Booze

There are only 3 places you can buy liquor here in England:

• Pubs and restaurants.
• Off Premises Licenced stores (“Off Licence” being short form for them, meaning places you can buy booze but can’t drink it on the premises.) with charmingly creative names such as “Booze Buster”
• Everywhere else.

Beer, wine and liquor are sold at every grocery store, corner shop, craft fair, and sidewalk market. There seem to be few if any restrictions. A few Sundays ago I was at a street market where the vendors, all set up at little folding tables, were happily selling sausages, cakes, hand-made jewellery, sandwiches and craft beer.

Beer wine and liquor are routinely offered on the sidewalk on Corn Street, in front of St. Nicholas Market, and in every grocery store, big and small. Imagine, in Toronto, a food truck in front of City Hall selling hot dogs, with a beer truck next to it.

I think there’d be a lot of customers.

Drinking in public is so common here that when drinking is not permitted in a certain area (ie in front of a cathedral) by-law signs are erected advising the public of that fact.

Of course, even some of those signs are, in typically British fashion, nuanced: I saw one in Canterbury that said, in ever so polite fashion, “It is an offence to drink alcohol in this area if warned not to do so by a police officer in uniform.”

How’s that for good manners?

It is a bit jarring to Canadian eyes to see people blithely walking down the street with a sandwich and a beer on their lunch break and you DO notice that the slovenly people who think nothing of dropping their sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts on the sidewalk in Toronto think nothing of dropping their sandwich wrappers, cigarette butts and empty beer cans on the sidewalk here in Bristol too.

But that just proves that “slovenly” is, unfortunately, an international language.