as best they could at the weekend and during the

week, either indoors or....................?  My parents had no

idea where I was, did anyone's?

We had a drug bust one weekend, very nearly sent the locals in to dangerous levels of excitement, as someone had seen someone pass a roll up

between two lads, it took all weekend for the local flics to sort it

all out, even leaving 13 &14 year old kids in nick for the night,

result.. one joint found, half smoked  and several warnings given

out to anyone known to know the lad concerned. So OTT, so

French................they grow up and move out from the little

villages, pdf !

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[quote user="Jo53"]

Teenagers around here do not appear to have much of a social life. [/quote]

That's one of the reasons why we haven't decided to move permanently to France - yet.  I am not sure our teenagers could put up easily with such a change imposed on them.  But then again, by not moving to a nice and quiet area we are putting them at risk of being mugged, knifed and worse in London (one has just been mugged...).  Can't win.

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It's not the drinking we need to worry about with today's youth  After all how many of us can put our hands on our hearts and say that we never did it ?  I remember a group of us getting more than tipsy on our last day of school in the late sixties ( didn't we get it in the neck !!).  It's the violence that's frightening.  It used to be fist fights,with a sort of honour, but now it's knives, guns, muggings and violence for violence's sake.  Believe me Davie, it's not just in London.  Never go down to the harbour in Torquay on a Friday and Saturday night !!  P.S. I used to live there.
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You just have to watch some of those (admittedly sensationalist) TV programmes where English city centres are a Saturday night battleground with the police struggling to contain drunken violence at throwing out time.  And it's not just teenagers that are involved. 

Can you imagine the French police or CRS politely asking a gang of angry drunks to stop kicking each other and back off .......  [:-))]

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For me, the big question is how will the French government and Police/CRS, deal with such problems: and what will be their lead-time into firstly identifying that there is a problem and secondly, taking positive action?

The problem with the UK I believe, is that all responsible authorities, (i.e. government, police, magistrates, probation officers et al), have been walking around for the last thirty years wearing blinkers.

In dynamic project management terms, if you like, they have failed to even begin any trend analysis.

None of this is new: the present media panics about binge drinking and now the knife culture are a natural evolution of lack of control of various social situations: plus, the impact of various do-gooder legislation, such as the Human Rights Act.

Failing to teach young children a number of sovereign social virtues, such as the difference between right and wrong, respect for others and their property and perhaps above all, the need to either respect higher authority or fear it, mean people, today, have almost free license to do whatever they want, with no real fear of retribution or punishment.

Thanks to American concepts of consumerism, marketing, advertising and perhaps money above all else, much of the UK is now a wholly Godless and amoral society, with the only criterion of importance being self. To me, the present phenomenon of grown men driving around with four little flags draped around their cars and/or walking to their local pub dressed like football players demonstrates quite clearly a worrying level of immaturity and compliance with externalised crowd hypnosis. More worrying still is that they can vote: and have children.

None of the current crop of social problems experienced in Britain, today, surprises me, as I have been forecasting precisely this sorry state for over twenty five years, as I have noticed various social trends growing in affect.

Society is fairly simple, actually. In the earliest days of human population of the planet, people naturally learned that a gregarious existence was preferred, as it made life safer and more fulfilling. Once people lived in groups, however, they then had to develop social mores to avoid conflicts. From this sprang laws, relating to and governing human behaviour.

What's gone wrong, as far as I am concerned, is the body of law governing society has not been applied and implemented. Instead, modern politicians, particularly Thatcher and Blair latched on to the PR-friendly wheeze of passing new laws to solve problems! Rather than using extant law effectively.

Any society can only work, where everyone knows that jurisprudence both effectively protects them from the malfeasance of others: and effectively punishes them for their own malfeasance against others.

The anarchy in most educational establishments, at differing levels, demonstrates much of this quite neatly.

As teachers have been deprived of effective sanctions and as kids and their parents fail to value education and knowledge and have zero respect for academia and its incumbents, the resulting loss of control spreads out in ever-wider circles and impacts on society more deeply as time progresses.

The end social effects are thus predictable and hardly surprising.

 

 

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If the CRS are called in, then it is for rather worse scenarios, or the

threat of such. As for the police, yes in many cases in the larger

urbanisations, they do feel it often best to keep their distance. That

is the way it is often done now. It is the CRS when called up who

will  generally be the ones to react.

I take a more simplistic view at all the problems, I  look at the

USA to see how the UK will be and in France, you can smply look the to

the UK to see how it may well turn out in the decade or so after.

Believe me, France has seen huge changes in social behaviour in the

last twenty years and I would say in the last 30-35 years, I 

recognise barely anything from the late 60's, bar the tiny communes

where time has stood still but I know places in Great Britain I could

attribute that to as well.

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Whenever I comment on how well behaved the children and teenagers here in the village and in the neighbouring town of Alençon are compared with our previous neighbourhood in England (Bromley on the outskirts of London), French friends regard me like I landed from Mars.  Standards of behaviour are going downhill but, as Miki says, there is just a time lag.

