Drinking, dating and defaults

A couple of posts ago, I promised that I would provide you, dear fans of TS&F, with an update on how the drinking was going. Out with a delightfully broad cross-section of the Gang yesterday afternoon, one of them (Little Agony Uncle since you’re asking) enquired as to why that update had not appeared, and I answered that as yet I didn’t feel that I’d quite worked out what my feelings were. I should have expected nothing less from an experienced agony uncle but was nonetheless still stunned by the simple brilliance of his advice: “Tell it to the blog.” So, here goes…

Since I took the big decision to try quitting for a while, and, following the success of that experiment, the arguably bigger decision to then try drinking again, I have certainly regained - or possibly, just gained – a sense of control about my drinking that was missing. It feels wonderful to be able to say that because, well aware as I was of the physical damage I was doing myself, and the wastefulness of spending entire weekends sleeping off the effects of one night’s drinking, it was the lack of control that had really scared me and finally prompted me to find the stop button. I still don’t feel that I’ve quite got the degree of control that I would like to have however, and as result my relationship with alcohol is still at best ambivalent.

It’s really hard to define what it is that I’m unsure about, but as I’m ‘telling it to the blog’ I’ll let you be the judge of whether what I’m saying makes sense. Since stopping, albeit for just a few weeks, there’s been a paradigm shift in my default drinking mode from drinking almost every day to drinking hardly any days, and from drinking more and faster than pretty much anyone to drinking no more and often much less than everyone. I’ve had a couple or three hangovers but nothing on the scale of ‘the old days’ and I’m satisfied that these have not been because of particularly excessive drinking – my biggest bender having been New Year’s Eve and even that was nothing compared to, say, my Bloodbath party - but because my body’s tolerance of and ability to process alcohol has retuned itself from that of a heavy drinker to that of a moderate one. Most satisfyingly, there have been no blackouts, no memory loss, no stripping naked and leaping into hot tubs (other than stone-cold sober in Chariots but that’s not for here), no turning up at afternoon parties already hammered and terrorising the children…you get the picture.

Yesterday I spent a pretty-much-perfect few hours with the boys in Le Shaz Bar and had just one shandy; last week at dinner with Big Sis I had one beer; on neither occasion did I want any more. So, complete abstinence I can do, and ‘just the one’, I can do; the grey area comes when I allow myself – and it really does feel like allowing myself – to drink, those nights (or days) when I consciously decide that drinking is on the agenda. Friday night and Saturday just gone were both such times, the former Glenda’s birthday drinks, the latter an enjoyable but ultimately unsuccessful date with the sexy Saffa from just after Christmas. On both occasions I followed the ‘old’ (and for most, ‘normal’) pattern of one drink after another and both times reached a point where I didn’t want to have any more; I’d chosen to press the ‘stop’ button.

The difficulty is that to be able to push the button, I have to be able to reach it, and it’s never in the bar or club or party that I’m at. If I stay, I’ll stay drinking – it’s as simple as that. I don’t think this is the ‘alcohol allergy’ that Bubble described; I can and do stop at or very near to the moment of my choosing; I just can’t quite get my head around doing that in whatever my present surroundings might be. Instead I have to do a Cinderella-like flit home, to the security – and sobriety – of home; to the sofa, a cup of tea, some chocolate…sources of comfort other than the bottle. Socially it can make things awkward. On the date, for example, about four hours and five or so pints in, I tried to engineer our going back to mine. Of course that was in part with the ulterior motive of getting a bit closer to the gorgeous hunk o’ spunk (that sadly was not on his agenda, unbelievable as that may be) but primarily because I knew that if we stayed out I would end up plastered and I just didn’t want to be. I guess through giving it so much thought – any thought even – I’ve created for myself a new guilt about drinking whereby anything more than ‘just the one’ triggers a thought process that can become quite self-accusatory.

All this leaves me not quite knowing what to do. I could quit drinking altogether, as not doing something is the only sure-fire way to not feel guilty about doing it, but for a reason I can’t yet grasp I don’t ‘want’ to be teetotal. I enjoy good wines, good whisky, a cocktail, a glass of champagne, and I don’t want to give those up. What I need to get to grips with is how to drink socially, if such a thing even exists. Maybe I’m sweating it all a bit too much; maybe I should just go a bit easier on myself and not beat myself up if I get a bit pissed at the weekend – everyone does, right? Or maybe a bit of self-tough-loving is the key to getting this drinking thing licked. For now, I’m happy, things are good, the future’s bright and I must say, that Agony Uncle gives damn good advice because ‘telling it to the blog’ - and may I thank you for indulging me - has made things a whole lot clearer than they were just 24 hours ago!

