How Many Days in the Wilderness...

I've not had an alcoholic drink for fifty days. 

I could have. I could have one right now. Well, not RIGHT now - I've nothing in. But there's an Off Licence on the corner of my street, brimming with dipsomaniacal delights: frothers, fizzers, dizziers, deadeners. Every booze hue ranked, shoulder to shoulder, on teeming shelves, an army of silk-tongued bruisers ready to dispense the King's shilling to a hapless sap like me. 

It's been very handy in the past. 

But I don't want to drink. I'm sort of fine without it. 

Now. 

Dean Martin said he felt sorry for people who don't drink because, "when they wake up in the morning that's the best they're going to feel all day." I know what he means. It was quite boring at first. There was all this time all the time, time lying idle about the house, time like a rudderless hippy, summer-vacationing-teenager-time. And hands! Christ! I was lousy with spare hands. I kept looking down and there was another loose, rogue hand flapping about, a hand not ferrying another delicious glass of something ruby red and delicious to my dry-riverbed lips. 

But you learn to do other things. Once you realise there's a chunk of day you no longer have to devote  to lying in soft-focus slovenliness on the sofa, you find things to do.

Today I had an eye test, bought some glasses, made some business cards, listened to a documentary on the origins of the English joke, bought a loaf of bread and some cheese, arranged some travel plans, did the washing up, and re-ordered my library. I arranged for a sofa to be taken away, gossiped about Grannies and strippers in West Belfast (or South, depending on where you live)* and updated my piss diary. 

Not bad for a morning I might have missed lying abed, swaddled in shallow dreams of...what? That last thing? 

Oh, the piss diary. Yeah. Well, lets not get into that. It's probably nothing. Sometimes a guy just wants to keep track of how much fluid he's expelling over three successive days. In case a passing doctor might be interested. Don't make a THING of it. 

Move on. 

I've come to like being sober. It's quite a bit cheaper than being constantly drunk too. 

I'm lucky in a way. Every day I go for a walk and pass the same two pubs and you have never seen a better advert for sobriety than the blue-nosed bandy-legged denizens of these places. The lighting is unflattering and the men drink alone, reading papers or, worse, with earbuds in. "Here Be Dragons" should be painted over the door**.

 I'm lucky too to have lived through the Craft Ale Revolution. I remember when beer used to taste good, but not any more, thank God. With entire bars given over to pints of wet-straw spittoon juice, there's never been a better time to avoid the public tavern. See also plasma screens full of live sport and earnest young people with acoustic guitar set-ups slicker and more professional than those of any band I was ever in, doing covers as dull as their plaid shirts. It's a golden age of not going out. 

So I'll stay in. Drinking tea. Writing. Charting my emissions like Sarah Miles. Finally an adult. 

But not forever, like...

*Actually, I was wrong. I thought I might get comments congratulating me on my boozeless half century, or concerned that I was suddenly far too interested in my urine. No way. I got two comments: one confirming the geographic location of the stripper pub and the other eulogising alcohol as a way of fending off nerves in social situations. Which obviously I never knew. 

It's like my friends don't care about me AT ALL. 

**"Here Be Flagons, perhaps...