I'm not sure how much more drunkenness there is now in towns than there ever was - we were hardly angels.  But I get the impression that nowadays it tends to be accompanied more frequently by violence and vandalism.

Phil

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Thanks, Paul and yes, you are right. Accepting responsibility, to me, is part of the dynamic: nothing is for nothing, rights do not stand alone; there is always a corollary.

Miki; yes, of course I do accept what you say. All systems (and society is simply a dynamic system of human interaction) tend to evolve over time.

What does interest me with these areas, as I said at the beginning of my previous post, is how France will react; particularly to the extraneous social influences? Particularly consumerism and Americanism?

Will France allow the tail to wag the dog, as the UK has?

To me, the dire enemy of social stability is globalisation, where foreign mega-corporations march in to states and their executives are blind to ethnic and social differences and are determined to force-feed new markets with identical products to those sold at home and worse, use identical sales and marketing strategies in a completely cynical and non-ethical fashion: and hang the local social consequences!

If one stops and considers it all for a bit, the vast majority of current Western social problems, have been created by apparently innocent things: pop music; sport; celebdom; the media; keep on going.

In fact, all these driving forces are now only big business and social brainwashing, with a single end-game objective: making vast sums for the corporate participants.

It is very interesting for me, to compare French terrestial TV to UK terrestial TV. UK TV (even the so-called morning "News" programmes), are almost exclusively devoted to celebdom, football, Big Brother, music (if one can call it that!) and glorifying soap "Stars". In other words, the main public service TV broadcaster, BBC, is in thrall to big business. Yet we still have to pay for the license!

Worrying...........................................................

 

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[quote user="Dago"]They have been appearing  on the shelves in the supermarkets for some time now but I think Val2 is right, there isn't the money around for real binges....yet. And here in the biggest town around (Gourdon) there are as yet no bars directed specifically at the youngsters, the only bar that does attract the young still has a large number of young lads and girls just having a coffee late at night, can get a bit more lively around the end of June for the Fete de la St Jean, when the whole town is ringed by a large fun fair, but still a family affair.[:)]
[/quote]

Would that be Le Divan D a g o, with the waiter with the nicely waxed tash ?

 

 

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[quote user="Miki"]
I take a more simplistic view at all the problems, I  look at the USA to see how the UK will be and in France, you can smply look the to the UK to see how it may well turn out in the decade or so after. Believe me, France has seen huge changes in social behaviour in the last twenty years and I would say in the last 30-35 years, I  recognise barely anything from the late 60's, bar the tiny communes where time has stood still but I know places in Great Britain I could attribute that to as well.



[/quote]

How right you are Miki, only today we were talking about this, and how our local auberge is no longer allowed to make its own home made mayonaise, and parents can no longer bring in home made birthday cakes to the school. 

Whatever happens in the US follows in the UK, say 10 years later, and in another 10 years it hits France.

 

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When you get to a certain age, you often look around you and it all seems to be going to the dogs. T'was ever thus; you can read similar comments made about society, going back to the ancient Greeks. I think part of the appeal of moving abroad when you're older is that you become less conscious of it happening, partly because of the language but also because you didn't know the country that well before. Older French people will be aware of things going downhill, but for an incomer, at least it's not the world that you know and love that is collapsing before your eyes. (NB.Must remember to watch Grumpy Old Men/Women tonight.)
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[quote user="Dick Smith"]My wife's school won't allow children to bring in sweets or cakes on their birthdays to share with the class because it is a 'healthy eating school'.  That just puzzles parents...

Also see this story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/5039954.stm
[/quote]

 

The worlds gone mad I tell ya [:-))]

 

This could fit here or in the GBF thread....

 

 

McDonalds  [8-)]

 

how did a nation that is supposedly so proud of their food and cooking get overun with MaccyD's, I was really shocked at the speed and spread of  them in France .... oh that's right they market to children [;-)]

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I expect, then, that there will be an explosion of childhood obesity in France in the years to come, to follow in UK's footsteps...

Gluestick - thanks for your great analysis of social trends.  I couldn't agree more - it is the basic respect that has gone to the dogs in the modern society.  No one has the courage any more to tell wrongdoers to stop what they are doing, for fear of their lives, frankly.  That's why I am not at all surprised that none of the grownups intervened at the busy bus stop when my son was mugged.  I find it very scary and depressing. 

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I intervened in a fight a while back, in front of about 100 stallholders at an 'environmental fair'. It was pretty nasty and one guy was taking a real pasting - getting kicked in the head. I managed to persuade the aggressor to leave him alone and go. What sickened me was the number of people who immediately afterwards said that my action was brave (it wasn't, I was crapping myself) and 'needed doing'. To which my answer was 'why didn't any of you help, then?'. No answer to that one, of course. But if five of us had acted then none of us would be in much danger. Incidentally, the two special constables we called over weren't the least bit interested, and we even had to get the ambulance crew ourselves.

The cause of the problem was that the beer tent had been in operation all day with no attempt to stop serving the obviously drunk and aggressive...

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