Of all the drinking cultures I'm familiar with, and they are legion, England's is the booziest, not in the sense of actual amounts consumed but as a cultural phenomenon, one that celebrates intoxication, one--as an article in a recent issue of The Economist points out--refined and exalted by the upper, not working, classes. "Do you drink?" Jennie Jerome's American father asked her upper-class English suitor, Lord Randolph Churchill. "Of course I drink, man," snapped Lord Randolph. "I'm a gentleman." From The Economist: "Outside London, ritualized heavy drinking arrived not just in pamphlet form but also in the shape of returning sons as men of influence. One story . . . involves a cleric and two lawyers in Yorkshire. Sitting in an alehouse, the trio 'began to be merry' in a manner that started with a faux-Latin competition and ended with the cleric's penis hanging out of his trousers while one of the lawyers burned it with his pipe." Ouch. What drunken semblance-of-rational-though provoked that, I wonder? An urge for mortification of the flesh? Sudden self-disgust? Conflict between church and state? Any of the foregoing will do, washed down with several pints of Yorkshire's best.