Airport drinking is a great british tradition which deserves to be preserved | thearticle

If you were among the swarm of people left trapped at Gatwick airport by the Metropolitan Police’s flying circus over Christmas, you might have been grateful for the opportunity of a good

drink. Of course, this isn’t a new experience for frequent flyers. The labyrinthine, perfumed horror of duty free at Stansted is enough to drive anyone to drink. Security at Manchester often

sees people down any and all forbidden liquids before they are confiscated, whether alcoholic or aftershave. And if flying from Luton, you’ll know as well as I that the only way to survive

the experience is to start drinking long before you even reach the car park. Drinking in airports is as much a part of British culture as drinking cider in a bus shelter as a twelve year

old: unspoken and accepted. There is no more British scene than ordering a Guinness before your 6am business trip to Bratislava, a Malia-bound hen-do on one side and an elderly couple doing

grappa shots on the other. And of course, there’s the pilgrimage to grab a bottle of Grey Goose in the shop before boarding. It saves money to spend £30 on a bottle there, rather than £30

when held captive in a metal shaft for a can of Strongbow. It settles the nerves after the mad dash for the flight, the drawn-out process of check in, and lets the mind know it can relax. It

may therefore upset you to know that the practice could soon be curbed, as the government is considering extending licensing laws to bars, lounges and pubs in airport terminals, and will

ban passengers from drinking alcohol bought in airports on flights. It means the Wetherspoons at Gatwick, for example, will no longer be able to open its doors to parched Ryanair victi… er,

customers, at 3am. It will also mean that the bottle of Grey Goose is now firmly verboten until you land. The reason, according to the government, is that there are too many instances of

anti-social behaviour at UK airports and on flights. By which they don’t mean the guards who stare at you like baffled orangutans at immigration, the machine-gun toting police officers who

stroll round casually reminding you that death is round every corner, or overzealous security staff keen to invade your personal space with a metal detector and lilac rubber gloves. No,

instead they mean drunk and disorderly passengers. For the 417 incidents in 2017, up by a dizzying two on 2016, the rest of us, numbering in the tens of millions, are to be told we can’t be

trusted to drink. Air travel is increasingly becoming a strain where once it was exciting. Fears over terrorism and the ascent of budget travel now mean it’s very difficult to enjoy flying.

People used to dress smartly, and there was an element of glamour regardless of your class or destination. What makes this particularly galling is that airports are meant to be the hubs of

the new globalised world, the gateways to opportunities. They are meant to be beacons of freedom, not regimented, hyper-policed holding centres with as few freedoms as possible. Now, I

understand the need for airport security. But drunk and disorderly people crop up in all walks of life. 417 across a year doesn’t seem so much, when one considers the number of people that

pass through our airports every day, when compared to, say, the number of annual incidents in the pubs and clubs on Britain’s streets. Certainly, it doesn’t seem to justify changing the only

enjoyable part of airport culture. I’ve been in many sticky situations at airports over the years. Missing a flight from Mombasa because of a grenade attack was one, and I’ve been grounded

in Shanghai because of an issue with a ticket, Addis Ababa because of a thunderstorm, and Kuwait because of a sandstorm. Of the four, the only one that was in any way pleasant was the 24

hours stranded because of Al-Shabab. Because at least whilst I was waiting, I was able to drink. And as for the long haul flights? Beijing to Melbourne? London to DC? Amsterdam to

Dar-es-Salaam? If I hadn’t been inebriated, what else would I have done? Catch up on a book? Sort my tax returns? Learn the local language? Don’t be ridiculous. Sure, badly behaved

passengers are a nuisance. They inconvenience staff and fellow travellers, and it can be terribly embarrassing when, head bowed below the level of the seats, we have to come to terms with

the fact that we share a nation with the person screaming that they want to get off at 25,000ft because the person next to them looked at them funny. But at 4.30a.m., when you’re waiting to

board a BA flight to Berlin for a conference, you’ll order a Bloody Mary and consider, as you slowly swirl that stick of celery, just what a miserable place Heathrow would be if it was just

tomato juice in your glass.