Decisions, Decisions

There are many reasons to drink, and “just because you can” ranks highly amongst them.  There will, however, always be consequences arising from having that drink, and although most of the time we dive in headlong and heedless (and quite rightly so), the fact that there will be consequences can be harnessed, by the experienced drinker, to suit his own ends.

More specifically, having that drink may clarify what it is that he wants, and make the actions which would make whatever it is come to pass more likely to happen.  In other words, drinking facilitates the making of what, to the sober self, may appear to be bad decisions, and in general I have found that one should always defer decisions until one is not in a fit state to make them.

Now, in positing a distinction between drunken and sober selves, I should make clear that I am not speaking of that massive change in personality indicative of a problematic relationship with the gods of grape and grain.  Rather, I am merely drawing attention to the fact that the drunken and sober selves see the world, and the self within that world, in very different ways.  The drunken self tends to see things more clearly, and certainly more intensely than the sober, and is less likely, perhaps less able, to foresee complications.  It is a world where between the conception and the action, the desire and its resolution, no shadow falls.  Or at least, not a very big one.

Many times I have woken, broken in the morning and desperately hungover, and found notes I have left for myself about what is to be done that day.  These are directions from the drunken self to the (nearly) sober, aware of the problems it will be facing at time of reading, and doing its best to help from its vantage point of clarity.  (That is the respect my drunken self shows to my sober self: it suggests, it advises, and on occasion it cajoles, but it doesn’t commit.  And since to “call her” would be such a phenomenally bad idea that even my drunken self has its reservations, it is a respect for which I am grateful.)

The sober self, however sensible it may perceive itself as, is not a fool.  It is aware of the nagging desires that assail the human soul, but has the advantage over most in that it knows it has a (fairly) reliable handmaiden with which to realise them should their nagging become too much to bear.

For instance, when money is tight (and for the drinking man, money almost always is), but you really want that bottle of expensive rum, a few pints in the pub (which you will justify as a legitimate pit stop on your meanderings about town) will break down the resistance between you and it.  You may wake the next morning anxious and regretting the money spent, but you will be aware that when evening comes and you have your philosophical nightcap, that that bottle, and the pause for thought it enables, will make you happy in a way that the mere presence of money – or more accurately, the absence of quite such a degree of debt – never can.

Even the agonised process of writing, hampered as it is by the strictures of hangovers and the inertia of sobriety, can be facilitated by strong drink.  The trickle, the slow drip of words can be transformed into a mighty torrent, a process I am watching happen now, as I write, a couple of pints down in the hushed stillness of an afternoon pub.  It is, it must be admitted, a torrent often in need of a good editor [Editor’s note: in dire need], but that is a service the sober self is happy to perform, out of gratitude if nothing else.

Alcohol is the medium through which two ways of being can reach each other, through which the cold world of reality and received wisdom, and the world of the heart’s desires, can mingle and mix.

Right.  I’m off to buy an expensive bottle of rum now, and maybe, who knows, I might just call that girl.  Cin-cin.

Hangover II: The Anatomy of a Hangover

I’ve never understood those people who, after a binge of greater or lesser proportions, can wake up and say, “never again.” To me it smacks of rank amateurism and a level of self-delusion I can’t even begin to contemplate.  To me, no matter how bad, the hangover must be embraced as part of the drinking experience: a souvenir of the night before, a memento mori forming a more extreme layer of sobriety.

That said, if there were a way to avoid the things, I would.  Although I have had some limited success on this front by taking half a Valium before bed, as a system it fails in two important regards.  First, Valium is expensive, and that money would be better spent on drinks; and second, it requires organisation: not only the purchase of the pills, but also the wherewithal to actually remember to take the things.  Any hangover prevention strategy that depends on the organisational capabilities of the drunk in question is ultimately doomed to failure.

