Wet (an epilogue).

Are you sitting comfortably? Then, I’ll begin.

That was how, in my head, I intended to start this blog. I wanted to tell you a story. I would have told you about the man with sand beneath his feet who became lost in the desert and bested the temptation of the beast. It’s an old one. You’ve probably heard it before. I would talk about resistance and possibly even a bit of redemption. I had it all mapped out from back in early March; notes scrawled across an A3 sheet of paper folded and crossed next to my keyboard. There’s no detail, just themes and notes. Next to week six it says “Why does everyone think Lent finishes at Easter? Doctrine? Conclude, summarise – the future. Is there ever an ending? Or does it always come later than we think?’

As I sat down to write out the final broadcast in this series I was no longer sure what the tale I’ve been telling is.

There was no final redemption. I never fell to my knees on the road to Damascus. There was no narrative arc to conclude. This is just about life, just random gatherings of useless knowledge and half remembered late nights.

Last weekend was my Grandpa’s ninetieth birthday. A phenomenal milestone and so I visited my family, went back to the places I’d been telling you about. Perhaps I hadn’t fully thought things through when I pressed ‘post’ last Thursday for one of the first things I was asked was: ‘How much of it was true?’

I shirked the question, answered without saying anything mainly because I wanted to avoid the conversation, but perhaps it deserves a response: All of it.

And none of it.

As I said right at the start, I don’t have - and never have had - a problem with alcohol. This is about why such a thing could have been possible.

I’ve presented you with snapshots. I’ve given you glimpses into ten years. A long time. Time more than enough for low and high moments. I don’t consistently drink too much, but I have done. Who hasn’t? I have never drunk for extended periods of time quantities of alcohol that would make you liver ache just reading about them. And yet, once, once upon a time I took pride in my capacity for drink. I was secretly pleased that I was capable of out drinking people as though it were…
As though it was what? I’m not sure. Some twisted sense of masculinity? No.
Not that.

More like not having grown up; like I was stuck at fifteen.

There was never any reason for it. I wasn’t depressed or bored or lonely. It certainly wasn’t because I thought it would make me more creative. I am not that naive. I’ve read things written after I have had a drink. They’re rubbish.

I thought I was blank.

‘So, why did you stop?’ my girlfriend asked.

I glanced at her and then back at the road. ‘What do you mean?’

‘If you started because you’d just arrived in London and had enough money,’ opportunity and means, ‘why did you stop?’

The traffic soared through the Paddington sky, arcing across the concrete flyover underneath the glittering sun.

After a while I said: ‘I don’t know.’

I’d never thought to ask myself that question. It just had. A couple of years ago, after a heavy night at a wedding, I had a pint with some friends at a lunch. Everyone else was on soft drinks. The fact I was drinking was remarked upon. It was a point of humour, as though it were inevitable that I would have started up again. It was only a pint, I thought, but I also felt slightly embarrassed. Did everyone else see something that I didn’t? It reminded me of a guy I met on a stag do, a man about ten, fifteen years old than me. We’d been fairly drunk the first night and as everyone else struggled their fried breakfasts down and grudgingly clambering into a middle bus that tilted around country lanes as though tempting our stomachs to evacuate, he cracked open a can of lager.

‘I’m like a machine,’ he joked, but his skin was blotched and his hair flayed, his paunch sagged and his eyes were hollow. He was alone.

I didn’t want to be him.

But remember, this is only a story. The epilogue makes no sense without all the words that precede it.

There were plenty of drunken writers I never got around to mentioning. Jack Kerouac left speed for booze as he became older, as he slowed down and his skin took on an increasingly yellowed hue until early one morning, sipping whisky and rye, his stomach haemorrhaged and he bled to death, vomiting great globules of salty blood up as he went.

Jack London once wrote: "I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink." By 1916, aged forty, London was treating his various painful ailments, dysentery, uremia, scurvy and the rest all aggravated by the drinking, with morphine when he appeared to decide that enough ache had passed. He let himself slip away on the front porch of his ranch, never to wake again.

Not everyone died young. Dorothy Parker made it to her seventies. Jean Rhys drank herself to bitterness but still preserved out of bloody mindedness to eighty-eight.
Then there’s the bizarre: Edgar Allen Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore wearing another man’s clothes and delirious when he collapsed and died; although all records have been lost he is believed to have been drunk beyond belief.

John Cheever; Eugene O’Neill; Anne Sexton; James Joyce; Hunter S Thompson; Tennessee Williams; Truman Capote and a thousand lost faces at the bar besides yet their stories are alien to me; more extreme than anything I can remember.

Why do writers drink so heavily? Stupidly, my page of notes suggests that I might be able to answer this question. Whilst there’s a little bit of me that is tempted to go with Robert Stone’s suggestion that it is to bring you down from the euphoria of words transcending the page they’ve been cast upon it would be ridiculous to suggest that there was a single reason. Or indeed that, proportionately, writers drink any heavier or deeply that any other cross-section of society. Maybe they have more demons to carry, but that’s a different question. That’s asking why they write in the first place; why they feel the need to demand that people listen to what they have to say.

Whatever the tortured artist is looking for inside the solace of an empty head, it isn’t inspiration. Or at least not the ability to convert inspiration into words. Wherever stories come from, it isn’t inside a deep drunk.

Maybe, though, it is to enable them to disassociate themselves from the norm.

Despite what the Daily Mail would have you believe, heavy drinking is not a keystone of society. Drinking is, yes, but long lasting, thorough spirit drinking at nine in the morning is still mainly socially unacceptable. It puts the drunk writer on the outside, looking in. They have been ejected out into the cold which makes it easier to look on everyone else with jealousy, with scorn, with envy, with a sense of the absurd. Maybe that’s it, maybe Hemmingway and Fitzgerald and Chandler and Greene and everyone else drank because it helped them to pass judgement.

Maybe that’s what I did too, you ask.

Sort of. Maybe. Maybe not.

I wonder if it was just that I wasn’t sure who I was yet. I’ve always had a good and happy life and yet it often felt a little empty, as though devoid of purpose. My own internal narrative lacked voice and direction. Perhaps it made me a little more interesting to myself. I think that maybe I bored me. I wanted a mythology without doing anything and so I replaced doing with dreaming and occasionally with drinking.

This story has no narrative and so has no ending because it has no true conflict. Giving up drinking for forty days wasn’t hard. Possibly giving up that representation of me (even if these days only the gremlin that walks my past inside my head sees it) was a little harder, but it was fun to confound people’s expectations.

I missed the social aspects. I missed the camaraderie for the Boy-John’s stag-do. I missed not being able to toast my Grandpa with anything other than lemonade. I missed sharing a bottle of wine with my girlfriend. This culture, this land, I love so is built of liquid foundations, but much to my surprise I didn’t actually miss the drinking.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote ‘first you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink and then the drink takes you.’ Maybe, a while ago, the drink was insisting it was its round, but I left it to its own devices in some late night bar somewhere and went home to bed. Or so I hope. I might be wrong. Perhaps Lent hasn’t finished after all. Perhaps the true ending comes later. Perhaps that’s how life really works; the ending isn’t on the last page but somewhere in the blankness at the back.

No.

I am not a machine. I won’t be alone and broken. I know which I want to do. I am starting to know who I am.

At the weekend, I bought some bottles of beer including the gorgeous tangy delight that is the Badger Brewery’s spring ale, Hopping Hare. It sits on my kitchen table. The dipping sunlight strokes the bottle; the golden contents sparkle. It is unseasonably hot. A glass is placed next to it. I sit in the chair and look. I think about the cap fitch-popping under my fingers, about the glugging of the refreshing drink filling the glass, about the anticipation and the glorious thrill as it brushes over my lips.

I get up.

I put the kettle on.

Not tonight. Another time.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The end.

Decision

Dylan sighed, a well of weariness drawn up from deep inside, pulled from far away back home. He was tired. Tired and sick. Tired and sick and unable to sleep. And drunk. Most of all, Dylan was darkly drunk. He let his lids sink and gently massaged his temple. Breath escape his ragged lungs and then, whilst the release had been calm, the attempt to snatch air back hacked and thracked his whole body. Stifling his coughs, Dyan indicated at his empty glass on the bar’s counter. The barman nodded and duly obliged to pour a slug of whisky.

Plagued by looming insolvency and the probable collapse of his marriage - poor Caitlin lost to the winds of her fancy and equally swallowed up by the drink - Dylan had readily accepted the lecture tour of America. A thousands pounds a week would solve his money problems, would leave him free from work and blissful in the arms of his musing, but America wasn’t suiting him. He’d enjoyed himself when he’d last visited. Or so he imagined. He couldn’t quite remember. They told him that he felt up the movie starlet and urinated in Charlie Chaplin’s pot plant, the sort of ego deflation that was within his gift to deliver. But this time, in New York, the air was laden with smog; worse even than London. A dank, smouldering cloud that penetrated life and moodily sagged.

Not that he truly felt any better in Wales. Dylan rarely felt well anymore. Instead he felt dragged down, weighed on by the burden of the need for words. The blackouts were almost a release. A gift of a few moments away from the throb inside, in his gut.

He necked the whisky. It glided down with ease to join the others.

The barman tipped the bottle. Dylan nodded. Amber honeyed peace sloshed in the glass.

