If I may, a proposition: many people drink because there’s nothing better to do.

I’ve thought and thought until I scweamed and I seem to be near a vague conclusion that the lack of any better alternatives is what a lot of it basically boils down to. It is very, very easy to prevaricate about the reasons why – it’s my genes, it’s my character, it’s my job’s fault, it’s my reward – but if you cut to the chase, all of those reasons essentially end up being caused by there being no better way for a person to spend their time.

This man's purpose is to make his own limbs fall off by drinking red wine for 19 solid days.

Not everyone’s condemned to a life of slavish ale quaffing. There are a group of people for whom there is a better way to spend their time, and today it finally clicked how those people get to be that way. Flicking through The Independent I came across a short piece about a tribute to Jean Charles de Menezes, sadly not a rock tribute penned by Damon Albarn with Brian May on guitar but a mural of some sort which passing tourists in years to come will walk past with little more than a bemused glance. His family stand in front of it with faces drooping with sorrow, much as they have since the day he died in 2005. That day was the day they gained purpose.

Directly beneath this story is news of a quadriplegic sailor crossing the Atlantic. Mankind has a tremendous ability to corrupt and degrade itself, as if intelligence is waged in an unknown war against evolution, and our great fondness of the critically disabled embarking on insane endeavours to cross our widest oceans and scale our highest hills is a good example of this. The whole cast of Gladiators combined into one enormous muscular super-entity would find it a fairly challenging and pointless task to sail across a massive bit of water, yet it seems an irresistible challenge for the completely body-fucked. Would this man have fancied the job if he had limbs? Not much chance. The day he lost those limbs was the day he gained purpose.

A little later in today’s paper we hit the obituaries and see that Freya Grafin von Moltke has died. She was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and then became known as an anti-Nazi worker. The last 60 years of this woman’s life have been based upon that one event; it was the day she found a purpose.

What struck me today is that there are people who shit happens to who then have a purpose for the rest of their lives. If my sister was gunned down on the tube, I’m pretty sure it’d take my life over for the next few years; going for a beer on an otherwise empty evening would cease to exist as an option. If I ran through a fiendishly-designed sawmill and lost my limbs overnight, the law of averages says I would succumb to a sudden compulsion to travel to Mars using nothing but a hand fan sellotaped to my back. If circumstances deigned I be born with access to the Fourth Reich, I’d end up plotting to blow them up; no time for gluhwein, thankyou. As it is, I’m just meandering through life with no one purpose distinct to anyone else.

My observation of the matter is that life happens to a minority, life is created by a smaller minority and for the rest, life drifts by with an opiate of choice; English society today mostly chooses beer to fill the gaps.

Beers · society

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