British People Might Not Be Able to Get Pissed at the Airport Anymore

As a daily booze drinker, I take great umbrage to the news that the way alcohol is being sold in airports is to be revised. What the fuck, guys? Drinking in airports is my right. It's the only thing to do other than get a katsu curry from Wagamama at 8:30 in the morning and play House of the Dead III in the arcade surrounded by screeching kids and sad looking parents. What's the point of having a holiday if you're just going to have to clean some kid's shit off his arse while he cries? No wonder they pound pint after pint at the Gatwick 'Spoons before getting on a four-hour flight to Crete.

But the Brits are maybe hitting the bottle a little too much pre-flight. In the last two years, 442 people have been held on suspicion of being drunk on a plane or at the airport. Lord Tariq Ahmad is in charge of reviewing whether selling alcohol to bored passengers at the crack of dawn is a good idea or not. He says: "I don't think we want to kill merriment altogether, but I think it's important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind." Pssht, "responsibility". The only responsibility I have is to get so blind drunk before my flight that I forget that I could potentially die in an explosion after the plane falls backwards during take off like some horrible fiery Alton Towers ride. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd quite like to have my own corpse at my funeral and not just some assorted ashes and bits of melted safety card on my remaining teeth.

Naturally the northerners are getting more pissed than the rest of the UK as the excitement of leaving the north would get anyone giddy enough to imbibe five gin and tonics in 20 minutes, which is why Manchester and Glasgow airports are trying a new scheme where shops sell booze all sealed up to stop scallies battering the pilots.

I hope for the sake of fearful flyers and depressed parents everywhere that Lord Ahmad doesn't do away with our sweet nectar in the airports. They can be scary places and sometimes a stiff drink is what you need to allay your anxieties. Conversely, maybe this will stop roving packs of ultra-lads neknominating each other to death before their flight to Amsterdam so they can jeer at prostitutes and throw up in the canal after drinking three snakebites and smoking a strong bifta rolled in novelty Tin Tin rolling paper.

@joe_bish

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