Unable to sleep, Dylan had left his hotel and prowled his way through Chelsea to the bar. Dylan liked to drink in the same places. He enjoyed the nod of recognition, the slight apprehension over what he might do, who he might speak with, what he might offend. Dylan enjoyed his reputation. He’d carefully built up the myth of a drinker. He was a poet whose words bought the truth that beer and whisky cleared the mind for. Life was nothing save an interlinked mess of dreary beauty but for a drink, ah a drink and the people one found at the bottom of the glass, made it worthwhile. Yet there was no-one that night. There was just Dylan and New York, cold and distant, the murmur around the bar, whisky and the memories of words that might have been.

Should he have another? He tried to count how many he’d already had and to work out whether it would make any difference the following day. He felt mildly sick, but then booze increasingly made him nauseous. And whilst he wondered, he pointed at the empty glass and it was duly topped up; his semblance of a choice in the matter shattered by his body acting on its own accord, broken by reality.

There was no choice. No matter how much he pretended otherwise, no matter how much he longed to retain control, he would drink either until he was broke and could charm no-one to join him or he blacked out.

Choice was but an illusion caused by wants.

Later Dylan stumbled home through the smogged streets of Chelsea. He didn’t pause, he didn’t clutch drunkenly at lampposts, Dylan was used to walking whilst drunk and he adapted his step to accept his stagger. Arriving in the red bricked entrance of the Chelsea Hotel, he nodded at the receptionist with a sly yet troubled grin.
‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies,’ he proudly proclaimed to no-one in particular. He paused and rubbed his temple as though easing thoughts of nothing out. ‘I think that’s a record.’

He stumbled up the stairs to his room not realising that when he lay down in the cool crashing forgiveness of the sheets he would never rise again. Even the hacking cough had rescinded, but the deep blue horror of his lungs reached out to his heart and embraced it. Sometime in his slumber Dylan slipped into a coma.

There he lay, at peace at last, in amongst the future ghosts of the Chelsea hotel. The rooms where Charles Jackson had chugged down sufficient pills to never wake from his final Lost Weekend; where Kerouac had battered out On The Road on a single endless tube of writing paper; where Dylan’s namesake Bob would compose his early calls to arms and sorrowful laments of love lost; where Andy’s glamour and vice would be filmed for fleeting fame; where Jimi and Janis and gravely Tom and Dee Dee and Johnny Thunders and Rufus before he got straight would all lose a sliver of their souls; where Sid would murder Nancy in his drugged oblivion, where in the twenty-first century Joseph O’Neil would compose a novel of loneliness and isolation, of being lost in a city that belongs to the world. Dylan’s breath rattled and rolled, cracking amongst his dreamless sleep. His soul drifted into the walls, the foundations, the plaster and the time.

Eventually a doctor arrived, sent him to hospital and incorrectly administered too much morphine and that was poor Dylan gone. Gone to the wind of the world.

“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

-And Death Shall Have No Dominion by Dylan Thomas.

Years later, Caitlin would write, as though we didn’t know, “ours was a drink story not a love story, just like millions of others.”

Just like millions of others? How despairing Dylan would have found all his efforts to be for naught.

When I first came to London, ten years ago this summer, I was a young man suddenly gifted a disposable income. Unexpectedly finding myself flush for cash after years of penniless studenthood and poorly paid bar work, I wasn’t, initially, interested in saving for anything. After all, what did I have to save up for? I had a rented flat I could afford and property ownership seemed a distant hassle. I had a patched together car. My interests were records, books and, well, going to the pub.

So I did. Lots.

The company I worked for mythologised drunken editorial staff. It actively encouraged lunchtime boozer visits with managers just as effortlessly tired as the rest of us. I quickly became accustomed to journalists turning up at lunch time having stopped off for a morning stiffner and that feeling of sinking weightlessness as the only lunch I’d had was two pints of lager. Friday afternoons were a void. I stumbled back to my desk at about three-thirty and tried not to screw up.
But I was young and didn’t know any better. Besides it was what everyone else did.


By the Christmas of that first year I deemed it appropriate behaviour to turn up to a dinner party with a four pack, two bottles of wine and a half bottle of brandy, largely for my own consumption. The resulting walk home saw me, so I’m told, nearly fall head first under the wheels of a taxi followed by an empty head and a flooded stomach the morning after. This three day hang-over did lead me to calm down somewhat, but slowly over the years it snuck back up.

The Boy John had his stag do right in the middle of Lent. That was okay. It was a countryside weekend away, not one swamped in drink and the typical distractions of male bravado around girls and fights and sights. I offered to make life easier and drive everyone.

As we walked away from the racecourse, the others were slightly flushed from midday drinking, but my head clean and clear. I watched the throngs of staggering bodies we passed. The red-stung face of the young man in his shiny grey court suit being held back by his mate as he raged at the world around, filled with anger for every living injustice; the orange skinned over-exposed girl tottering on implausibly high heels as she tried to navigate the kerb; the older guy with his head resting on his arms supported by a handy wall at the end of someone’s drive, the puddle of sick over his shiny shoes; the lad groaning under the weight of his girlfriend in his arms, who berated him in slurred words as he carried her from the melee. I was never like that. I just used to sit quietly, drink and turn off.

Time eased by. I started to hang around the less salubrious pubs in South-East London, chatting merrily to people with speckled red faces and faded love and hate tattoos on their knuckles. But still, it didn’t feel any different to all those who went and passed out on a Saturday night. At a party in Peterborough I remember sitting under the barbecue sky and an Australian girl with a bottle of whisky hanging out her dungarees asked us why weren’t getting drunk.

‘I don’t think,’ I replied, ‘there’s any real danger of us missing out.’ I knew I’d get there, I had ample ale to get through and fancied poaching some of her scotch, but I couldn’t see what the hurry was.

In many ways I almost preferred drinking alone, even occasionally leaving a work drinks early to go home, sit and watch TV and chug back cans of lager and a couple of hard measures. It wasn’t because I preferred my own company, but simply because sometimes it was easier that way. I didn’t need to impatiently wait for someone else to finish their drink and get a round in, or be bought a drink by me so that I wasn’t at the bar just for myself.

At the time I lived with my then-girlfriend, but we were never permanently entwined. She had a tendency to work into the early hours of the morning leaving me to my own devices. It wasn’t that hard to sneak the additional recycling out the flat and pretend to have had less than I had.

I started to take whisky to bed with me. Not every night, but often enough. A large glass of scotch balanced on my chest as I lay and read words in books I wouldn’t be able to remember the next day and when I’d finished, I would hide the glass somewhere underneath the bed. Down amongst the sleeping bags and the places she wouldn’t go.

Friends began to cut back, to be able to enjoy a couple of drinks and then call it a night. They claimed that any more and they would be incapacitated the following day. I nodded and pretended to be the same, but really I couldn’t understand it. If anything my tolerance appeared to be growing stronger and stronger. For a while my whisky habit became something like a bottle a week. Plus beer and wine and other assorted spirits. I would deliberately arrive early to meet friends and nip into a different pub around the corner for a solitary pint. I would try to find a late night bar still open on the way home and miss the last train in favour of the night bus. Failing that I’d acquire a can for the journey somewhere and still take a nightcap once finally home.

At some point I started drinking things I’d never touched before. Cider and vodka, for example. Not necessarily the nice stuff either. The cheap and the strong, those that typically have little purpose beyond being lost. I stopped buying single malt scotch and switched to blends, partially out of sheer financial necessity, but also because it felt wrong to drink and without true appreciation.

And in the mornings, I’d awaken in the chair, in a bathtub, on a sofa, somewhere across town from home, somewhere I had to quietly slip out from letting the door close on the people I just met. Locking away the night for another day.
Somewhere around this time I stopped getting hang-overs. Which seems somewhat weird, but it’s true. No matter how much I drank, I would feel, if not fantastic, then at least okay the morning after. A bit tired, somewhat irritable, but nothing a walk in the fresh air and several strong coffees wouldn’t fix. I tended to sag slightly in the mid-afternoon, but if there was no debilitating, gut wrenching God-awful pain then what was to stop me?

Is any of this true? Or am I self-mythologising too? Was it habit, boredom or frustration? Maybe all three, maybe none. Maybe I’m picking out infrequent incidents in a ten year period.

It was all such a long time ago, why am I even telling you all this? Who am I confessing my sins to? Who am I saying sorry to?

Ray didn’t need to open his eyes. He could smell where he was. Again. The stench of cleanliness burned. He’d hoped for a moment, it that brief pause between the disturbed sober slumber and being fully awake, that he had dreamt the two previous days.

But that was a pointless wish, for Ray hadn’t dreamt in years. His sleep, when it finally came, was deep and black and undisturbed except by the aches.

He really was back in hospital. His stomach lining had loosened again and as he’d vomited there’d been blood and a slight stink of faeces. Someone more coherent had decided to call for help and so there he was again. On the ward. The fourth time in under a year. They didn’t want him there. They weren’t interested in those who wouldn’t try. He didn’t want to be there either. He just wanted to be left alone.

He was stuck. They all were. Ray, the failing writer, and all his drinking chums with nowhere to go. The guy to his right rolled under the sheets and scratched at his bare flesh as though something wriggled under the skin. The man diagonally opposite had drunk a bottle of vodka every day for twelve years and had given up too late to save his liver. It had stopped functioning leaving him prone to swelling with fluid; unable to process waste his gut had ballooned out to the size of a beer barrel with his belly button sharply protruding like a the tap to draw off a beautifully golden fizzing beer, all hoppy and bliss. The man down the far end of the ward needed an operation to remove a weeping abscess on his bladder and who liked to drink thirteen bottles of cooking sherry a day. The bed to Ray’s left was empty, the occupant from the day before was barely an indent in the sheets as though he’d never been there.

