BBC presenter Adrian Chiles’s delight in the simple pleasures of a pint in a park during lockdown reflects how so many feel
Television and radio presenter Adrian Chiles’s relationship with alcohol has been very publicly documented. In August 2018, he presented a BBC Two documentary entitled Drinkers Like Me and “investigated why alcohol had become such a big part of his life.”
At the time Chiles surmised that alcohol was “the only drug you do not have to apologise for taking” and declared he “associated drinking with friendship and good times, as most of us do” according to the Guardian’s Emine Saner. Concluding, the BBC stalwart added: “The advice to ‘drink responsibly’ is the world’s most boring phrase.”
This morning in an opinion piece for the Guardian, Chiles announced: “I am trying to drink less but know a simple pleasure when I see one.” In it, he recounts how his “accidentally on purpose” visit to a pub during the coronavirus lockdown to get a takeaway beer with a friend to drink during a break from the book he is “endeavouring to write… working title: How to Drink Less.”
After consuming a stout on a “rickety bench beneath a low-hanging tree” with “slow reverence,” he “gave thanks for this simple pleasure” and concluded: “I am all for taking alcohol off the pedestal on which it stands for many of us, but this was something special. We talked as we sipped, and then we went home, exemplars of mindful, moderate drinking.” Spot on and cheers!
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