This. I worked in magazine publishing 2002ish-2007ish and our boss would always take us out on a Friday lunchtime for a pub lunch and a drink in the pub over the road. Those guys were hardcore drinkers. People were frequently leathered and sometimes we didn’t even go back to the office, it just carried on into the evening. The afternoons where we did go back I remember frequently squinting at my computer screen, typing absolute gibberish. I was young and couldn’t handle my booze, so I was well and truly wankered after a couple of pints.
I then stared teaching in 2008 and again, it was a standard thing in my first school to head over to the pub over the road for lunch and a drink on a Friday. It had been the same at the school where I was a pupil; we all knew that the younger teachers (and a few of the hardcore older ones) went to the pub on a Friday lunchtime… we would see them all traipsing back into school, giggling and smoking.
Once I was teaching I would always join the Friday lunchtime pub lunch crew, but only ever had an alcoholic drink and went back to teach once- turns out that going back into school to teach a mental Year 8 class whilst half cut was absolutely horrible. I’d only had a white wine spritzer, but I felt disorientated and queasy and remember thinking that I couldn’t get up and teach the lesson this way. Teaching really isn’t a job where there’s anywhere to hide. But some teachers did it no problem, on way more than a white wine spritzer (there were a couple of older, male teachers who would put away three pints of a Friday lunch time, easy). Either it was no problem for them to teach whilst pissed, or they just put on a video.
Almost 20 years later, it seems outrageous and the vibe is very different in teaching now; much more corporate and professional. I suspect that it’s probably the case in magazines too, and that the days of the company credit card paying for shots of Sambuca is over. As it should be: drinking on the job is unprofessional and there’s no place for it in a modern workplace, which includes the House of Commons. You wouldn’t have a pub inside a school for teachers, so why are there bars inside the Commons for MPs? Hannah Spencer is absolutely right to call this out, very well done to her.