They were all part of the club; everyone had a drink of choice and sometimes they even had a reason to drink. But more often they didn’t. More often to drink was their reason. No excuse was offered. Telling the truth, for once, they would shrug and admit that it was just because. Because there was no choice.

Ray closed his eyes again. The problem with hospital was that there was so little to do. At least at the rehab out clinic there was structure, meals to be made, tasks to be done, games of cards and chess to be played, a routine to exist by. In the hospital there was just boredom. Boredom made Ray want.

No. That was a lie.

Life made Ray want.

He tried to think of a single line, a phrase to cut to the heart of where he was. Something that described the futility and resigned acceptance of hospital stays as a part of the drinker’s life. He would have been able to do so once. Once when he wrote. He missed writing, but he’d had to give it up. It took up too much time. It got in the way of his fulltime drinking.

One of the men eeked his way past Ray’s bed, his hospital gown flapping open at the back to reveal his wart covered behind. Every few steps he giggled and raised the front to expose his shrunken and wrinkled genitals. His movements were slow and ached, fragile as though he might shatter. Not that he would have cared. Yet sufficient force to self-shatter was clearly beyond his wasted muscle. He looked as though he’d been collecting his pension for ten years. The nurse had said he was forty-three.

The bed to Ray’s left was still empty.

Ray’s stories had been collected the year before. Written in the gaps between various blue collar jobs in hospitals and stores and wherever to get by and the teaching of writing to others and the far more serious business of getting wasted, Ray had been pleased that it had been released. And yet it wasn’t enough. He could do better; he just needed the right amount of whisky to find the sweet spot between drunkenness and sobriety to have the courage to reveal life.

He sighed quietly to himself and craved a cigarette. A cigarette and a drink. He wished the pretty nurse would come round and arrange his pillows, just to give him a wink and a reason for hope, just to break the monotonous repetition of nothing.
He felt hollow. His insides could have vanished, been pulled out and cast aside as the useless addled dead weight they’d soon become. He was hooked up to a drip that intravenously feeding him all the stuff whisky lacked. His wrist throbbed slightly but nothing hurt so he guessed he must be on morphine. It gave a distanting sensation, so different to alcohol which pulled the world in tight and then slammed the door in its face.

Ray closed his eyes and tried not to think about his wife and kids. About the mistakes he’d made. About the wrongs it was too late to make right. About the world and words he couldn’t write.

The bed to his left was still empty. Ray knew that the man who’d slept in it fitfully the day before, Ralph or Jimmy or Frank or Mike or whatever his name was with his poison of choice had died. That was the quickest way out of the hospital. Ray didn’t want to die. He wanted to write. He wanted to not want to drink. He wanted to be free of the drag to get drunk, the urge that demanded to be fed. He wanted to tell the world some truths. He knew how to do it, he knew what change he had to make, but it was so easy to say and so impossibly hard to think of doing.

'No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don't forget it."'
-Gravy by Raymond Carver.



This week’s David Marston Writes dramatises scenes from the lives of Dylan Thomas and Raymond Carver. They are not intended to be strictly accurate representations nor are they intended to cause any offence or distress to the estates of either man.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) wrote numerous poems, short stories and scripted short films for the BBC during the Second World War. He was arguably Wales’ finest poetic voice. His most famous work, Under the Milkwood, was due for release when he died suddenly of pneumonia complicated by alcohol abuse in New York. Caitlin Thomas was his wife.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) gave up drinking in 1978 and went on to write two short story collections, Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as well as numerous poems, before he died of cancer. He is frequently acclaimed as the greatest exponent of the short story form in the twentieth century. The term Carverish tends to refer to a bleakly minimalist style.

Much of the inspiration for the hospital ward came from Christopher Palling’s 2009 Guardian article.

Grain

It could be argued that when the young drink, when they are drunk, they are at their most beautiful. Or that they feel beautiful at least. Free and light. The old, the survivors, those who keep on drinking, they know that they’re the damned. The beautiful and the damned. One becomes the other.

Spirits are found the world over. By spirits I don’t mean derivatives of other alcoholic drinks, like brandy is a boosted version of wine, but the stuff that started off as cheap and nasty and from necessity. Spirits, just life’s ghosts. Vodka, whisky, gin, rum, tequila, and absinthe the sole purpose for the existence of these is drive the day’s demons out into the night.

Vodka, the proper stuff not the sickly flavoured spew designed to be disguised as sweets for oversized children, was invented during the ninth century somewhere in the so-called vodka-belt countries, those at one time or another under the domination of Moscow or St Petersburg, but in a significantly weaker state than what we’re used to. The full on version we know today came from Russia in the early fifteenth century and, like so many other drinks, was cultivated by monks. What was it about monks that they had so much time to be dosing about producing exciting and different drinks for people? Never mind. Vodka, the word, is derived from the Slavic for water. Kind of apt for a drink that is supposed to keep you alive in the depths of the harshest snow.

Vodka shouldn’t be fucked around with. Modern brands flavour it with cherry or bacon or chocolate, but at worst it should be infused with lemongrass or ginger, stuff that grows naturally, and ideally just leave it alone. It’s supposed to kick your eyeballs out. Just be grateful you’re not knocking back the homebrew stuff out a jam-jar somewhere on a post-Soviet farming collective in the Siberian steppes. And that’s how it should be drunk: hard and neat. There are rituals around vodka. It should be cold, which does dull the burn somewhat, and served in small shot glasses, toasted and necked in one before chatter continues and sometime later another will be poured. Get it over with, don’t linger. Enjoy it.

By the time I reached University I was an accomplished beer drinker. I knew my limits, knew my comfort zones. I felt that I was done with getting inadvertently legless, throwing up, waking up on a traffic roundabout, staggering around incoherently, setting shit on fire and bumping into the Police. I’d finished, or so I thought, experimenting with alcohol. I knew what I liked and what I liked was about a dozen pints of ale or Guinness and to go home. I liked pubs. Pubs like the one where I’d been born. Local pubs with wooden bars and no aluminium; music was an acceptable addition, but it didn’t need to be overbearing, did it?

Sheffield is a city. And whilst, to an extent, I had grown up in a bigger city (or at least adjacent to one) it was very much in a suburban outcast fashion and suddenly I found myself at the heart of something with a wider range of distractions. My friends wanted to go to nightclubs, which contrary to my previous experiences, were not either mildly threatening or pap filled dross pits, but venues packed with other students playing music I actually liked for once. They also wanted, occasionally, to go to large city centre pubs or shiny tiny bars, or even cocktail lounges of crappy hotels. When they had a happy hour. Not too often, usually because we couldn’t afford it, but, you know, sometimes. For a change. For something different.

At eighteen, I wasn’t too keen on change or diversity. I enjoyed routine, the same repeated again and again.

Ssh, whisper it: I was afraid of the unknown.

Gin is a particularly English drink. Made from the re-distilled neutral spirits of agriculture (in other words the excess grain mash that produces a highly alcoholic flammable liquid) and flavoured with juniper berries, its main attraction was its cheapness. It offered an affordable intoxication for all to lie in swills of the stuff.

Despite its popularity in seventeenth century England, or notoriety if not popularity with Hogarth’s gin alley being a fairly accurate portrayal of people who had nothing else to do all day except get fuck-eyed, it was a Dutch drink originally. William of Orange bought it over in the Glorious Revolution, but the Dutch had been enthusiastically using it for many years before, distributing it to soldiers during the eighty years war before battle to give them courage. Dutch courage. The Dutch version was a weaker one, and the English toughened it up, often mixing it with turpentine for a real kick.

It was also frequently used as a tonic. Firstly as an ineffective cure for the bubonic plague and then, as the empire expanded, the juniper flavour was found as an adequate way to disguise the potency of quinine, the anti-malaria, drug. All it really did was take a taste of home around the world.

Deep in the basement resturant, underneath the old streets of Soho where a few too many nights have been lost, both Stu and my girlfriend decided to swirl glasses of red wine under my nose.

‘Mmmm,’ they cooed. I pretended not to care, tried to act aloof as though it didn’t matter. And maybe, just maybe, it didn’t as much as it might have done.
Meanwhile, fourteen years earlier and two hundred miles further north my confidence, and some might say my sarcasm, increased. I became more prepared to branch out and try new experiences. Hell, I even began to enjoy myself.

So I started to occasionally drink spirits, either neat as shots or with mixers or in some fucking ridiculous multi-coloured combo with a stupid punning name and an umbrella sticking out the top.

But spirits aren’t controlled; I didn’t fully understand how to handle them properly. They’re volatile. After one particularly raucous first year party in the depressing bare brick corridors of Wolfson Flats I awoke about midday on the Sunday to find myself underneath the bed and stark naked. I had no idea what had been running through my mind to get myself there. The end of the evening was a blacked out mush filled with cans of Ward’s bitter and a potent vodka based punch that filled a vast red plastic trough (a container that until about two and a half years ago continued to be used as a receptacle for my recycling).

The thing was, though, I didn’t care. Drink and the oblivion, the unknown end to the night was starting to seem enticing. I was never one of those people who feels full on beer, yet in addition to discovering a particular penchant for red wine I embarked on the enthusiasm for pints of gin and tonic, seventy-six percent rum bought back from Spain and vodka and cokes for that sugary caffeine kick in the days before red bull. In short, anything and everything and bugger the consequences.

