Buying a Drink

I cannot speak for the private sector, but it is no longer possible to buy anyone in the public sector a drink. Before some tax official sees me in a pub and shouts out, “Yes you can. Mine’s a pint of heavy with a Manhattan chaser!” let me point out that I am using the phrase in a slightly technical way.

I recently witnessed an act of kindness performed by a worker for the NHS, who, on her day off, left a family barbeque and rushed into Hospital to sort out a problem for an elderly patient rather than leave him worrying for another twenty four hours until she came in legitimately. As she was about to leave him, he reached down and pulled something out of his trousers. Both she and the nurse on duty literally squealed: “No! No! You mustn’t do that!” and leapt back five yards to distance themselves from the obscene object he was now holding in his hand. It was a five pound note.

Except that to him it was not a five pound note. It was a way for someone who was awkward with words to express his gratitude for a favour. It was something which in his younger days (though the actual sum of money would have been very much less) would have been regarded as required politeness.

And except that to her it was her P45. To touch it was instant death to her career.

When did we lose the right to thank people in a financial way? When I was young, at least in the area where I lived, the phrase was “get yourself a drink on me”. There was no compulsion on the recipient to spend it in this way. It could be given to a teetotaler without any offence being taken and without any variation in the formula. The full meaning of the phrase was: “I know you will not get paid for doing this. I understand that if you were to charge me what you ought to be paid for doing it I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. And I am confident that if I did offer you the going rate you would refuse to take it. So instead I offer this as an acknowledgement that you could legitimately have charged me, and as a token of my gratitude.”

How much you gave was up to you, but it had to be at least the price of a pint of beer rounded up; to give less would be insulting; to give the exact amount would make it appear too literal. The top limit would be controlled by your financial position, but also by the need not to embarrass the recipient by tendering enough to buy a firkin rather than a pint. Provided the money tendered was within those limits, the recipient could if they wished refuse once to appear polite but would then be obliged to accept when it was reoffered with an insistence.

It was, I suppose, a working-class ritual, comparable to what one finds in those books of upper-class etiquette which we now laugh at so heartily – where to seat an Irish peer relative to the Bishop of London, or which fork to use to eat mixed prunes and oysters. And perhaps it is just as laughable: but I still believe pressing a florin into someone’s hand ‘for a drink’ beats the current approved response of trying to find the name and address of the Good Samaritan’s Line Manager and sending them a laudatory letter, especially since it would probably transpire that she should not have done the deed and you have dropped her right in the prunes and oysters.