In Memoriam Peter O'Toole

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

In a Bad Mood

 It gets to you sometimes.  It really does.  It starts with the perennial shortage of money, and ends with a long walk home, half-cut and seething, wondering why you’re doing this to yourself.  When money’s tight and your opportunities for distraction are thus limited, if your chosen pub lets you down, it’s going to be a long time until you can give it the chance to make things right again.

And in the meantime, you seethe.  There is a lot to seethe about in this world these days, most of it to do with childish faith in bankrupt economic theories and the shocking disregard in which our “elected” representatives hold us.  And I confess, I seethe about these things on a regular basis.  But (and I suspect it is by this and similar mechanisms that the powers that be manage to get away with their bullshit), they don’t make me anything like as angry, or trouble my sense of well being half as much as being disappointed by an excursion to the pub.

I blame the particular pub for this, and more than that, I blame the drinking culture in this town.  In this I am justified.  The fault lies squarely on an inability to accommodate Bacchanalian excesses on a weekday.  But as an individual within this localised society, ones perception of oneself is coloured by that society’s perception of one. Given that ones post-excessive, hungover state of mind is likely anyway to be touched by the hand of guilt (for no good reason, or at least, no good reason that you can remember), the perception of others – others who, it must be emphasised again, are absolutely in the wrong - weighs heavily upon one.

It’s not enough to touch your core beliefs, of course, but it saps the joy that surrounds them.  Without that joy, without the lift that the thought of going to the pub gives you (and this is all the more true when your financial situation curtails the opportunities to actually do so), you lose the sense of consolation, the sense that there is another way of being which you can attain.  If not right now, then tomorrow or next week or next month.  The pub, in any worthwhile context, smiles at you, it urges you on through the quagmire of the quotidian, and basking in that promise you’ll find a way to reach it.  If the pub frowns, then you’re lost, trapped in the festering, bubbling, seething morass of other people’s misplaced – and misguided – morality.

The absence of a healthy drinking culture means there is no community of drinkers that can be relied upon and among whom you can take your place.  You may, by chance, run into a few pleasantly inebriated people at the bar, but it is a situation that cannot be relied upon to manifest itself regularly.  Bad nights happen, of course, wherever you drink, but if there’s money, and a place where your brand of merriment is more commonly appreciated, then one bad evening will disappear in the alcoholic tide of other evenings.  As it is, you’re beached, stranded on the polluted shores of other people’s sobriety.

The truth is, under normal circumstances, I could probably drink my way out of this impasse.  Throwing alcohol at a problem is a failsafe solution to most things.  Let down by the pub, though, the question arises of where this course of existential therapy would take place.  That pub doesn’t appeal, and if that pub - which hitherto has come closest to satisfying your socio-alcoholic needs in this town - isn’t working, then the chances of any of the others doing so is small.  When the symbiosis of pub and punter has broken down, what is there that one can do?

Like getting back on a bike after you’ve fallen off, you have to get back in there.  A line must be drawn, a stand must be made.  In any relationship, a time comes when you have to say, up with this I will not, cannot, put.  And that time is now.  So, as soon as money permits, I will be there, drinking heavily for my beliefs, consequence be damned.  I have right on my side, I have faith in my heart.  So cin fucking cin.