It was whilst at University that I started to get into whisky (although not yet seriously). At this time I took my scotch and Irish neat, taking pleasure in the searing sting at the back of the throat. Maybe it was a precocious drink for a twenty-year old to choose, but I enjoyed a short night cap or to work my way through a couple of healthy doses of Jameson’s whilst reading history text books with music blasting out. Finally, I felt like I was graduating to the serious drinking stuff.
No more messing about with beer and wine; this was the real deal. Whisky was what the real men drank, what anti-heroes in stories took to.

At the battle of Trafalgar, Nelson’s broken and bloody body was stuffed into a barrel of rum to bring the hero back from the southern seas to the land of his birth. Upon docking in Britain, the lid of the cast was removed and pickled body extracted, but the barrel was also empty. Closer inspection revealed that the bottom had been tampered with and sailors had been sneakily stealing tots of rum, presumably unaware that it was also laced with the Admiral’s blood and gore.

Rum is made by distilling sugar-cane and then aging the product in oak barrels. Slightly different processes for different colours, but essentially the same stuff. White rum is smoother, deliberately so for mixing, whilst dark rum’s the real pirate stuff, the sort of drink that rots your gut with a yo-ho-ho. The Royal Navy used to mix it with beer to make grog and the infantry in world war one had a daily rum ration to keep their spirits up amongst the bodies and the rain filled craters and the mud drenched trenches of Flanders.

Saturday night and I found myself still walking after twelve hours, still putting one foot in front of the other, darkness sneaked around, coiling us in a chilled breath. Inside I felt empty. Almost forty miles done, I just needed to keep walking. To keep moving forwards, towards the end. My insides ached, as though floating in space, adrift from my consciousness. My shoulders and neck felt bolted through with iron as the head torches danced gently amongst the steamed breath. The pain, the frustration was inevitable and yet, knowing there was no real choice, we had gone and done it anyway.

Once, once I would have wanted a drink at the end of this. Once, once I would have craved a cold beer to flush down my gullet and to let my brain float off after my body. That evening I just want to lie down, close my eyes and wish it away.

‘I don’t think I have a morsel of energy left. I’m moving on stubbornness alone.’

‘Well that shouldn’t be a problem,’ replied Google-Steve implausibly chipper. ‘You’ve deep reserves of that.’

The consequences of drinking in the Yorkshire pubs and clubs with such abandon weren’t insignificant. Despite being told on more than one occasion that “it’s impossible to tell when you’re pissed; you’re just the same,” I knew when I’d passed the point because I’d have to concentrate harder on retaining any sort of physical coordination. I would need to cover one eye to reduce the double, triple, quadruple vision, my eyeballs would feel loose in their sockets, indulge in some petty theft of things like ashtrays, pint glasses and the odd sofa and sprained my ankle so many times that now the cartilage is all but worn away. Oh, and then the morning after would be hell. Perhaps I was just a slow learner, never really taking on board any of the hangover prevention techniques I heard about. A Nurofen or two before going to sleep worked for one person. Drinking a pint of water never seemed sufficient. Tactical vomiting somewhat distasteful. But when the sun finally barraged its way into my student bedroom it would frequently find me groaning miserably under the covers for, surprisingly given that I was so keen on getting drunk, I suffered greatly with hangovers.

My girlfriend recently referred to herself as “feeling quite hung-over”, which sounded out of character. Given that she only “had a couple of drinks” and went to bed at four, I suspected she was more tired than anything else. Being quite hung-over in Sheffield was something more dramatic. It frequently felt as though someone was trying to extract my brain from my skull with fish hooks stuffed up my nostrils. Every movement caused a pulse of agony to run along my bones from the top to my toes. My gut swirled and I would vomit until there wasn’t anything left and then my poisoned stomach would continue to convulse leaving me to retch weakly yet with noisy echoes in the toilet.

And yet, there was, I convinced myself, something coolly noble about all of this silliness.

Much like the bohemian artistes found absinthe, not something mystical but simply a drink based on wormwood plant and fennel. The French refer to the Green Fairy taking over, as the writer or artist succumbed to the effects, but aside from getting you royally pissed its effects have been exaggerated. It has a dangerous edge to it which is grounded more in fiction and convenience than anything else. For example, in 1905 Jean Lanfray murdered his wife and children in Switzerland after imbibing in absinthe and the authorities used it as justification to ban the spirit, helpfully forgetting to acknowledge that Lanfray was an alcoholic who started every day with two glasses of the stuff. Whilst it was banned across much of Europe, Britain never officially got around to it and in fact it simply went out of fashion.

Meanwhile, whilst I was fantasising I was growing up, failing to realise I wasn’t, I also became even more deeply obsessed with music and in particular with Shane MacGowan and the Pogues. MacGowan is commonly seen as a something of a lyrical genius wasted by booze. A talent ultimately destroyed by his own inability to slow down. His lyrics whilst at once emotionally sentimental and heart-warmingly romantic also recount an idyllic life of pubs and clubs and beer and hard spit. Lines like “I’ll walk into a bar and drink fifteen pints of beer” casually tossed into the Boys of the County Hell like it was an everyday occurrence. And it probably was. I played their records again and again, wallowing in the pathos of it all and singing, no doubt tunelessly, along much, I am sure, to the disdain of my housemates who must have wished I’d just shut the fuck up at two in the morning or whenever it was.

But it felt like an isolated moment in time. It felt like I was just being a student. After all, being into music too much and drinking too much and sleeping too much and eating badly and having to hold my arm by the wrist to stop the morning after shakes as I tried to drink my tea was what I supposed to do. When I graduated, after a final summer hurrah and some farewell boozing up and down the city, I found myself broke, living at home and working back in the pub where I was born.

The odd thing about working behind a bar with my clothes and hands permanently smelling slightly of beer was that I wasn’t so bothered about having a drink. I drove to the pub and worked most nights. A drink became something sporadic.
Sensibleness wasn’t to last though, more is the pity.

And as for whisky, well it’s just like the old song goes ‘whisky is the life of man.’
American, if you really, really must, or Irish, Jameson’s or Bushmill’s, Catholic or Irish, even Welsh, but, oh, for Scotch is where the lifeblood truly is.

Ernest Hemingway was a mammoth of a literary man, at least in his own imagination. Hemingway believed that life needed to be grappled to the death. He was a big bear rooted to the physical, arguably an unusual state of being for a writer, most of whom seem to prefer the quiet of a darkened room, but perhaps it suited his terse compact style where the words not being written were almost as important as those that were.

Hemingway took every physicality seriously. He hunted, fished, went to war more than twice, fucked and drank his way around the world. Drinking in a bawdy, hugging, male embracive way is Hemingway’s legend. It has even become fictionalised with, amongst others, Logan Mountstuart, the fictional author from William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, getting pissed up in bomb strewn Madrid with Hemingway paying the bill for gallons of red wine. Wine blood red like the streets around them.

But Hemingway found that the body fails no matter how much the myth wishes to prevail. A lifetime of gruelling challenges and excesses, shrapnel wounds, repetitive car and aircraft accidents, almost decapitating himself with a skylight in Paris, all took their toll. The voices in his head, telling him that he wasn’t as true and as real as he’d hoped started in the 1940s. He mocked and gloated over his friend, William Faulkner’s, decline; laughing at Faulkner for his inability to keep up with Hemingway’s prodigious intake, to write through the drunkenness, and all the while, in the secret dread of the night, Hemingway nervously looked up liver cirrhosis in library books.

The fear of failing, of falling, grew despite the Nobel Prize. Until, one cold morning in 1961, shortly after a bout of electro convulsive therapy for depression, Hemingway got out of bed and went out on to the porch of his wilderness home. The landscape would have crept around in the dull hours, tensing him for the day ahead. Unable to stomach the disappointment of age yet again he loaded both barrels of his favourite shotgun, placed it in his mouth and squeezed. In the end, his liver protruded from his gut like a long fat leech.

Hemingway, or maybe Gertrude Stein depending on whose estate you believe, coined the phrase The Lost Generation. It was intended to refer to a generation of Americans who came back from the first world war and its peripheral tragedies. Those who couldn’t understand the highlife of 1920s’ American boom. Alienated, they clustered in Paris and found their own hedonism, one ground in higher ascetics than share prices, but it also has its own sorrow. Lost, for they would never truly find themselves. Thanks to the war or just an inability to cope with the acceleration of the twentieth century, they were, in the main, pulled apart by their own fears and foibles. Lost, forever drifting on the edge until there was nothing left to hold onto. Hemingway wanted to be a hero, “show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his notebook.

Fitzgerald was Hemingway’s contemporary in that loose-knit group. The two shared a friend ship of hostility and jealousness, but genuine affection. Hemingway was never one to truly compliment anyone, but of Fitzgerald he said “his talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.”

Fitzgerald coined his own phrase to describe the world he found himself in: The Jazz Age. A time of illegal highballs, flappers with shortish skirts and tightly bobbed hair, exhibitionism and the bebop free style of brass late at night. Unlike the rest of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald tried to own the twenties, to define it as his age. But Fitzgerald was a slight ghost of a man who’d never seem combat and had been a fully-blown alcoholic since his college days. Hardly the shape of someone who could set a generation. He even had to pretend to suffer from tuberculosis to cover up his illness, to conceal the pickling of his insides.

In 1940, aged just forty-four, he suffered two heart attacks in quick succession. The second killed him instantly, bringing him first to his feet from a chair, and then crashing to the floor, the remnants of a candy bar on his lips.

