Dry July brings out the public health fun police

Time to counter Dry July with I Can’t Remember September.

Last Monday, Dry July began with a reported 42,355 Australians swearing off the booze for the month. It is all for a good cause with the money obtained from donors and sponsors kicking in an estimated $4.6 million to raise money for cancer support charities, including the Cancer Council, the McGrath and Leukaemia Foundations.

My partner in crime, co-author of the Fine Cotton Fiasco (shameless plug #2), Pat Sheil, a man not normally known for his abstemiousness, has got on board and is doing his darnedest to shun the pull of the demon grog.

Personally, I don’t approve of charity drives that require abstinence. If you’re going to weigh in, I believe you should do so blotto to the point where money ceases to have any value. That’s why I have come up with the charity concept, ‘I Can’t Remember September’, an alcohol-fuelled bacchanalia running through the month that coincides with footy finals, the Melbourne Spring racing carnival and too many weddings to count.

Imagine the capacity for fund raising with guilt-addled souls rousing on October 1, rheumy-eyed and dishevelled asking, ‘My wife hasn’t spoken to me since the Caulfield Guineas, how much do I owe?’

There is money to be made there. Mark my word.

For all my concerns about charitable asceticism, I have noticed Sheil has changed. He doesn’t sweat when he eats anymore. He responds to my correspondence in a timely fashion and I can still have a telephone conversation with him after 7.00pm that doesn’t end in death threats.

No doubt his forbearance will be sorely tested in the days and weeks to come. This might be strained even further with the news that one of Dry July’s sponsors is the Woolworths-owned bottle-o, BWS.

To many the partnership may be a deeply ironic one. The CEO of the chain, Guy Brent offered an explanation:

“BWS believes in giving consumers choice, which is why in recent years it has increased its range of low and no alcohol drinks for those reducing their alcohol intake, taking part in Dry July, or choosing to abstain entirely.”

This gives rise to the amusing image of Sheil and thousands of other temporarily abstinent Australians sauntering into a BWS as parched as a Wilcannia nature strip on New Year’s Day, shuffling past the refrigerated sections, staggering along the spirits and fortified wines aisles before reaching out with a trembling hand for a bottle of cordial.

This amuses me more than it probably should. It certainly is giving until it hurts, and I am all for that as long as I avoid any suffering.

In truth, Mr Brent was merely responding to a rash of public health hand wringers who entered the fray tut-tutting at the charity and quoting a rash of statistics that make the responsible consumption of alcohol seem as dangerous as injecting brown tar heroin into your left eyeball.

For the fun police and the public health nay-sayers, charity begins and ends with a stern lecture about our lifestyle choices and dire warnings of mayhem and death should we choose to ignore them.

I could attach the entire list of known carcinogens in this column, but your eyes would glaze over because intelligent people can only handle so much fear raking before they lose interest.

Suffice to say, the things that might give you cancer include engine exhausts, cigars, leather dust, salted fish, latex, ham, bacon and sausages. Put all those together and throw in a carton of the sponsor’s drop and it sounds like a fun weekend to me.

I should add that if you manage to grill or fry those smallgoods to a dark char, you will also be creating heterocyclic amines which are also carcinogenic.

When I was first diagnosed, head bowed I asked a consulting urologist if my cancerous bladder was due to the fact that I smoked for more than three decades. I was, I felt, a gormless idiot and a walk-up start for a chemo cannula.

I’ll never forget his response.

“It doesn’t matter.”

And you know what? It doesn’t. Not a jot. I could possibly have been etched into a public health report as another smoking-related statistic, but I doubt that, too. I could have picked up cancer from the weed killer I spray on the garden or from a large chunk of dead cow that was incinerated on a BBQ (blue inside, thanks) and bunged on a plate for my consumption. Or that time I cracked a filling in a molar and let it go untreated for a couple of years (it turns out bad dental health is carcinogenic, too). It could have been almost anything at any time.

Having gone through the process of diagnosis and treatment, about the only thing that was given no importance was the cause of the cancer because as my illustrious urologist told me, it doesn’t matter.

Public health folk deal only in the theoretical, an epidemiological rat’s maze of human beings cast as numbers on a spreadsheet divided by the amount of toxins it is figured exist in the environment.

What the hand wringers don’t seem to understand is that not everyone is going to check out after being hit by the Number 39 bus. In fact, the statistical chances of that happening are only slightly more possible than being hit by a meteorite while walking down Pitt Street.

It also raises the ugly prospect of there being good cancer patients who have followed the public health forebodings to the letter and bad cancer patients who have not.

The fact remains that something is going to kill you and, in all likelihood, it will be heart disease or cancer, regardless of whether you happily smoked millions of cigarettes or spent your leisure time in a latex gimp suit.

So, don’t listen to these rechabites with their constant hectoring. You go out and enjoy yourselves. Unless you’ve signed up for Dry July, then you’ll have to wait until the end of the month.

Personally, I can’t wait. I just spoke to Sheil and he was friendly, polite and helpful. I don’t even know who he is anymore.