This Time It's Not For Keeps

 I gave up drinking for January. I'll be giving up drinking for February too. And, likely, March. After that, I don't know. My thinking here is a few months off the booze might give me an opportunity to reset, to reshape my, er, approach to drinking. 

Historically, drinking has accompanied: good news, bad news, meeting friends, long haul flights, short haul flights, being at the airport at seven in the morning, weddings, birthdays, parties and gatherings, watching bands, recording songs, going to the cinema, going to the pub, going to art galleries and the theatre, professional successes, professional failures, romantic successes and failures, anniversaries, writing alone in bars, Christmas and New Year, Halloween and Valentines Day, the birthdays of people I love, the death days of people I loved, periods of grief, funerals, and just sitting around the house watching TV and doing nothing else. 

The joys of insomnia: these are the books I read in January 2024

Booze is both cloth and wire mother, a movable feast, flux and mutability. There's no occasion where I can't celebrate or self-harm with alcohol. It's the ultimate condiment - it goes with everything. And it's boring. It doesn't even have scarcity value. There's a bottle of wine five minutes and a tenner away right now. 

This is almost the longest time I've ever been sober as an adult. I used to "Go Sober For October" for cancer charities - sponsored sobriety. But even then people were able to donate for you to have a drink on certain occasions - it's in the rules - so, barring a three month period I spent in hospital* in the early 2000s, this is probably it. 

I wanted to do it. For one thing, it's a challenge. For another, a lot of my friends seem to be dying - I've heard the unhelpful phrase "sniper's alley" about the razor-blade festooned corridor between fifty and sixty - and I'm looking to swerve an imminent death. I have things to live for. I have books and films to make and I don't think they'll get made without me. Who would bother? 

So, I can do this thing. This easy thing. This quiet, dull thing. And I can watch what I eat, and exercise. I even have outfits for exercising now. My regimen of long walks, press-ups and Pilates is already paying dividends. I'm in constant pain. 

Elbowing the booze has not been that hard. Not really. The pubs of Belfast are unattractive. I have a shrinking pool of friends. Guinness 00 is acceptable, and it calms the nerves of twitchy, hare-eyed drunks who think you're judging them if you aren't drooling on the table. And I'm mostly free of the sort of bloke who insists you're gay if you don't have a pint. Mostly. They're also the ones who are a bit quiet about their voting history and say things like, "They're all the same, aren't they? Pint?"

There was an initial bout of insomnia, and I started craving Starburst. Then there's the smoker's "sudden hands" - you find strange spare hand that used to be ferrying a cigarette or  wine glass to your lips. Now it's just flapping about like a sock on a washing-line. But it's mostly pretty manageable. 

And the fucking money I've saved! I bought a sofa!

*Now I think back, the junior doctor who told me I wasn't like the "other patients"(!) prescribed me a can of Guinness a day, after about two months in my Hospice room. It's a long story, that one.