Whilst his death was quick, his dying wasn’t. Fitzgerald wasn’t a fool he knew what was coming just as he knew he could do nothing to prevent it. He knew he lacked the will to stop to drinking, even if he’d wanted, and he could feel his internal organs breaking down. In 1937 Esquire magazine published his short story An Alcoholic Case which tells the shift of a nurse tending to an alcoholic cartoonist. It not only highlights his awareness of the inevitable, that he knew he would do anything for a drink and that it eventually it will kill him, but it also recognises how feeble and pathetic he believed the rest of the world saw him as. A waste. A life discarded.

“She stared at his handsome face, weak and defiant--afraid to turn even half-way because she knew that death was in that corner where he was looking. She knew death--she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable odour, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom; that it was standing there looking at him while he spat from a feeble cough and rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever made.”

The beautiful and the damned, indeed. Or, as he wrote for Jay Gatsby’s funeral in his masterpiece: “The poor son a bitch.”

Hops

After the beginning, there is a journey. The narrative thrusts onwards and upwards relentlessly towards something clear. A point. Or that’s how it often is in stories. A fictional journey has expectations around it. Real life often, unfortunately, confounds these by taking a more meandering scenic route. It has a tendency to dawdle round in rhythms of its own devising for a while, curling up into a fixed routine and before you know it years have passed. Or a habit we will have settled upon.

This isn’t necessarily real life. Nor is it entirely a story.

Once a glass of wine opened the floodgates it wasn’t too long before I began sampling other alcoholic drinks in the supervised environment of the family home. Crème de Menthe became a firm after-lunch Christmas Day tipple, with which I would retreat into the quiet corner of my grandparents’ house, savour its sweetly sticky luminous greenness and read is isolation. Wine and liqueurs, easy flavours. Already, I was discovering that I quite liked how the words felt on the page when I had a drink to go with them.

But my new best friend was beer. Many people will say that it took them a while to understand what all the fuss was about with beer. Their first experience was not a happy one, but a confused moment of wondering why people drank the odd-tasting gassy stuff before preserving out of social obligation, out of a need to feel cool. Not me. As far as I recall it was love at first sup. (Although, once again, this could all be wrongly remembered.) At first I was weaned on bog-standard lagers, Heineken and Carlsberg’s UK market under four percent versions, Carling Black-Label (as it was then fully known) and the wonderfully bland Skol.

Skol is an odd beer. In contrast to most beer’s regional roots, Skol was consciously developed by a collection of breweries to be an international brand that could be sub-licensed at a local level. Shame they forget to make it taste nice. The British version was brewed by the Carlsberg-Tetley in Leeds, but to give it an air of the continental it was marketed by cartoon Vikings chugging away at vast tankards of the stuff chanting their drinking song: Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol. It is perhaps reflective of a less analysed age that lager could be marketed by a historical group best renowned for raping and pillaging and not get into trouble for promoting domestic violence when the man’s tea wasn’t on the table the moment he fell through the door after a heroic drinking session.

The main thing I remember about Skol was swiping cans of it to drink in my bedroom, hiding the empties behind the curtain and retrieving them in the morning to be ditched in a bin up the road somewhere. What, I thought, made me really sneaky was that I took it from the cupboard in the hall rather than the fridge, which of course meant I had to drink it warm, but I was convinced was less likely to be noticed. I suspect my parents instead chose to turn a blind eye as indeed they almost certainly did to my experimenting with measures of spirits in the cupboards, trying out whisky and water when I’d been left alone in the house under the pretext of doing some homework. Mischievous, but then isn’t mischief expected of teenage boys?

When my friend’s father died, I came home from college at lunch time to an empty house and fixed myself a whisky. I sat in the lounge, still in my coat and shoes, and drank the burning scotch before washing out the glass and putting it back in the cupboard. I remember doing this, but I wish I could remember what was going through my mind. Perhaps it was just what I thought was expected. I was replicating something I’d seen in a film or read in a book. When in moments of shock or grief a stiff drink will help.

Whilst, as we discussed last week, some writers have drunk seeking creative inspiration, maybe there is also a small cadre of writers who drank because it was expected of them, as though people somehow confused the people they wrote about and the author himself.

This distinction was not helped by people like Henry Miller deliberately blurring the lines between fiction and fact by writing things like the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. These books were marketed and produced as novels and yet the subject matter shadow Miller’s own nineteen thirties’ existence as he drank and fucked his way through Parisian society. At times it reads like little more than the dirty, drunken diary written beneath the sheets whilst this eye balls struggled to focus, but at other moments Miller cut to the core of what makes people function. Or fail to function.

Beer is arguably one of the world’s cornerstones. It is the most widely produced and deeply drunk alcoholic beverage, one which archaeologists have argued originated in what is now Iraq sometime around the moment man grunted his way into cereal harvesting. Part of its beauty is its simplicity. All that is required is some sort of cereal baseline, maize or wheat or corn, fermented with yeast and then flavoured, usually by hops. That something so straightforward can produce such a myriad range of wondrously tasty and diverse products is testament not only to the ingenuity of man, but the marvel of nature. Possibly even, to quote Thomas Jefferson, ‘proof of the existence of God and that he wishes us to be happy.’ Whilst the addition of, for example, a smudge of caramel can create interesting concoctions, the need for the fundamental basics to remain pure is strong. In the UK the Campaign for Real Ale snootily dismisses anything that’s been too mucked around with and in Germany the purity laws mean that each type of beer must be made in the way they have always been or else.

I suspect to breach these laws is punishable by a fine, but I quite like the idea of specially made prisons being filled up with criminals who tried to pasteurise a pilsner or stuck bloody blackcurrent in what’s supposed to be a wheat beer and being forced to drink Caffreys or Michelob every evening until it comes out their nose.

Whilst I was initially reared on lager, I quickly gravitated towards bitter.
Partly, I suspect, this was because I wanted to stand out from the in-crowd; partly,
I hope, it was a genuine affection for the taste, even if it was simply an acknowledgement that there was something more complex going on rather than a true appreciation. However, in the early-nineties the real-ale explosion had yet to happen and the range commonly available outside of pubs was limited to John Smiths, Tetley’s, bloody Newcastle Brown and the odd special bottle of things like Bishop’s Finger; in retrospect more interesting for its odd name than the flavour which today I find a bit blergh.

So, in the interim I found a different long tall alcoholic drink to differentiate me from the other teenage boys hanging around outside Victoria Wine’s: Guinness. Ah, a drop of the black stuff. These days Guinness is something I tend to steer clear of, partly from the over-sentimentalising of all things Paddy-cute, partly because of the nasty things it did to my bowels one hefty drinking session in Galway, partly because of the smug attempts at suggesting it is something world defining found in its advertising, but in the early nineties, Guinness was still promoting itself through genuinely entertaining and amusing adverts and was an unusual choice for a young boy-man to have as his tipple.

(Tch, listen to me. If the government ever wanted to do a case study of how advertising encouraged children to drink, I’d be a perfect poster boy.)

And so after several years of socially having a drink with my parents on a Saturday evening and on general special and not-so-special occasions, such as dropping in on my grandparents whilst walking the dog on a Sunday morning, and a shorter period of time lurking around off licences wondering if my long-black trench coat and increasingly shaggy hair was any aid to getting served or not, I finally entered the pub where I was born.

Dashiell Hammett’s creations Nick and Nora Charles, the detectives in the Thin Man, knock back whisky and sodas like they were tap water. Indeed, it’s impressive they’re ever sober enough to catch the criminal as their favourite hobby seems to be hanging around their New York hotel room just, well, drinking.

Hammett too was an industrial drinker and perhaps he couldn’t combine it with work, for the Thin Man was the last of his five novels which helped to define American hard-boiled/noir detective fiction. Hammett’s style dispensed with internal monologues and explanations of thought, simply recounting what characters did and driving narrative through dialogue. Simple and yet perhaps a wider expanse would have enabled him to keep writing, to keep being interested, to purge his own demons.

Seemingly unable or uninterested in writing, Hammett became a campaigner for the left-wing and for social justice and found himself jailed for contempt of court when he failed to reveal the local of communists who had skipped bail. When he came out of prison, his lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman, said that ‘jail had made the thin man thinner.’ He died of complications from tuberculosis exasperated by a lifetime of drink and cigarettes in 1961 having not published a word for almost thirty years.

Surprisingly, hops, the most common form of flavouring, is not particularly traditional. Initially used by Germans monks, the addition of roast hops to English didn’t occur until comfortably in the middle ages, after several hundred years of brewing. Before then the flavours were even more wide-reaching taking in roots such as ginger, various fruits, even flowers such as dandelion, and the ever popular Mead flavoured with honey. The arrival of hops saw great rolling acres of Kentish countryside given over to their cultivation and the tradition of cockneys from the capital spending the summer out on the land securing their drinking winter. The garden of England was in fact a vast plantation for beer’s raw ingredients.

The production of beer always used to be highly localised, with regional areas producing distinct brews based around the flavour of the local water, for example the heavy water of Dublin being particularly apt for dark Stout and the gypsum heavy soil of Burton ideal for Pale Ales, and other regional tastes and fashions. The industrialisation posed a heavy threat to this process enabling the mass transportation of beer around a country or continent without having to resort to the horrific American tradition of pasteurisation which makes most of their product flavourless gold piss. For a while the new future and the contracting of the world in the second half of the twentieth century threatened to standardise beer into a bland inoffensive drink where you knew it would be the same wherever you went. But beer fought back.

