Cafew

This Monday I arranged to meet my friends before leaving for Moscow. We thought a nice dinner in a cosy cafe would do just fine. However, the evening turned out to be more adventurous than we had expected it to be.

We chose a cafe in Harrow-on-the-Hill where we could have different kinds of food at reasonable prices. Having placed ourselves comfortably at the corner table, we headed to the cashier's to make an order. The cashier greeted us with enthusiasm and with a pleasant smile asked us... to show her our IDs.

My friend at first didn't even understand what we were required to do since we were not ordering an ounce of alcohol, and had to ask her to repeat her words. "You should show me your IDs otherwise you will have to leave this place", she said in an unconcerned voice. We asked for an explanation. She said that according to the rules if anyone stays at their cafe after 8 p.m. they have to show their IDs.

We were persistent and decided to try all the means to stay there. We insisted that we were Master course students and had our student cards on us. No result. OK, we were not having any alcohol, just a bowl of soup or chicken or anything else equally innocent. No way. The cashier was polite, understanding but she rejected our pleas to let us stay.

We left the cafe boiling just like the soup that we didn't have. It was only upon coming home and giving a second thought to this irritating situation I realised that it's silly to blame the staff at the cafe. They were just doing their job and doing it well. It's just the system designed, as I understand, to prevent adolescents from alcohol abuse by forbidding them to buy it at all. Which would be a great idea if it worked.

Unfortunately, the statistics of the increasing alcohol consumption among the young in the UK say the opposite. The number of teenagers and young people suffering from alcohol abuse is not diminishing drastically, as it would be expected, but is still disturbingly high. So unfortunately, age constraints and ID control work only to a certain degree. Most frequently, it results in chasing away potential mature and self-controlled customers (just like us *smiling self-complacently*) who just come to have a meal and even if they do have alcohol drinks it's mostly social drinking, for the sake of company, and not binge drinking, for the sake of drinking.

This is a complicated problem that can't be solved by simple measures. Probably, more
education on alcohol consumption at schools and first of all in families would be a good initiative, although of course it's difficult if not impossible to control the implementation of these ideas. But I still do believe that by forbidding alone no earth-shattering results would be achieved. People can be very ingenuous when they really crave for something, and therefore teenagers can find ways to get alcohol without actually buying it themselves.

Probably, a better idea of fighting this vice of heavy drinking would be promoting a healthier lifestyle, making it fashionable to look and feel healthy. Until dead-drunk celebrities rolling out of bars and doing crazy things remain role models for adolescents, unhealthy alcohol-consuming culture will blossom. And no strict regulations are likely to change this.