>>I guess it's a cultural difference. We probably drink as much as the Irish, and for so many different occasions, that this almost taboo of drinking alone is possibly one precaution against going over the edge. We are almost exclusively social drinkers - and the sheer diversity of socially acceptable times and places where having a drink is anywhere between accepted and mandatory is staggering. I've seen a CEO of a small enterprise, a then customer of ours, fall off his chair at noon.
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>There used to be a lot more work related drinking in the UK during the day than there is now. Looking back 25 years we regularly decamped to the pub at lunchtime for several pints of beer. Now its fruit juice all round.

The trouble was more frequently in the bottles present in the offices. I wasn't even aware of it, as I was mostly on the road, but now in retrospect, out of 14 people in the company where I was in the early nineties, one is 2m under, one is retiring and doesn't look too good, one has retired early and is out of rehab, one is divorced and sort of settled now.