In the late seventies and early eighties, in Britain anyway, the battle was almost lost to the likes of Martin Amis’ Keith Talent character promoting lager as a necessity to his darts playing because “Lager’s kegged. Kegged. Standard. You know what you’re getting, some of these local brews…” In the end, though, it appears that beer has won out and only the dullest most tedious of drinking establishments offering fucking Carling or bottles of Bud as the sole option.

Talent is one of those characters in one of those books that just makes me want to have a drink to hand whilst I read it. David Peace’s Damned United was the same. As was Graham Swift’s Last Orders. There’s just so much drinking taking place that it seems rude not to be having one too. But that’s a failure to distinguish fiction from real life; the former stops the later tries not to.

Here, let me tell you a secret, expose another fiction: Beer doesn’t make you fat.
The beer belly is something of a myth. What makes you fat is being pissed up, stumbling off the bus that’s taken you a few hundred metres down the high street, falling through the door of the takeaway and getting a large doner kebab or three quarters of a chicken deep fried and coated in salt and fat, struggling home and then flopping down on your arse to watch late night TV with no content nor soul, as you chug down another couple of cans for a nightcap. Trust me. I know.

And another myth: Radegast, the Slavic God of hospitality invented beer. I like that legend. Beer is something easy to give. It’s a common language, a gift small enough to share with everyone. Who else, but a god of hospitality, would give it to us. I never used to count the value of a pint; standing someone a drink of ale in a pub was no more than offering the plumber who came to fix your boiler a cup of tea. It's what you were expected to do. At the very least, it gave you someone to talk to in the pub on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

People keep telling me that I must be feeling more alert. ‘You’ll notice it after a while,’ someone recently said. ‘Friends of mine who have stopped drinking can’t believe how sharp they feel.’ To be honest, I don’t feel more tuned in; I just feel knackered all the time. Okay so I’ve generally substituted alcohol (a stimulant) withherbal tea (a relaxant), but even so: I’ve been crushingly, brain drudgingly, gut stomping shattered every evening and the mornings are little better. I don’t awake with clarity from a deep and restful sleep, but rather find myself muddled and confused, my attention slipping as the day wears on. Mental oblivion, a mind distracted by tedium, a memory flooded by images of childhood continually replaying process of youth it all feels overwhelming. I want a way out.

My Dad gave up drinking sometime around the time I was ten or eleven, I think. Certainly before I became a teenager. He stopped for no particular reason. Just because. He still liked to tell tales of marathon pub sessions, of the folly of youth. After all, who doesn’t? But he indulged no longer. I wonder if my decision to embrace alcohol was enthusiastically (and it was a conscious decision, I believe) was one of those ways teenage boys try to find to both emulate and simultaneously mark themselves as distinct from their fathers?

Inside that first pub was warm when outside there was a chill to the winter evening and it bustled when the streets were empty. People were crushed together, young and old, laughter and debate, the clink of glasses and the sour faced people who’d lost so much that their only consolation was to have another and try to forget. I was in a group, but being skint youngsters, we’d queued individually to buy our drinks. As I waited my turn amongst the hustle I tired to think of ways in which I’d guarantee being served, ways in which I could suggest I was older than I was.

I asked for a Guinness not only because it was what I really wanted, but because part of me thought it would sound more convincing.

The boys I was with that night, I don’t know what happened to any of them. I am no longer in touch with any of them, they’re just names lost down the years, but that evening they were the best friends a guy could ever have and that pub was to be the centre of my world for the next couple of years. If anyone wondered where I was, come rain or shine, it was invariable that I could be found down the pub where I was born for the second time.

It was a local’s pub; I didn’t need to know everyone’s name, but it was sufficient to recognise the faces and the same drinks being raised to their lips at the same time each week, like the natural patterns of the earth. Years later, I would find myself on the other side of the bar taking the pump and the mystique would be eroded, battered open by the mundane inevitability of life, not that I ever fully fell out of love with that pub: it was everything and it was mine.

I even ended up structuring a series of interlocking short stories focused around somewhere that could very easily be mistaken for that pub. Tch, sentimental toss of course, but it was sentimentality I wanted to share. At sixteen I genuinely believed I was writing something original from the inside of a drunk, how romantic can the young be?

Never a stranger to heavy drinking’s romance, Raymond Chandler’s everyman character Phillip Marlowe became increasingly embittered and disillusioned with the world over the course of his fictional life. By the time of, arguably, Chandler’s finest novel the Long Goodbye, the author was heartbroken as his wife slowly died from a long illness and sunk deep in a bottle, much the way Marlow would have done. Chandler still managed to pull this outstanding line from the bottom of his depression: ‘Alcohol is like love; the first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third routine. After which you just take her clothes off.’ It’s the despair that makes it work so well. Love isn’t really like that, but habit is. Drink or sex, at the end of the journey you just resent it.

Beer has been on a journey of its own. It used to be drunk instead of water. In Medieval times weak, happily flavoured ale and bitter would be chugged down over breakfast. Too shallow in alcohol to induce drunkenness, safer than water with all the disease filtered out by the brewing. Medieval brewers were the public health experts of their times. It’s a practice that has only recently died out. Table beer, a popular Belgium beer of less than 1% by volume, was often served alongside school meals until the 1970s. Its popularity has finally fallen in recent years due to the rise of fizzy pop and mineral water.

And so now there are numerous types of beer, each wondrous in its own way. From the standard Pilsner pale Lagers to the hoppy English bitters to the roast malts of Stouts and the more obscure Belgian Abbey and trappist ales, the German Kolsch, only legally allowed to be brewed in the Cologne, area, or traditional Midlands milds, the sweet Scottish heather beer, or African Tusker malty-hoppy delight or thick deeply dark Czech lager, each, like wine, has its own suitability and place in the canon. For the discerning drinker it is not a case of either all, it is not a case of Stella Artois, that Cardiff brewed slop, or nothing else. Anything goes, so long as it is served at the right temperature in a pleasant atmosphere. And yet it is something special to be savoured, not just fuel to be consumed. Its purpose isn’t to clean the water, but to entertain; to provide stories to regale your friends with. To provide romantic myths.

In the late eighteenth, early nineteen century steel tankards were popular in Britain during the winter. Pokers would be left stuffed in the fire and a chilled drinker could take the hot metal spike and use it to warm his beer up. This may be complete bollocks. It may be invented, if so not by me. It may be folklore, but who cares? That’s kind of the point. A drinker has a myth to cling onto; an illusion of something romantic.

The other evening the old man staggered along the aisles of the eight-thirty train out of Charing Cross. His movements surged against the rocking of the carriage, his left hand stuttered from head rest to pole hauling him upright whilst his right hand, his drinking hand, clutched a glass half-full of what looked like whisky.

‘How you doing, son?’ he slurred as his reached the area by the doors where I’d tried to bury myself inside a book.

‘I’m all right. You?’ I replied, nodding at his glass.

‘Oh, aye.’ He took a gleeful sip of his drink. ‘Never better.’ The train clicker-clacked its way through the dulled city outside. ‘I’ve had a lovely day, I have.’

‘I bet.’

‘Aye. Taken myself up town. Had a rare old time. Seen some of the fellas. Had a few bevies. A snifter of the stiff stuff.’ He smiled through cracked yellowing-grey teeth, the curl of his lips sinking his scattershot reddened cheeks into their hollows. ‘Sssh!’ He put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I might be a touch tipsy.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I smiled back. I couldn’t help myself. The old guy deserved his final hurrahs. If he wanted to get pissed up on a mid-week afternoon, why shouldn’t he? ‘Where are you going now? To where the party is?’

‘Nah.’ He took another sip. ‘I’m going home to bed. Except…’ He trailed off and stared hard at me. For the first time I noticed the broken welling up in his eyes. ‘Except I don’t know where that is anymore.’

Before I could form a reply the train had lurched to a halt, the doors open and off he had staggered into the dark of New Cross Gate.

Grapes

In the beginning it was a many splendoured thing. Something that was full of beauty. A composite of colour and light and to all that it touched, it gave mirth and delight.

Or so I imagined, as a child, watching the ruby red, golden and beech brown drinks pass over the lips of the adults. And as they drank the chatter and laughter and sometimes song that followed gleefully in its wake was something magical to behold.
Or perhaps, that’s just how I imagined it would be. Perhaps, after I had been sent to bed, I lay awake and stared at the ceiling with its ripples of plaster, craggy like the sides of mountains or the cliff faces along the steepest coasts, and I made up exciting lives downstairs where people still awake were allowed to be upright.

There has always been mystery at the bottom of a glass. It was there long before me and you, long before the adults in my child eyes and long before the adults in their childhood memories and even before everyone long gone who populated the smoke broken stories of highjinks and nostalgic remorse that filled the air. We, humanity, have been drinking for longer than is probably good for us.

Hasn’t it been beautiful?

Alcohol and the consumption thereof have formed a part of civilisation for thousands of years. There is evidence of wine being consumed in China as far back as 7000BC and beer in ancient Egypt. In both cases it wasn’t something to be squandered causally, not something that was idly consumed just as an aside to food. It wasn’t ingested for sustenance. It was something spiritual. Access to a higher life came in a glass.

(Or possibly not glass, depending upon when glass was invented. A clay pot, perhaps? Or a leather stitched skin?)