So, in the ordinary scheme of things, one is left hungover, stranded, in exile upon the island of sobriety’s revenge.  Broadly speaking, I find they can be broken down into one of three kinds:

1) The Common or Garden Hangover.  Symptoms Include: an “oof” upon waking, dryness of the mouth, a slight tiredness behind the eyes, an acute awareness of the membrane around the brain.  Almost indistinguishable from the simple fact of being alive.  Treatment: water, coffee, orange juice, toast.  Tea with sugar if symptoms persist.  Distinctive Activities: checking with trepidation your wallet to see if by chance you have any change from the night before.

2) The Proper Hangover.  Symptoms Include: “oh my God,” “oh fuck,” or in certain iterations, “oo ma heed.”  Akin to waking up into a brick wall.  Extreme dryness of the mouth and throat, difficulty swallowing, shaking of the extremities, sense of brain collapsing in on itself.  Low-level guilt, paranoia and fear, although often tempered by a naughty schoolboy’s sense of mischievous pride.  Treatment: either, strong drink, Full English Breakfast, more strong drink; or cowering indoors with the curtains drawn, hoping the world doesn’t find you.  Distinctive Activities: checking with trepidation to see if there is anything left in your bank account; desperately trying to remember to whom you now owe money.

3) The Post-Bender Psycho-Physiological Crisis.  Symptoms Include: stunned silence on waking, perhaps a sigh of relief as one realises one is, probably, still alive.  Tremors in the body and usually in the soul as well.  Uncertainty with regard to whom one’s brain belongs, as any thoughts one has tend to detach themselves from the inside of one’s skull and take on a life of their own.  Fear.  Guilt and paranoia begin to emerge once one regains partial ownership of one’s head.  Treatment: none, as suicide is beyond you.  May decay into other forms of hangover over time, and therefore be treatable as such.  Distinctive Activities: a remarkably sanguine acceptance of the economic freefall one is now condemned to, a sanguinity dampened only slightly by the realisation one’s internal organs are now worth significantly less on the black market than they were before one started.

As I say, it’s just a part of the life we’ve chosen.  Cin-cin.

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.

On Relationships and Their Manifestations

 

You drink because you want to, or perhaps because you must.  You drink for pleasure, you drink from boredom, and you drink to ease the pain.  You drink for company and to lubricate the wheels of social interaction, and often enough, you drink to get away from everything and everyone.  You drink.  And that’s a good thing.

Because you drink, you frequently find yourself in pubs.  Because you’ve been drinking for a long time, you find your relationship with pubs more fundamental than your relationship to booze.  Your relationship with the pub is, as I may have mentioned before, clearly inconceivable without the booze, and naturally it is the booze that draws the two of you together in the first place, but once you’re there, your relationship with the particular pub in question can blossom into existence.

Now clearly there are pubs that, having been once, you’d never go back to again.  Theme pubs, gastro-pubs and the like, where the gastro has so overtaken the pub that the honest drinker is pushed into a corner and left feeling that his simple need to consume the establishment’s massively overpriced beer is an inconvenience.  Where any semblance of someone having fun is to be frowned upon.  If you drink amongst people for whom a second glass of wine is viewed as risqué, then what chance do you have?

Then there are pubs that simply happen to be convenient, neatly positioned for you to pause and regroup on your journey from A to B.  They may be perfectly pleasant in their own right, you may even find that you tarry a little longer than you had anticipated.  Quite possibly to the extent you decide that whatever it was you were going to do at B is not worth the bother and perhaps you will just stay for another one after all.  The chances are, however, given that for your everyday peregrinations it’s a little bit out of the way, you won’t go back.

But once in a while, you stumble into a pub for the first time, and something clicks.  It answers a need in you.  Perhaps it’s a particular calm, or then again, a particular vivaciousness in the atmosphere.  Perhaps it’s the ease with which you fall into conversation with the gentlemen at the bar.  Perhaps it’s as simple as the barmaid being pretty and open to distraction.  Or perhaps it’s something more intangible.  It would be easy to overwork the psychology involved, but there is a sense of recognition when you find a pub to which you immediately know you will return, a sense of familiarity, a sense of felicity, a sense of yes, right here.

