Nobody likes it when someone skimps on a round, but the Scots want everyone to do it. Just try that here, writes Arminta Wallace
With the Edinburgh Festival approaching its annual mid-August mayhem, the Scottish Executive has just unveiled a sobering plan for bringing the Scots back to porridge, big-time. It has announced a major advertising campaign aimed at trying to dissuade people from buying rounds in the pub.
It may sound like the opening line of a Billy Connolly monologue, or an old-fashioned anti-Scottish joke - a "have you heard the one about the Jock who was so tight he couldn't get his hand into his pocket" sort of thing - but the figures which lie behind the announcement are deadly serious. It seems the number of alcohol-related deaths is rising faster in Scotland than anywhere else in Europe; male deaths from cirrhosis of the liver have quadrupled there in the past 50 years, while the death rate for women has trebled.
Here in Ireland it doesn't come as much of a shock to learn that too much alcohol is bad for us. But why have the Scottish powers-that-be singled out the humble round for particular opprobrium? Isn't the buying of a round a quaint and charming custom? Don't rounds encourage chumminess, creating the sort of bar-type bonding whose mysterious magnetic force draws visitors to these shores from all corners of the earth? Put it another way - aren't rounds our birthright, and don't we hold them close to our hearts, dammit?
Such is the average drinker's first reaction to what looks, on the face of it, like just another wave of the raging PC pandemic. When you think about it, though, the rounds system often involves more pain than gain.
Think of all the times you've been had by round-evaders: all those sneaky, well-timed trips to the loo; or the shameless transparency of the folk who drink mineral water on their round, only to dive into a double brandy when it's yours. Think of that friend who's always half-way into her first pint when you arrive, making it technically your round. When presented with a replacement, though, she proceeds to nurse her last half-inch until somebody - anybody - is driven to get up and go to the bar before everybody dies of thirst.
Or the other friend who's pregnant, but reckons she could manage one of those juices which, since the fruit was picked before dawn on the other side of the world this morning and is being squeezed according to organic principles before your very eyes, costs an arm and a leg. Oh, and as long as you're up, would you ever be a darling and get her three packets of freeze-dried hand-made sea salt and balsamic vinegar crisps as well?
The truth is, the rounds system is a tyranny we'd all be much better off without. Where did it come from, anyway? Nobody seems to know, though one website suggests that it preserves "the values of pre-industrial male artisan culture". In other words, nonsensical macho posturing which is only inches away from outright bullying.
Let's face it, how many times have you been forced - under the round system - into having a drink you don't actually want? And how daft is it to buy someone a drink just because they happen to be standing or sitting next to you in a pub? You don't offer to pay for the groceries of the person next to you at the supermarket checkout, do you?
Rounds have, over the years, been roundly condemned by many in official circles, from the Health Protection Unit to Senator Jim Walsh, who once bemoaned their somewhat ambiguous appeal in the course of a Dáil debate on alcohol policy. "People who go out for one or two drinks often find themselves drinking five or six drinks because they become socially involved with other people," he said. "That is odd - although I do like it, like everyone else."
Well, not quite everyone. Conor Power, a barman at the Morrison Hotel in Dublin, says the rounds system is alive and kicking among the suit set - though not so much among women drinkers, who tend to buy their own bevvies, he says. For young people in large groups, however, rounds are the norm.
"When I go out myself with my friends, or when we go on holidays, I'd be on rounds," he says. "It's definitely a bad thing, because people get too drunk. Often they can't keep up with the others at the table, and then they have two or three drinks sitting in front of them and they're rushing to finish them."
Griping about the rounds system is one thing, of course. Doing something to change it is another thing entirely, as one suspects the Scottish Executive is about to discover. Those fine people suggest that, if pressed to join in a round-buying fray, Scots drinkers should plead illness or dietary constrictions - or sign up for a nice sensible pub quiz instead. Are they for real? Given the multicultural nature of our pubs these days, it might be more appropriate to import some alternative drinking habits from other countries.
Leonard Kaye, a friend - a real one, not a round-dodger - reports that in Korea, which he visited at the time of the Olympics, you never pour a drink for yourself, someone else pours it for you. So does that keep drinking levels down?
"Are you kidding? What it means is that you can never refuse a drink. We couldn't understand why there were all these Korean people going around the streets really drunk - until we went into a pub and tried it," he says. "Then it made sense."
In Russia, the preferred option is a spot of vodka toasting. Someone announces a toast to someone else, and the guests respond by downing a shot of vodka. As soon as a bottle is finished, it must be removed from the table and replaced with another - with the result that staggeringly impressive quantities can be consumed over the course of a meal.
The Chinese version of this is gan bei - or "bottoms up" - in which the person who proposes the toast must empty his cup before everyone else to show respect. In a tradition dating back to the Ming dynasty, if he leaves even a single drop at the bottom, he must then drink three further cups.
Ming? Mingin' would be the more likely result if this approach were to be implemented in Irish hostelries. Until someone comes up with a workable alternative, it looks like we're stuck on that good old, bad old merry-go-round.