Times have changed, though. In the far-flung past there were no blue gloop drinks served against throbbing bass beats in murkily lit rooms. When I think of alcohol in the past it is always wine. Perhaps in a golden goblet.

Wine was originally concocted in the areas that are now Armenia, Georgia and Iran, and was scooped up for wider European consumption as the ancient Greeks foraged further eastwards. The Greeks though were a temperate lot. The image of toga-glad drunken meals descending into orgies is more Roman. The Greeks, however, believed in a little of everything. Keen on order and control, wanton drunkenness was frowned upon. Their wine was intended to be watered down and diluted, indeed it was only made in its purer form for easier transportation.

But Greek society was fractured, divided along lines of belief. The cult of Dionysus was the exception. Dionysus, the God of wine. Dionysus, the twice born man, torn from his mother’s womb and then carried inside Zeus’ thigh to term completion. He was forced to hide disguised as a girl on an isolated island for his youth, finally driven mad by Hera and then, almost accidentally, conquered India by force of arms. Sounds like the sort of life where a few too many would explain a lot.

His victory over India meant that he was usually portrayed in victory procession, his chariot being pulled along by panthers, his arrival being met by jubilation and its associated revelry. And his followers drank for all they were worth, for intoxication bought them closer to their God. Drunkenness was close to Godliness. Yet, for a long time the Dionysians were an exclusive club, a niche club, mainly based in Macedonia, until their most famous son conquered most of the known world. A heavy night never seemed to slow Alexander the Great up much.

The Romans, as they were want to do, incorporated the Greek God dynasties into their own magpie religious make-up. For Rome, assimilating local beliefs, repackaging and reselling them back was a standard subjection tactic. And so, from Dionysus came Bacchus.

Bacchus, like most other Roman Gods, found his portfolio of patronages expanded beyond his original brief and he became the God of Theatre and the God of Agriculture as well. Perhaps the links are obvious; theatre types happily embracing a wine and song lifestyle even back then, whilst agricultural drinkers, equally heavy going and perhaps more deserving of refreshment at the end of a sun-cracked working day.

Bacchus and Dionysus; two names for one deity prone to wandering amongst his worshippers sprinkling magic in his wake. And there is something rather magical about wine. I’m not sure if it’s the universal heritage, the fact that most alcohol producing countries have found similar process of fermenting fruit, if not always grapes, into juice with a zip, or perhaps the process with which it all comes together. There is something deeply personal about making wine. Sure, it’s also deeply commercialised and automated in the twenty-first century, but in its most basic form when the firm richly coloured grapes are plucked from the lying vines crawling across the valley and they are crushed between people’s toes, the same people whose families have been bound to the land for generations, then it is almost as though you are drinking someone’s heritage. A little bit of their soul. In the end, making wine is difficult, but for centuries people have forced a way through, because it’s worth it.

Wine attracts debate because people care about it passionately. All the petty little rituals get bound up in the sense of drinking something important. Should it be decanted or not? Are rubber stoppers ever a sufficient alternative to traditional corks? What temperature, given that today’s central heating boosts the warmth of the average room, should red wine be served at? Can the precocious new world wines ever live up the heritage of the competition or is the old world too wrapped up its own tradition of self-importance to actually produce good wine anymore? Is the damn stuff even healthy? How on earth, when their diet is flooded with saturated fat, do the French have traditionally lower instances of heart disease than other areas of Western Europe? The French Paradox, a mystery wrapped up in a way of life, concealed behind a refusal to compromise, supported by God’s breath in a ruby red filled glass at every table in every home with every meal.

But passion also breeds eccentrics. I have encountered several people who work in wine as importers, sellers and general all round enthusiasts over the years and two of whom were somewhat characterful. One had the most cock-eyed approach to profit margins I’ve ever encountered seeming content for vast waves of stock to act as an unequal exchange for goods, or occasionally just favours, plus a rather odd obsession with marking his territory by pissing outside his house. The other was entrenched in a bed and breakfast on the Welsh borders and wrote odd rants about society in general and wine in particular into his product catalogue. It was as ugh he hoped to entice a customer base, but refused to change his ways because wine doesn’t. It always stays the same and waits for the world to sensibly accommodate it.

I don’t remember the first drink I ever had. I suspect I was rather young. Certainly, I remember being young enough to still be over-excited by the prospect of Christmas morning when I was allowed an alcoholic drink the night before. Nothing too powerful, just that bastion of seventies and eighties taste disaster: Babycham. I remember the bubbles against the back of my throat and the glee in being able to follow the adults. (Or do I? Am I just muddling this up with want again?) It was my parents’ idea. A festive drink that was not only a treat, but that would also ease me to sleep. It didn’t work. Instead, I remember the minutes ticking down on the clock by my pillow and, bored by the dwindling dark, I decided to press a switched on torch against my eye. Gazing deep into the light, I marvelled at the hidden world inside. I imagined walking the light structures and girders of gold, of mixing between beams that curved within the light. I cast myself deep inside where perhaps there was something more. I stared harder, trying to work out its mysteries. I knew I wouldn’t sleep for I was too awakened to the possibility of what the world’s morning might bring.

Last Friday was harder than I had expected. My plans were disrupted and I was stuck at home alone. The week had been heady and the adrenaline was draining away. I was ten days into my enforced sobriety and the half-drunk bottles of spirits on the kitchen floor, stuffed up in the gap between the shelves, and, most of all, the glistening wine bottles in their rank on the window sill, the late evening light caressing their bulbs, were whispering temptation down my ear. I was tired and surprisingly bored by my own company. There was a nagging that scratched at the inside of my skull and I wanted a drink.

Wine has, over the centuries, become an integral part of many religious ceremonies. Much like the hallucinogenics, for example, of Native Americans cultures, a drop of alcohol is the cornerstone of the Jewish Kiddush ceremony and the Christian Eucharist ritual. In the latter, the dark (often cheap) deep red wine is intended to represent the blood of Christ the saviour. Devotion at such a fully immersed level seems, to my no-doubt damned soul, utterly bizarre. Do we really want to be drinking the blood of the Lord, like some weirdly sycophantic vampires? Probably not, but if one argument for the rapid and powerful rise of state religion in early-medieval society is that it was an extension of the crown’s authority, a way to keep the populace compliant and docile, then a free tipple on Sunday was the icing on the cake, the added bonus to doing as you were told. It was your earthly reward from the Kingdom of Heaven for your unswerving devotion.

But, once again, this was nothing new. Dionysus had his blood replaced with wine, almost an inversion of the sacrament. In China, the drinking of rice wine mixed with blood would supposedly bring life to the oddly precise age of on-hundred and ninety. St Bernard described wine as the link between fear and strength and perhaps this not only explains its presence in religion, but why people become dependant upon it.

Writers, as has been discussed in this blog before, are notorious for liking a tipple. The reasons as to why are too varied o thoroughly discuss here, but perhaps they are too poor to afford hard drugs but with as much time alone, lost inside someone else’s head as actors or rock and roll stars, and so turn to booze for relief. Maybe, but the majority of writers have had to maintain some sort of additional career to support both their habit and their love, not for them the many idle hours between sound-checks and the audience’s arrival and the night time loneliness of the tour machine drifting through another unknown town.

Robert Stone, in a 1985 Paris Review Interview said “If you do something you’re really pleased with, you’re in the crazy position of being exhilarated by yourself. I remember finishing one section…in the basement of a college library…and I staggered out in tears, talking to myself…It’s hard to come down from your work – it’s one of the reasons writers drink. The exhilaration of your work turns into the daily depression of the aftermath, but if you heal yourself with a lot of scotch you’re not fit for duty.”

So is booze a short-term fix to come down from the incredible high of writing? When the euphoria of a sentence, or a paragraph or (glory be) a whole scene clicks into place and you genuinely feel as though the words coming down on the page are cut from your heart and could possibly change the world, do you require some sort of assistance to prise yourself off the ceiling? Graham Greene probably thought so. Although he claimed to only possibly be able to write cold sober, he was more than partial to a drink even answering the first question of his own Paris Review Interview in 1953 with “[I’ll be] Very frank. Now, what will you have to drink?” Alcohol filled Greene’s non-writing time. He collected miniature whisky bottles, felt the need to write to a friend with great excitement when the bar of some random airport he was passing through during his relentless globe criss-crossing phase stocked his favourite gin, and once described his peak production phase as being based around rising early, churning out 500 to 750 words in the morning and then relaxing with a drink on an exotic veranda somewhere tropical.

Similarly, William Faulkner would stay largely sober whilst actually writing and then take himself out on a heroic binge to celebrate the completion, or to counteract the boredom of having nothing to write about, to help him walk with everyone else. This sort of behaviour was permissible even encouraged, for in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, before Elvis, writers were rock and roll. No-one was going to tell Kingsley Amis he couldn’t drink a bottle of whisky a day if he didn’t want to because, well, he was Kingsley Amis and he’d earned it. It was what people wanted him to do.

Others have used it as a crux to produce work, seeking inspiration in the broken down barriers in the brain that booze provides. In On Writing, Stephen King describes sitting in his attic pounding at the typewriter to produce the Shining, an overflowing ashtray and steadily diminishing bottles of painkillers and scotch and blood streaming out his nose from all the cocaine he’d snorted (King’s staggering success with Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot perhaps singling him out as an exception to the ‘can’t afford hard drugs’ rule).

