The late Anthony Bourdain once observed: “In England man, it’s like 1986 over there. Everyone’s doing Charlie. I really hope I never spoke like they do. Every other word is an endless stream of bullshit. Yammering half drunk… God I get contact paranoia just going over there.” Not an encouraging endorsement from a man who was once an addict himself. But he’s not wrong. The Guardian reported that more than 6.2% of all 15 to 34-year-olds in the UK confess to using cocaine in the past year,

We have the dubious accolade of cocaine capital of Europe, and the problem is only getting worse.

Cressida Dick, head of the Met, lays the blame squarely at the feet of the middle classes, who are operating on double standards of lauding fair trade coffee and veganism, only to blithely pick up a few grams on a weekend, blind to the damage and knife crime this causes down the supply chain.

Whether it is fuelling knife crime to the extent Dick suggests or not, it’s normalisation amongst middle-class millennials is undeniable. Tweets and instagrams from influencer accounts that are instantly ‘relatable’ pump out ‘LOL’ quotes about cocaine use to their burgeoning groups of followers.

two biggest shocks of adult life:
1. everyone does cocaine
2. cheese is fucking expensive

— czm (@totallyclairezo) October 9, 2017

Drug dealers are using niceties such as ‘Regards’ to butter up posho customers over Whatsapp. In the city, cocaine use is ‘rife,’  justified beneath a philosophy of ‘work hard, play hard’.

After all, no one is addicted, right?

Journalist Dolly Alderton cheerfully admits in her memoir,Everything I know about Love, that she built up a familiar rapport with a ‘charming’ middle-class drug dealer named Fergus. In short, cocaine is being referenced in popular culture and normalised as just something everyone ‘does.’ After all, no one is addicted, right? Cocaine is ‘only ever a vehicle to carry on drinking’ and to keep the evening going. It’s the inevitable conduit to making a new friend at a party. It’s the pleasure of the ritual, holed up in a loo or an upstairs bedroom.

But what Cressida Dick failed to highlight, is that it’s not just the middle-class millennials that are at it. Cocaine use spans social and demographic divides. The drug is certainly no stranger to the football stadium- a video of fans on the pitch at Tottenham snorting lines spawned the Daily Mail headline ‘White Hart Line.’. And as Gordon Ramsay’s recent documentary uncovered, everyone in the restaurant trade is supposedly ‘at it’ both in and out of the kitchen.

Scratch beneath the service of any industry, talk to anyone in a pub on a Friday night and you’ll find a culture of recreational cocaine use that is barely concealed.

The hedonism of the weekend gives way to the hell of a Monday morning

So what it is it about the British and cocaine? There’s surely something deeper at play here than a base desire to carry on the party. It is inextricably linked to our relationship with alcohol, and of course, social anxiety. Adrian Chiles summed it up well in his programme exploring his own penchant for booze. He asks the valid question, “If we don’t like ourselves, what do we do to be likable?” Instead of seeing each other soberly on a Tuesday, everyone is staying in more during the week, and relying on cocaine to fuel pub session conversations on a Friday.

Some get hooked on cocaine because they find it relieves their anxiety

It’s no surprise then, that along with cocaine use, anxiety issues are going through the roof. As the Raleigh House charity notes: ‘When it comes to cocaine and anxiety, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Some get hooked on cocaine because they find it relieves their anxiety. Others develop severe anxiety once they start using cocaine.’ The hedonism of the weekend gives way to the hell of a Monday morning. I spoke to one user who described almost having a panic attack over a powerpoint presentation after a particularly heavy weekend: ‘It rendered me incapable.’

The two problems are serving each other in a virtuous circle.

And nowhere are we more extreme than in the capital. If the disgusting, but fascinating fatberg on stage at the Museum of London has told us anything, it’s that London is a city on the hunt for highs, healthy or otherwise. When analysed, it contained a concerning, if contradictory, amount of sports enhancers, cocaine and MDMA.

A significant portion of the country being permanently stuck in a wheel of self-care vs. self-destruction

Irvine Welsh, not adverse to a line of cocaine himself, admitted to approaching exercise with the same verve and enthusiasm as drug taking, praising the ‘buzz’ it gave him. Yet again it highlights the search for ‘wellness’ and a need to sweat out the weekend’s excesses and paranoia combined with unbridled hedonism has lead to a significant portion of the country being permanently stuck in a wheel of self-care vs. self-destruction.

Wellness trends will come and go but until we, as a nation, we stop thinking the answer to a long hard week lies at the bottom of a glass and a rolled up note, little is going to change.

Have you ever had that feeling when someone knows you so well it makes you want to cry? 

When Miranda in “Sex and the City’” is mocked, (or so she thinks) by the woman at her favourite  Chinese who cackles down the line, ‘every night it’s the same!’ she feels judged and embarrassed.  Because when your local takeaway knows your routines and foibles better than some of your closest  friends, it’s surely time to get out more right? Well I’ve got no shame. Every Sunday for nigh-on seven  years, I’ve been ordering from the charmingly shabby Dim Sum restaurant opposite my house in  Peckham and the weekly ritual is as comforting to me as a hug from an old friend. So I may as well  tell you now, this isn’t going to be a typical restaurant review. It’s utterly biased, totally subjective and  based on my deeply personal and idiosyncratic relationship with the aptly named Lovely House. Over  the years there seems to have been a benevolent conspiracy in miscommunication- the woman who  runs it still thinks my name is Christie and I will continue to not know her name (and honestly, after all  we have been through, it’s far too late to ask). No matter. Lovely House and I need not unpick these  irrelevant missteps. We remain the best of friends.  