Testing My Sobriety

After three full weeks of not drinking – not one single drop, sip or taste – I gave myself permission last weekend to start again, with a view to putting to the test whether, having proved to my satisfaction that I could go totally without, I could drink and keep it under control. During the week I’d had a long and enlightening conversation with Bubble, my Stateside friend who is in AA and has been sober now for 13 months. He – like all of the Inner Circle – has been incredibly supportive of my efforts and gave me some surprising but common sense advice: that the only way to be sure if I had a problem was not to abstain, but to drink.

The rationale behind this is that alcoholism, like all addictions, comes in many guises. Some people are alcohol-dependent; that is, they physically cannot get through a day, an hour or a minute without being drunk. For others, the drinking is the symptom, not the problem; they drink to mask or anaesthetise immediate or deeply-rooted emotional or psychological pain, so while they may not drink all the time, when they do, they do it to excess. Others still – and this is the category Bubble falls into – are alcohol-allergic; one drink, just one, triggers a reaction in the brain which removes the ability to stop, leading them to drink to oblivion for no other reason than that they cannot do otherwise.

Of these three types of alcoholism – and the list is by no means exhaustive – I felt by day 21 that I’d successfully discounted the first (cravings, whilst they occurred, were very few and far between and swiftly passed with a bit of self-coaching and a family-size mint Aero.) I took, several times, a good hard impassive look at my life to see if the second applied and decided that it did not; for all that I have, and have had, trouble in my life, I genuinely could not equate my drinking with being symptomatic of it. That left the third option, the alcohol allergy, and there was only one way to put that to the test. So it was that on Saturday last I tentatively took my first drink in three weeks.

The results were far from dramatic. It didn’t go ‘straight to my head’ as I’d thought it might, nor did it make me feel at all ill, as I’d feared it might. I felt neither relief nor pleasure; my overwhelming feeling was, if anything, of confusion. Confusion, because after so long abstaining, I’d unconsciously come to dissociate drinking alcohol from being a part of my routine, and so almost like a computer detecting rogue software, my brain struggled to comprehend what exactly a glass of wine was doing in my hands. I finished the glass very slowly, and shortly after went on to a 40th birthday party and from there, on to that classy Sarf London venue Los Dos Brewos, and not a drop further passed my lips. Experiment or no experiment, I just didn’t want to drink! Sure I was getting bored senseless of juice, Red Bull and water, but I wasn’t even tempted to vary it with something hard. (Although I was certainly gagging for something ‘hard’ but failed to find it – two weeks into not drinking, I mentioned to Glenda that on a stone-cold sober visit to Barcode, I’d been amazed at how few guys I’d found attractive without my trusty beer goggles of old. He chuckled and replied with his typical brevity and perceptiveness, “Sobriety is a harsh judge,” and how bloody right he was!)

Thinking it over the next day, I cautiously allowed myself to take the previous night’s abstinence as a good sign. But then I got to wondering, maybe I didn’t want more of the wine because it just wasn’t very nice wine? What would happen if I were to crack open a really good bottle; would I finish the lot? I needed to test this theory so later, invited to Margo and Jerry’s for lunch along with The Agony Uncles and Our Lady of Chappelle, I took with me a corker of a Cab Sauv and when the beef was served let Margo pour me a small glass. I sipped as I ate – interspersing each delicious mouthful with one of Pellegrino – and found that the one glass lasted me through the meal and indeed dessert. Cometh the cheese board, cometh the port, and I partook of a thimbleful; again, I savoured it, enjoyed it, finished it – but felt no urge at all to refill it. I still felt somehow guilty that after three weeks (sounds like nothing, doesn’t it?) I was ‘back on the bottle’ again, but I reassured myself that it was for research purposes and felt a lot better for that.

So where am I with it now? Well, I think it’s too early to say that I’ve got it fully under control. Sure, I managed to stop at one glass of wine; but I have yet to try that test on one beer, one cocktail or – my real Nemesis – one vodka. And try it I will; I need to know that I can control my drinking, as opposed to my non-drinking, for myself, and if I can’t, I need to think again about what I’m going to do about it.

So far, so damn good – I feel great, everyone says I look great, for the best part of a month I’ve not done or said a single thing I’m ashamed of, and as a very pleasant side-effect my money’s going a hell of a lot further. The support I’ve had from the Inner Circle has been, if not surprising, amazing and affirming. From regular words of encouragement and expressions of their pride, to the more subtle gestures such as inviting me for ‘a juice’ after work, the gang have accepted and respected my need to not drink and made sticking to it so much easier. Drinking responsibly though is, I think, likely to be a greater challenge yet than not drinking has been. Watch, as ever, this space!