The Scottish Executive has launched an ad campaign to stop people joining in rounds when in the pub. Here are its tips, for its fellow Scots: say you are on medication or on a diet. Brilliant - don't want people to think you are round-dodging? Suggest to them instead that you are vain, neurotic, ill-informed, ill and, furthermore, still round-dodging! "Ha, ha," say the English, what a totally pointless advert, on account of how Scottish people are tight and the very last thing they need to be told is how to avoid spending money on one another.
As enjoyable as it is, this stereotype has no grounds in fact and, even if it did, it would be suspended by the Law of the Round, which has nothing to do with generosity, and applies equally in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK.
It is true that there are some cases of outlandish tightness, in which a tight person will try to avoid getting into a round. A horrible toad once explained to me how he got out of rounds: first, he was always 15 minutes early. The law that says "If you've bought yourself one, then it's technically your round and you have to get up again to buy the other guy one" is suspended once you are halfway down the pint, whereupon it becomes his round and you, effectively, have got yourself a drink for free, assuming, of course, that you end on a round of his, which you will because, as we have established, you are a round-dodger. Second, the toad would nurse his last half-inch for a long time, whereupon his companion would become frustrated and get up to go to the bar, even though he knows it's your round.
What a sad world, in which the bliss of getting drunk with friends is poisoned by a person making this kind of calculation.
(I stopped being friends with this man after that, and he told everyone that we had fallen out because I had made a pass at him and been rebuffed. You see how the character of tightwad and cad are really the same, even though the essence of those flaws is quite different? Of course, it's possible that I did make a pass at him, only I was too drunk to remember, all, might I add, on my own money.)
Never mind, this was all a very long time ago. Which brings me to the point - you have a certain set of ideas, in your first decade of round-entering, which in my case was my 20s (students, legitimately I think, tend to stick to their own drinks unless in very close company, since they have often budgeted down to the last 20p and one Smirnoff Ice can knock the whole rickety house over). You think that people who are tight, who slyly nurse their spittle-filled dregs, are somehow getting one over on the rest of us. You resent them terribly, you think they are undermining one of society's most important trust-based structures (seriously, there's the NHS, there's the concept of "round", and there's sticking to the footpath, even though the farmer is in the middle of a sileage bath and can't see you. Name me another!).
Then, as you enter your 30s, you look around for these people and they are nowhere! They haven't got any friends, they don't get invited anywhere, they are probably sitting in with the PlayStation they bought with all that money they saved, concocting imaginary relationships between cartoon monsters who then beat each other to death. All because they wouldn't put their hand in their pocket for a measly Fosters! That is the great misapprehension of the 25-year-old round-dodger. She thinks (I am choosing my personal pronouns at random, not to make any gender point) that her methods are so subtle that they won't be noticed. In fact, this concept is so fundamental and so totally simple that there is no sleight-of-hand on earth that will leave anyone in any doubt about who last bought a drink. People who wave their little armies about and say, "Don't worry, I'm sure it's my round", are just lying. They are trying to mask their embarrassment at your miserly pantomime. They know precisely whose round it is.
OK, in one's 30s there are a couple of tightwad tropes that cling on, including the girlfriend who thinks her contribution to the round is covered by her boyfriend buying a round, even though her contribution to the world of drinking is manifestly not covered by her sharing her boyfriend's drink (here, the gender is no accident. Men do some bad things, but I have never met a man who did this).
Occasionally, someone garners such a reputation for round-dodging in their 20s that people will actively avoid accepting a drink from them, since it is funnier to be able to say, "Do you know, that X, he has never bought me a drink. In 12 years!" There are people who will still, as ludicrous as it is, wait till it's someone else's round before they realise they want some pork scratchings.
There is, of course, the classic manoeuvre, of a person who only wants a water when he is paying himself and then has a sudden yen for a kir royale when it's your round. There are family conventions, where a grown-up child will be embarrassed about a tight-wad parent and start round-covering, which is quite sweet, but you are not doing them any favours; they are never too old to learn, these olds, and what will they do when you are not there, huh?
There are also new irritants, such as the pregnant person who would like a ridiculous ginger beer brewed on the rolling plains of the mighty Harquahala, oh, and some cheese and onion crisps please, and yet is no longer required to buy a round, because she is pregnant, goddam you, what are you suggesting, that she would recklessly risk foetal alcohol syndrome by handing you a vodka?
Otherwise, though, drinking is like driving (by which I definitely do not mean that they should be undertaken in conjunction, nor that their result is interchangeable); there are rules of the road; everybody knows them; everybody can see an infraction; if they don't make a "dickhead" gesture to your face, as sure as eggs are eggs, they are doing one behind your back.
Like all anti-drinking initiatives, this Scottish one misunderstands the business of drinking so radically that it's as if it set itself up to be ridiculed. Its first claim: "Time spent boozing and recovering from its after- effects will probably mean less time doing other more positive things together, like talking and sharing feelings." Oh, where to start - when did two sober people last share their feelings? What, exactly, is so negative about drinking two bottles of wine, climbing on a car, getting told off by the police/girlfriend/boyfriend, vomiting purest maroon and spending the next day in a foetal position calling out: "No! Why was I born evil?"
Its second claim: the ill-effects of drinking can include drowning, date rape, setting fire to your house and being too drunk to shag. Well, which of us hasn't woken up and thought damn, I wish I'd found the cognitive function and physical coordination to have sex last night, and now he's gone to work, and I've burned down the kitchen so I can't even subliminate my urges with toast!
Yet the bald truth is that they are right about the round - it's not really generosity that welds us so eternally to this idea.
It is the fact that once in a round, all decisions about how much you are going to drink are out of your hands. Eight pints, you say? On a Tuesday? When I have a 10 o'clock meeting on Wednesday and if I look into my crystal ball I can see myself, at 9.55 tomorrow morning, Googling "bloodshot eyes + cure + likely to find it in a stationery cupboard"? Is that really wise? Will I honestly be able to look myself in the (unrecognisably damaged) eye and say: "Yes, you drank exactly the right amount"?
And this is where the noble Law of the Round calls out. Eight People! Eight Drinks! Eight People! Eight Drinks! What do you want me to do, change the laws of physics?