Similarly, JG Ballard used to steadily grind his way through a bottle of whisky whilst letting the lack of reservations allow him to ask the questions most of us wouldn’t. In contrast to King, Ballard’s existence was gloriously suburban. He would get up, take his children to school in Shepperton, park his car (“It goes better after a couple of drinks.”) outside the semi-detached house and its neatly aligned front garden, the exact reflection of all the others along the cul-de-sac, go into the back room and pour himself a large whisky before sitting down to write. The glass would be steadily topped up as the pages filled up. In fairness, Ballard was also combating grief over the sudden death of his wife which had left him an isolated single father in an age when that wasn’t really the done thing, especially not for controversy courting writers determined to rub society’s face in its own vomit. Yet, as he produced the likes of Crash and the Atrocity Exhibition which smashed taboos aside, finding the unusual and the erotic in, for example, the mundane horror of car crashes, his undeniably uniquely inquisitive mind was being aided by drink.

And yet alcohol clearly isn’t always the most efficient way of achieving results. Take brandy. Proper, good brandy is a wonderful drink. All stickily burningly sharp, flavours that mug you and yet it gives an intense burst of endorphin fuelled energy where sleep becomes irrelevant. Whilst traditionally a French drink derived from wine, in 1900 many of the world’s most revered brandies came out of Georgia and Armenia. These routinely beat the leading French barrels in blind tasting in Paris and the Russian Tsar happily plundered his outlying provinces to amass one of history’s most enviable drink cellars at the Winter Palace.

In 1917, as the Communist revolution sacked the Palace they came across this immense store. All the booze was heartily attacked, but none as much as the much coveted brandy. So enthusiastic were the soldiers to get utterly fuck-eyed, that the revolution briefly ground to a halt whilst they wallowed in excess and toasted their future as free men and equals again and again until the lights dimmed on several days’ hedonism and little was left save for throbbing eyeballs in the morning sun.

Whilst Ballard dropped the whisky as either his grief diminished, or perhaps as Stone’s statement “when I was younger I was able to use hang-overs, but now I have to go to bed early” came true, Faulkner found it intruded further into his daily life. The binging at the end of a piece of work moved further and further forward, until it became at the heart of each piece. In his later writings you can see the heavy, clodden passages where his mind was soaked and his fingers couldn’t force the right words to appear on the page.

Maybe, in the end, beauty must fade and light must always fade to black.
Meanwhile, around the time that Babycham was being introduced to my life as a festive frivolity, I also began to be indulged in other mildly alcoholic treats.
Hot summer days were rewarded by kid-friendly cans of Panda Pop Shandy and Shandy Bass, both of which whilst minimally alcoholic in content did at least taste of sugary beer. I loved them. I’ve never been particularly partial to sweet sodas, and whilst the 0.5 or 1% proof pop was still laden down with glucose, it did at least have a genuine bittery tang too. ‘Made with real beer’ the Shandy Bass cans proudly proclaimed in marketing aimed at ten year olds and I, for one, was suckered.

From then on it was only a stuttering step to the next stage. Exactly when, again I’m not entirely sure when, but I suspect sometime before teenage years, I was permitted wine at family get-togethers. With the majority of my family living within a mile or so of each other, these were fairly frequent affairs and I was allowed a glass and then two and then three of white wine with the Sunday lunchtime meal we would have. This was sweet white, German wine. Not the sort of thing my palate particularly enjoys now, but, well, it was the eighties and the darkly smogged bottle of Black Tower was oddly alluring. It was definitely something properly alcoholic. I was doing something illicit, a thrill that buzzed with every sip. It was something adult; something real.

Jalal-al-Din Rumi, a Sufi mystic poet, wrote “before a garden, or a vine, or a grape existed in this world our souls were intoxicated with immortal wine.”

In the beginning, maybe that was where we came from, maybe that was how it all was.

Dry

Let’s get one thing straight, right from the start: This is not about desire. I am not writing about necessity. It is not about addiction. It is not even about excess. This is not because I have to, but because I choose to.

New Year’s Day and I felt empty. I felt turned inside out. I had been slightly sick and I had horrific diarrhoea, the sort that flushes you through until all that is left is a hollow husk. Feeling drained, I had been unable to get up properly.
I’d done small things, like taken a shower, then been a little more ill and then needed to lie down to recuperate. As I lay somewhat feebly on my girlfriend’s sofa with my head on her lap and the burble of the television somewhere behind my closed eyelids, I felt embarrassed; embarrassed and guilty because I knew that my patheticness would mean that we failed to meet some of her friends. By the time I was confident there was nothing left to come, it was too late. By the time we arrived at the pub in Old Street they had already left and it was all my fault.

But, contrary your expectations, I did not have a hang-over.

Oh, all right. Maybe a little one. When I first awoke there was a dehydrated crinkle to my brain, but it faded quickly enough. I’d drunk a fair bit the night before, but not to excess. Not like I used to. I hadn’t felt drunk as we’d walked home through the damp shadowed streets of West London. I’d consumed probably less than I had on many a Friday night over the years after which I would have sprung out of bed with ease on a Saturday morning. No, honestly. I wasn’t. My stomach was still upset three days later.

But this isn’t about any of that. I’m just setting the context.

On the evening of New Year’s Day I cooked my girlfriend some dinner whilst she read the paper. The Guardian’s magazine was full of helpful advice about how to live a prosperous and healthy 2011. It was the usual pointedly appropriate mix of drink less, eat more healthily, do more exercise, make time for life rather than just work. One section discussed cutting down on our media, the never-ending ways in which we are plugged in the world. We should, it argued, make sure we are connected, but with how people really look as well as their profile pictures.

‘I gave up Facebook last year,’ she said. ‘It was surprisingly easy. I might do that again.’

Self-denial has never featured high up my list of ways to be entertained, but, without thinking, I said: ‘I wonder what I could give up.’

‘Beer,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘Or,’ she gave the matter some more consideration, ’alcohol generally?’

‘Now, let’s not be silly.’

But the more I thought about it, the more it appealed. I can be a contrary bugger at times and there was something about the social experiment aspect that would be interesting.

(Plus, you know, I need material for these things to come from somewhere. Ah, my life: Nothing but a vehicle for your entertainment.)

‘Yeah, right,’ guffawed my Kiwi friend, when I initially touted the idea. ‘You know what they say, David? Only those with a problem have to completely abstain.’

Yes, thank you, but this isn’t about problems. I do not have a problem with alcohol. I frequently don’t drink. I rarely drink during the day under any circumstances, simply because I find it difficult to then get anything else done. I don’t race home from the office craving a beer. I am not one of those people I see around, the woman in the power-dressed stripped business suit nipping at a hipflask as the seven-thirty morning commute train arrives in London Bridge, or the scabby guy with the burst blood vessels in his cheeks picking up cans of Strongbow Black when I collect my Observer from the newsagents early on a Sunday.

But I am a habitual drinker. Whilst it’s not as though I’m churning my way through four times the recommended limit every week, I do enjoy my drink. Going to the pub forms the foundation of my social activity. When I haven’t seen a friend for a while I always suggest we meet for a beer. I enjoy nice wine with a meal. I confess I do that thing which supposedly marks the alcoholic from the casual boozer - I drink alone. I take pleasure in a beer or a glass of wine or a whisky and water after an evening writing. Ultimately, my sub-conscious associates relaxing, down time, allowing space for my thoughts, chilling out, whatever you want to call it, it comes with an alcoholic drink.

But the thing is, these are all my choices. I know that I don’t have to do any of these things. I don’t have a physical yearning to imbibe? I don’t believe that I have a mental crux that makes social interaction impossible without lubrication. I don’t think I’d be bored if I didn’t drink.

Yet as I wrote about music and got on with life Lent got closer and closer and somewhere in the back of my mind I began to get slightly apprehensive: what would happen when I stopped drinking altogether? Would social occasions feel weird?
Would people look at me oddly, so defined am I with glass in hand? Would I simply hide away in my flat being somewhat boring? And crucially, for someone whose only non-alcoholic drinks of choice are ginger beer (but more than one these days gives me heartburn), tea, coffee and water, what the hell am I going to physically do with myself whilst those around me quaff till it dribbles out their ears?

I wrote the first draft of this blog on the first Sunday of Lent. The night before I went to a party. On paper it was one of those events where perhaps a drink or two might have eased things along slightly. A charity bash at my girlfriend’s parents’ place and whilst her family and friends are absolutely lovely and have made me feel welcome in their circles, I would still be surrounded by people I didn’t know that well. All of whom would be enjoying a drink. Somewhat to my surprise, it couldn’t have been easier. Time flowed on by and, although I found myself adrift and swollen with tap water whilst frequently having to politely decline her Father when he proffered the open wine bottle, the evening was thoroughly enjoyable.

The morning after, however, was weird. Initially everything was fine, but once in the shower I felt a ringing sting shoot through my head. As the afternoon wore on it dulled to a consistent throb, but even though I was five days sober I was the one with the headache the day after the party. At times life really isn’t fair.

Which left me to wonder, what will happen next? Will my much feared insomnia, fuelled by deep sleeps, late rises and too much caffeine return? Will I find myself suddenly much more productive or, as paradoxically I found trying to carve this blog out, lethargic in my writing? Leafing through my diary shows numerous events coming up where not drinking may be socially unacceptable, not least a stag do. Am I going to find myself shunned and ridiculed by a society where the consumption of alcohol, if not quite at the mythological levels splattered across the tabloids suggesting a high-street hell or Gomorrah Great Britain, is at least the common ground for most formal engagements?

Well, sod it. There’s only one way to find out. Keep dry and carry on.