TODAY, Easter Sunday, in which of the "binges" will you be fully indulging? Perhaps the most traditional one, binge eating, which involves stealthily snapping off chocolate slivers from the bairns' Kinder Easter Selection Box while trying to convince them the rubbish toy is actually "the best bit anyway!" Perhaps you'll be binge drinking, a phenomenon invented in the 1990s (and known for several hundred years beforehand as "drinking") as we skip to the pub for an "Easter pub lunch", which roughly translates as "the best excuse since the festive fandango for going to the pub all day".
Perhaps one of us will go to church and celebrate our "Lord" being "risen", and not return all year until the carol service come December - a phenomenon known, any day now, as binge remembering about Jesus. Or perhaps we'll be binge flying, a phrase that crash-landed into the mainstream this very month when Heathrow's Terminal 5 was unveiled and now dubbed forevermore, by our Greenpeace chums, as "a monument to binge flying".
As the population of binge Britain, surely, nodded gravely while binge-checking-its-emails for confirmation of the flights to Barcelona for Easter (the holiday now known as binge remembering about the crucifixion) where it will fully indulge in the nationwide pastime possibly now known as binge bingeing ...
We find ourselves today in the middle of a binge on the word binge. Consult our contemporary dictionaries and the evidence is undeniable, a place where the sometimes standard definition of a binge is, "a short period of excessive indulgence" in reference to food or drink has now expanded into new informational territory where dictionaries are binge informative. The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language, for example, illustrates the concept with this sentence: "The story is like a fever dream that a disturbed and imaginative city-dweller might have after bingeing on comics."
So now we're binge imagining and binge reading. Elsewhere, we've been binge gambling and binge shopping which, by their very definition, are binge behaviours while they introduce the emotional binge.
Whatever, you wonder, next? Dads across the land currently in the throes of deeply indulgent binge DIY? Thousands in training for the forthcoming London Marathon now deemed immoderate binge joggers? Surely Heather Mills, after last week's spectacular emotional binge on the steps of the high court, now cited as the official definition of the binge delusional blabbermouth? Or perhaps we could stop binge-talking about binges altogether and become slightly less binge paranoid ...
This Easter, there is some Good News. The modern world is not, as we're continually told, defined by a consumptive nationwide bingeing epidemic, but it certainly was exactly 100 years ago, from 1870 to 1914, when we lived through a historical period officially known as The Great Binge.
Today, therefore, as we indulge in our Easter binges, let's take momentary comfort from our demented forebears who were considerably worse than we are and would be spending Easter, today, in jail. Back then, the nation made foaming merriment with today's Grade A narcotics and strongest-ever booze, all publicly developed and fully legal and seeping through the nation with the unrelenting popularity of today's "Innocent" blueberry smoothie. Absinthe, apparently, started it - becoming popular across Europe after vines were destroyed by a plague of insects and so a grape-free drink was feverishly welcomed.
(NB: As someone who has "sipped" the mighty absinthe and ended up fumbling with her house key at a lock at 3am before realising she'd gone back three previous homes in time, Absinthe is not recommended as your regular drink down the local.) Simultaneously, cocaine was officially patented and introduced into drinks (and something called "kola nuts") while Sigmund Freud published his famed work, Uber Coca, and trumpeted his considered verdict. Cocaine caused, he bugled, "... exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person. You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. In other words, you are simply normal". Anyone who has ever heard the billowing emptiness of the cocaine opus that is Oasis's Be Here Now can 100% refute. Soon afterwards, adverts featuring twinkle-faced six-year-olds in bonny straw hats appeared in newspapers advising "cocaine tooth drops" for children.
By 1910, heroin was being given to children as "cough medicine". A considerable proportion of adults, meanwhile, were swooning asunder in a collective binge-afflicted nationwide stupor on codeine, morphine, a spectrum of opiates, hallucinogenic alcohol, amphetamine inhalers used as "decongestants", while morphine and cocaine gift-boxes were sold in Harrods wrapped in silken ribbons. Eventually, something called "addiction" appeared. As did, presumably, the psychopathic insanity that made Swiss alcoholic Jean Lanfray kill his wife and children during a frenzied binge on absinthe, wine and brandy that saw absinthe banned throughout Europe and global prohibition erupt. And after that, naturally, everything stayed exactly the same only now it was all illegal.
Binge, curiously, is exactly the same word as being, only with the letters in a different order. So all we're doing, perhaps, is binge living, cramming everything we possibly can into our paltry few seconds on Earth before we binge ourselves to what we'll certainly never consider any kind of binge death.
So, Happy Easter everyone and, as nine-fingered Irish comedian Dave Allen almost used to say, while binge drinking and binge smoking on television in the 1970s, "may your binge go with you".
