I’ve just found a survey that says the average Briton spends more than a year of his life in the pub. Specifically, a man will spend 10,585 hours, equivalent to 441 days, in the pub throughout his life. For women, the figures are 8,454 hours or 340 days. The lifetime cost is estimated to be £38,624, rather higher if food and snacks are added in. More details of the survey can be found here.Before this is seized upon as a further example of our national alcoholic decline, it’s worth remembering that if you work an 8-hour day for forty years, you will spend 76,800 hours in work, equivalent to 8.75 years. When you consider the debilitating effects of work-related stress and depression, the job is much worse in causing health problems than the pub. Perhaps health campaigners should target their efforts accordingly.
The survey was commissioned by the UKTV channel Blighty as part of a series about pubs. As it’s not on freeview, I’m not likely to see it, but some of you might. Let me know if it's any good.
The illustration shows a popular health food.
Assuming a man lives to 75, 10,585 hours is actually less than 3 hours a week. Indeed the average adult drinks less than 2 pints of beer in a pub each week.
ReplyDeleteBut averages conceal a wide variation in habits.
True, but would anyone have even noticed their survey if they'd said 3 hours per week? Which would have meant no free publicity for their TV series.
ReplyDeleteFascinating. Work is very bad for your health! Haha. But seriously, I see myriad people who have almost crippling physical ailments from their office jobs, but I know very few people with alcohol related disease.
ReplyDeleteHi Purlygrrrl: I couldn't agree more ~ physical and mental problems abound in the workplace, whereas in the pub everyone is usually happy. Which means that, with ever-increasing beer duty, the Government has perfected the way to tax happiness.
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