Three sheets to the wind and full steam ahead

"Scaring the living daylights out of young people about the health impact of binge drinking in terms of brain damage might just do some good," Rudd aged 50, told Bloomberg in Canberra.

The article then follows young Tom Dalfer who is attending a B&S Ball. "With 48 cans of beer in the back and a bumper sticker that says 'Rum - So Much More Than a Breakfast Food,' Tom Dalfer headed to a remote Australian town last month with one purpose: to get as drunk as possible."

"This is my 44th B&S and I'm going to drink as much as I can before I fall over," Dalfer told Bloomberg. "I'm here to have a good time."

The Prime Minister has even threatened to cut funding to sports clubs that abuse alcohol and launch programs to get teenagers to drink more responsibly with a $20 million advertising campaign.

Damn fine idea Mr Rudd, target those sports clubs and let them know that they can't continue to approach their bingey ways with such reckless abandon. All those netballers I see causing havoc on the city streets. Remove the funding I say!

Sports people just don't have a refined way of binging like those involved in the arts. We are a model for responsible drinking. Those opening nights, launches, closing nights, gallery openings, fundraisers, readings, meetings, celebrations and gatherings are all drenched in a responsible glass of fine binge.

For time immemorial, creativity and binge have been connected through our models. Ernest Hemingway, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis.

Amis even wrote a book about it which was titled simply Kingsley Amis On Drink. The man knew irony indeed.

"Offered the choice of red or white wine at a stand-up party the other day," he writes, "I explained that my stomach objected to the acid produced by wine without food, whereas spirits were all right. 'Sorry to hear that,' said the host. "I’m afraid there’s nothing else in the house.' My stomach took five minutes to change its mind."

Our respectful community even finds the exploits of our artistic forbears hilarious and re-tell the famous stories as we take another sip of binge. One of my favourites is from the kidney-great Peter O’Toole who, from memory, tells a story about him and Richard Harris who were in a production together when they were very young. Playing small parts they had a huge wait in between appearances and would go off to the pub and get on the ‘lash’.

Arriving back on stage towards the end of the play, one of the actors reprimands O’Toole saying to him, “You’re drunk!”

O’Toole, in his loudest and most Shakespearian of voices replies, as his colleague stumbles on stage, “If you think I’m drunk, you should see the Duke of Windsor!”

A David Boon story doesn’t even compare, does it?

In a brilliant review of On Drink by Alexander Waugh in Book Forum, Walker highlights the magical literary pattern Amis could thread even through a hangover:

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

Go get those sports club Mr Rudd, while we have a toast to your good health and wish you good luck.

Break a leg, son!

Image: First edition of Kingsley Amis’s On Drink, 1972.