That said, no relationship is always plain sailing, and even that initial sense of rightness can be misleading.  You can go back to a place at find the atmosphere gone, twats at the bar, and a superfluity of boorish barmen.  Even then, though, on the strength of the initial encounter, you are inclined to give it another chance or two, and if like me, you are still bereft of a proper local to call your own, a few more after that.  At the very least, you come to an understanding.  While it may not be The One, it is at least there, and fulfilling at least some of your needs.

Thus I find myself without a local as such, but with at least a couple of pubs I enjoy and that I’m seeing on a regular basis.  While I may have moved on, I have perhaps not yet fully let go of the old pub, and am still looking for something of that in any new pub I chance upon.  And that is perhaps in part because something deep within me is longing to hear those three little words that can change the world, three little words that make the whole of that mess we call existence make sense.  Those three little words that at the very least ensure a night of magic: “on the house.”  Cin-cin.

Opening Time

It never completely leaves you, the thrill of going to the pub, no matter how many times in your life that you’ve been there.  Once the decision is made (and in truth, once you’ve posed the question, it’s a decision that has already been made), it shakes you free of inertia and lifts you to a higher plane.

So it was, after giving up on an unusually fitful night’s sleep, I found myself outside very early in the morning to clear my head, and the promise of a lunchtime pint was the motivating factor.  I found myself outside rather too early, with a head so clear that the urge to cloud it again settled early upon me.  Rather too early, as the pubs would not open for quite a while to come.

There is very little on this earth as pathetic as a grown man staring folornly at a locked pub door at eleven o’clock in the morning, wondering why it won’t unlock until twelve.  The loosening of the licensing laws has been of clear net benefit to the country, but when eleven o’clock is seared into the mind of every drinking man and woman as the beginning of the day, this tendency to twelve o’clock starts seems designed to confuse the already very confused.  I resolved I would not be caught out in this way (God, not again), and decided to find something else to do until the hour of my deliverance arrived.

 Thus resolved, the problem arose of what that would actually entail.  The early morning is not my natural habitat, and whilst there is a certain pleasure to be taken from seeing a familiar place from this unusual perspective, the novelty had already worn off by the time I was wondering what to do with it.

Being somewhat short of funds (and replete with enough self-knowledge to realise that a lunchtime pint is more than likely to become a teatime pint, a suppertime pint, and quite probably a nightcap as well), my initial reaction, to prepare the ground by indulging in God’s gift to the all day drinker, namely, the Full English Breakfast, was right out.  In a town such as the one in which I find myself, this cornerstone of British culture has become something of a luxury item, and whilst in the city, there are many places where it can be had for less than the price of a pint, the thought of sacrificing two or even three was too much to bear, and would anyway leave the projected economics of the day in tatters.

Coffee, however, remained an option.  But although it is the friend of those, like me, who find the very idea of morning too much of a challenge to contemplate unaided, once it leaves the confines of ones own kitchen and establishes itself in its public form, the cafè, it becomes an altogether more insidious liquid.  Overpriced, and generally speaking a watery memory of what real coffee should taste like, it can hardly come as a surprise that as parasitical a practise as insurance (and so ultimately, the stock exchange) was born in the places of its sale.

Unwilling to risk adding to the sum total of human misery, and in any case distinctly uninspired by the visions of corporate blandness that revealed themselves to me as I walked past their windows, I dismissed the idea of coffee, and continued to walk.

Coming to a park, the thought struck me that, if my way to the pub was blocked by the vagaries of time, then perhaps I could, in some small way, bring the pub to me.  Parks have benches, and park benches have a proud tradition of being sat and drank upon.  It would, of course, involve me finding an off license of some description, one willing to be charmed into selling me booze before eleven o’clock in the morning (the concept of twenty-four hour drinking seems not to have yet filtered down to the retailer), and further, risk the opprobrium of the kind of sober folk who pass their mornings in parks, but the promise of a can or two to pass the time and fortify my resolve was enough to help me rise above such mundane concerns. 

