Adventures in not drinking
(okay 'adventures' might be overstating it)
Hey folks, just quickly breaking the fourth wall to say hello, I hope you have an excellent Banky Hols. That’s also why I’m delivering the latest installment a little bit ahead of skedge-yule, to keep up with the mayhem of the long weekend. Have fun, drink loads, and if you like what I’m offering over here on Substack, please do feel free to tell your friends, your family, your colleagues, your cellmate, and even whoever that person is in the top bunk on your submarine.
Word up. Please now enjoy this week’s thingy...
Don’t worry, we’re not embarking on a huge series of posts detailing my ‘journey to sobriety’, I’m fully aware that the world doesn’t need any more of those. The self-indulgence and earnestness of abstaining from various vices gets fairly cumbersome after the thousandth one, you know generally how it goes. All a little preachy, quite often self-congratulatory. And mostly the tale of someone pulling themselves up off the canvas, turning their life around. Epiphanies, roads to Damascus, seeing the light, all fairly biblical.
The good news, I suppose, is that my story really isn’t that. There’s nothing noble (nor divine) about me turning my back on the sauce, I’d not hit rock bottom, I wasn’t sloshing vodka over my Alpen. My doctor just pointed at a number with his big medical finger and the maths became undeniable. No intervention, just a GP and a blood test telling me my body was fast becoming too broken to ignore.
If you’ve not heard the word ‘triglycerides’ before, don’t worry, you’re the same as me about six weeks ago. But I’ll give you a quick lowdown on how it works. Your ‘triglycerides’ can be measured via a vial of fresh blood from your arm (or any part of you, doesn’t have to be arm blood), they send it off to a lab by helicopter, then two days later they come back with a number that should be very low (around 1 or 2). If it’s not you’re at greater risk of pancreatitis, stroke, or a heart attack. All bad situations to be in. I’m not going to tell you what my number was because there’s such a thing as patient/doctor confidentiality (okay fine, there isn’t, I just don’t want to say it out loud), but it was really high. Imagine counting all the way up towards 9.6 without stopping.
Point is, even my doctor, who presumably delivers bad news before lunch most days, sounded nervous saying it, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was reading. I found myself bracing for the arrival of a priest or the cold hand of death, though thankfully neither turned up. But I was told in fairly pointed tones to rethink my celebratory lifestyle. To consider whether toasting the weekend, every weekend, is entirely necessary. Whether it was also necessary to keep declaring Thursday “the new Friday” whilst also treating Friday like the Friday it’s always been. Also, Sundays. I’d often talk of “stolen afternoons” in pubs, but when it’s most Sunday afternoons does it still count as stolen or do you just officially own that now?
These were all things for me to consider, to ruminate upon, to both chew, and digest. These were habits I’d not broken for a long time, fixed behaviours that didn’t span a few years, but decades. Could I really live without them? I found myself desperately clutching at the correct pronunciation for the word “eschew” but sadly I couldn’t get there with any confidence. And without wanting to be too sobering at this point, the more this guy spoke to me the more it struck me that I have an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old, and one day I’d like to have a 41-year-old and a 38-year-old. Then a 51-year-old and a 48 year old. At a miraculous push, I’d like to have a 91-year-old and an 88-year-old. Doesn’t matter that I’d be a crumbling fossil by that point, or possibly pickled in vinegar, in that moment, talking to that glorious quack in that sterile surgery office, my priorities sharpened. You get where I’m going with this. I didn’t want to fucking die.
My first, and in fairness, only hurdle was thus: that regular boozing has marked practically every occasion I can think of in the last thirty years (birthdays, weddings, funerals, Wednesdays). My defense at this point is that I’ve grown up with pubs. Sat outside them when I was a kid eating crisps, ventured into them as a teen, drank in them, played pool in them, stood huddled around a fruit machine in them, met my wife in them. A few beers has been a key component of not just my lifestyle, but my personality. For as long as I can remember I’ve been a ‘beer in hand’ kind of guy. I had my first can at 14, I barfed copiously for the first time not long after (that wasn’t going to derail me). I’ve had misadventures with Port, misadventures with Tia Maria, misadventures with tequila, misadventures with vodka, misadventures with a weed/booze combination. My student years were a blur of pound-a-pint nights, pre-loading before you went out. I worked as a barman for a bit (not a very good one), and we drank as we went. It was the 90s, that’s what we did. It was the noughties after that, and that’s what we still did. More than once I’ve been the first person of the day at the bar, mid-morning. Drinking was cultural, habitual, fun.
You’d smoke fags too - booze and fags, cigarettes and alcohol, a stellar combination. I’d oscillate between B&H and Embassy Number One, or if things were tight I’d shift to Cutter’s Choice. These were years marked socially by hedonism, the pursuit of fun at all costs and for the most part, I was all for it. There’s a communal closeness about inviting a little bit of chaos into your weekend, an intimacy that comes from blinkered gratification. I gave up smoking in my 30s, but I still miss the conspiratorial nature of conversations over a cigarette. You can’t really replicate them in normal life.
I’m not using any of this as an earnest confessional, by the way, it’s all just a statement of fact. I’m from a generation that reveled in pub culture, that drank frequently and unabashedly. I’ve navigated career 180s, 360s (which sound better but are much less impressive), co-habitation, mortgages, marriage, two entire childbirths - the second of which decreed that fathers had no place staying overnight in the hospital, so guess where I ended up on the way home? But now I’ve stopped, I’ve dried out, corked the dam. I’m not going to veer into evangelism here, but I dare say... it’s been an absolute revelation. And not in a way I was expecting either. The obvious benefits are a given, you know all about those, I’m even loath to mention them, so we’ll just do a quick inventory and say nothing more of it (else it’d be like holding in a sneeze wouldn’t it?) - better sleep, more energy, no hangovers (which still feels like a huge win), skin that’s developing a healthier hue. Blah blah blah, boring boring boring.
But here’s the weird bit that I definitely wasn’t expecting - I’M ENJOYING IT. Really, genuinely, having a bizarrely good time off the booze. I’m not squirreling myself away, I’ve not adhered to a new monastic way of being, I’m not swerving pubs for fear of lurching in the direction of half-drunk pints to soothe my social anxiety. I’ve just kept doing what I’ve always done, minus one of the very key components. And I’ve happily handled it, to the point where I’ve wondered if I’m operating under a delusion, lying to myself. They say that mad people don’t know they’re mad (on account of being mad), so I’ve even questioned my sanity, attempted to get to the bottom of this entirely unpredictable, counterintuitive, outcome.
When I started, friends were quick to suggest replacements, alternative stimulants or relaxants to keep the world at bay - mushroom oil, coke, Coke - but, somehow, for now, it feels like actually the most transgressive thing I can do is order a glass of fizzy water. That the most radical rock and roll move is to not have anything at all, to (for the first time since I was literally a teenager) socialise without getting a little bit off my face.
“Bet you find drunk people really annoying now...” slurred a friend of mine into my ear, being all drunkenly drunk. And they couldn’t have been more wrong. I love drunk people and I love drinking. I just don’t do it myself. It feels weird as hell, I honestly have no idea who I am anymore, but against the odds, I’m having an excellent time finding out.
I loved reading this JB