Everyone knows the best Chinese food is found in slightly dingy outposts, not the swanky West end  joints. AA Gill himself was famously scathing about upmarket chinese. The dumplings at Chai Wu,  Harrods were parcels ‘decorated with shards of gold leaf or caviar or truffle, denying their basic  utilitarian purpose and pleasure.’ There is nothing decorous about Lovely House. The website is  appallingly basic, a mess of Comic Sans and random pictures. You will struggle to find the phone  number. Look on Twitter, and words associated with it don’t exactly scream foodie mecca. It ‘looks  like a dive,’ said one. It’s ‘understated’ said another. Put bluntly, it’s ‘not very cool’ but it’s also  apparently ‘authentic’. And cheap. I’m the place’s biggest fan and even I’ll admit Lovely House isn’t  exactly ‘vibey’. But man, I love their dumplings. 

Despite the abundant options in Peckham’s burgeoning food scene, it was Lovely House that I first fell  in love with back in 2013. Being 26, weekends were heady. My housemates Emily, Lauren and I spent  them swinging the pendulum between drunk or prone on the sofa nursing the kind of hangovers that  become untenable in your thirties. Sunday evenings at that first rented terrace revolved around our  pick up. We were self professed addicts to the prawn and chive dumplings. The crispy spring rolls.  The soupy dumplings we could never remember the name of. Post yet another Saturday session, we  would always have a craving for its comforting saltiness. The lashings of soy sauce with their glorious  prawn toast- so greasy and crunchy- a winning combination that left you wiping your chin in glutinous  satisfaction. So, we decided, whatever debauchery had led us to make bad decisions the night before  at 4am, all it meant was that we deserved more dim sum than usual from Lovely House’s extensive  menu. On one occasion I went too far. Having come back from a long afternoon in the pub, I got my  portions and sizes confused and ordered 50 dumplings. ’Is this for one?’ the woman asked tentatively  when I bowled in to pick up my gargantuan order. It was a fair question. I muttered something about  ‘some friends’ and then had to blearily pay for an almost industrious amount that took me about a  week to eat. 

The smiling woman at our favourite establishment has seen me through these turbulent twenties with  reassuring regularity, quietly observing my behaviour over the years. Commenting to Emily recently,  she asked, ‘How Is Christie? A while back she seem a bit crazy? But she more happy now, now she  much more settled.’ Her brief and sage analyses of my psyche often unnervingly hit the spot. Because  things have changed. I now have a mortgage, a house of my own and a fulfilling job. Brunches with  babies are more frequent than all nighters. But the Sunday night routine remains the same. And if  anyone tries to suggest an alternative culinary option for that evening, Emily and I will dutifully explain  to the interloper that in this house, since the beginning of time we have had dumplings and to veto this  would be, well, sacrilege. 

When you think of the average Londoners’ spending habits, much has been said about the tech  behemoths taking our hard earned cash. Ten quid for Netflix. God knows how much on Uber and  Deliveroo. But for me, Lovely House tops the single most consistent outgoing. We’re talking North of  50 quid a month. For seven years. This is no exaggeration. To this day, Lovely House isn’t on  Deliveroo. Hell, it doesn’t even do delivery. You have to go and pick up your order. Imagine! How  quaint. It is a place where your order isn’t anonymised and your interactions are remembered. Where  you aren’t ever judged for turning up in your pajamas on a Sunday evening and a pair of trainers,  having been nominated by the household for the dim sum dash. And every time it’s one of my  housemates rather than me, she will ask ‘how is Christie? Did she send you?” Amongst my circle, my  relationship with the ‘dumpling place’ has become folklore. At Lovely House my loyalty isn’t just noted,  it’s revered. One friend visited and was told first hand, ‘Christie? She’s our favourite customer! We  want to get her picture on the wall!’ The proprietor recently announced she had a present for me- a  silk scarf from China. It began to dawn on me that I was as much a part of her life as she was mine.  And what of the food over this half decade? Like Emily and I, still the closest of friends, it hasn’t  changed. We dutifully pull out the menu each week but we know it’s for show. Prawn and chive, pork  sui mai, one Shanghai and one Peking (whichever is which), spring rolls and copious amounts of soy  sauce that we mix with extra chilli and sesame oil. Fortune cookies and prawn crackers are always  added without us having to ask (we like to think these flourishes are reserved for regulars). My Lovely  House fix has been more constant than boyfriends, housemates and jobs. Since lockdown, it has  been shut and I feel bereft. So when someone asks me ‘oh you’re so lucky having all those delicious  restaurants on your doorstep. What’s your favourite?’ I will silently be thinking of the gorgeous Lovely  House, with its stark interior, its basic dim sum and charming owner before recommending some other  more well known and ambient choice. Because I know that most people just won’t ‘get’ Lovely House.  They will be too short sighted and too tuned into the zeitgeist to give into its understated allure and  that’s fine by me.