And so it was I wandered off in search of an offy, and so it was, as I wandered and searched, I beheld a sight that brought joy to my heart.  An open door, and attached to the door was a pub.  I checked the time.  It was later than I had thought.  It was, give or take, eleven o’clock.  I approached gingerly, afraid that this, my oasis, may yet turn out to be a mirage, but a word to the man behind the bar confirmed to me that these were indeed the gates of paradise thrown open in the welcome it behoves the just to embrace.

And so it was, amidst the gentle sounds of a pub in the process of opening, of people popping their heads around the door to say a quick hello to the barman, of the one or two who came in for an early lunchtime pint, of the rustle of a newspaper, of the clink of a glass and of bottles being prepared for the day; amidst these happy noises full of promise my salvation was vouchsafed.  My day had finally begun.  Where it would end, I couldn’t say (and to be honest, even now looking back, I’m still trying to piece that one together), but closing time was a long way off, there was a pint full in front of me, and with my heart full of happiness and glorious anticipation, it struck me a day doesn’t start better than this.  Cin-cin.

Off the Leash

 

Booze never fails puts me in a good mood, and  I often marvel at its capacity to do so.  Walking into a pub and carrying with me all the petty annoyances of the day, it still strikes me with epiphanic force when, usually about half way down my third pint, a transformation occurs.  The miserable git who was sitting there a moment ago has disappeared, and in his place is a cheery soul, propping up the bar with a grin on his face.  This, it seems to me, is an innate property of drink, its capacity to induce merriment and release the good mood lurking beneath the foetid crust of quotidian concerns.

It’s a noble state of mind, and one I’m always happy to be in.  But there are times when it’s not enough.  There are times when the pressures of life have built up to such an extent that you really need to cut loose; and to enter the realm of unfettered euphoric Bacchanalia, there are other contingencies which need to be addressed.

First amongst these is, inevitably, money.  Bar-propping is an expensive business at the best of times, but to allow yourself off the leash you must be able to forget entirely the financial consequences.  The need to count pennies is a force that runs counter to the full expression of the euphoria you are hoping to achieve (and in fact, runs counter to most that is good in the human spirit), and will always undermine it.

Second is time, and for very similar reasons.  If you have to worry about getting up for work tomorrow, or even worry about calling in sick, then you’ll be hard pressed to really embrace the course of therapy upon which you have embarked, and following the evening through its labyrinthine twists and turns, often into the next day and often into the day after that, becomes deeply problematic.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it’s the company you keep whilst on your merry way.  It may come as a surprise, but there are certain circles, certain pubs even, where drunkenness is frowned upon.  This is not where you want to be.  If you cannot fully commit to the course you have chosen from the very beginning, then you may as well go home.  If you are, tacitly or otherwise, on the defensive, amongst people for whom drinking is a polite pass-time rather than the highest expression of the human spirit (civilisation begins with fermentation, after all – beer, wine, and bread*), then the essential gregariousness inherent to the project is opposed, its freedom crushed by the weight of staid disapproval.

It should be remembered, however, that this is a spiritual quest, and not a case of mere mechanics.  Like Eckhart’s dark night, the ground may be prepared, but the Spirit may yet choose not to descend.  That said, when I found myself on the receiving end of a small piece of financial good fortune, it was only ever going to end one way.  A trip to the city was what was needed, and an unfettered, euphoric, three-day Bacchanalian binge. 

And that was exactly what I got.  Off the leash and in good company, chasing through old pubs and new, feeling the sense of liberation that only undiluted alcoholic folly can bring.  A return to the fold, touching upon the divine.

All good things must come to an end (or so we are led to believe), and now I find myself back in the town of my self-imposed exile.  Having reconnected fully with my inner Dionysus, inevitably it is screaming at me to keep the party going.  But for all the reasons outlined above, I cannot.  I must betray the god within, quiet him until the next opportunity presents itself.  This saddens me, but at least I’ve enough money left to pop to the pub.  It will all seem a lot better after a pint or three.  It’s a noble state of mind, cin-cin.

*What Faulkner actually said was, “civilization begins with distillation,” and there is a good case to be made; for myself, however, I prefer this amendment, pointing as it does to the moment we as a species raised ourselves above brute survival.