Here’s what I’ve discovered since I’ve
stopped drinking.
I don’t like parties.
I don’t even really like people, or at
least new people all that much.
And I don’t like going out.
What I liked was drinking .
I liked parties because you could drink at
them. And drinking at parties made
people bearable, and new people tolerable. And going out?
Well that was fun, because when you were out you could drink and a glass
of wine, before during and after even the dreariest of plays, became watchable;
a bog-standard pizza, enjoyable; a bowl of nuts, dinner.
But here’s the thing. Without drinking, a bowl of peanuts is
just a dish of other people’s pee-tinged fingers, with extra salt. And people? People are boring.
Me too. I’m supremely boring. I actually have nothing to say. Niente, Nada, Ma Fi Shi – nothing in
several languages, none of which I’m fluent in.
Ab.
So. Lute. Lee.
No
Thing.
I’m duller that a gluten free scone, but
less elastic.
Just like that flat, rubbery, gluten and
taste-free scone, you need a lot of cream and jam to make it palatable, though
in my case it’s alcohol. Only
fuelled by vodka, do I turn into anything remotely interesting and equally
springy, and as for you – well you don’t stand a chance.
People ask you 'for a drink' and you really need that drink to get through the evening. It's not the same with a herbal tea. 'Would you like another?' Nah, not really. Tea gets your bladder going, not the conversation. Sober, I really, really don’t want to listen to
you talk about your job for twenty minutes, and then spend another ten telling
you what a valuable service you’re providing because you’re a psychotherapist,
or a teacher. I don’t care a damn about
your kids and you really don’t care about mine, nor should you. I pushed them into the world and love
them dearly, but they’re not that scintillating a specialist subject. I could tell you about my cats, who are
cuter, but I really don’t think you’d be interested. Me, on the other hand, I’d rather see pictures of yours, or
watch videos of them doing silly things on YouTube than listen to you drone on
about Caspian’s fricking exams, or Cunninglinga’s first from Oxford.
No wonder I drank. But it's only now that I realised that the reason I was so keen on drinking at anything involving people was to avoid the crippling anxieties and numbing dreariness of actually having to socialise. Now I walk into a party sober and I’m a
crackling ball of static anxiety. I
used to see glamour but now I just see trial by people everywhere, all of them
talk, talk, talking. I can chit
chat for Britain but I still don’t say anything worth listening to, and so of
course nobody really wants to talk to me.
They’re sucking the oxygen from someone more influential, with more of a
schpeil than I can muster, huddled in clumps of the dull and duller and prettier
and thinner. Alcohol didn’t slim
me down or soft-focus my edges, but it did at least make me forget I was fifty,
fat and tongue-tied. Now I’m as
dry as Sharjah, and all I want to do is run home to a choc ice and an episode
of The Good Wife. In the past, I
reached my hand out for something from the tray, knocked it back and chased it
down with another. Then filled
with the rosy glow of cheap Merlot, I’d saunter forward, insincerely admire
somebody’s frock, or their hair, or tell them that they’d lost weight, ask
about the effyousee king kids, and laugh till my face went as red as my
teeth. Now I just flounder like a
beached whale, and there are just not enough bubbles in a glass of sparkling
water to lift me into effervescent conversation with someone I’ll never see
again and who has forgotten my name before they move off to speak to someone
they ‘just must talk to’.
So I go home. And have a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits, and catch up
with a BBC4 Scandinavian Drama. Me
the cats, and my partner who, apart from the opposable thumbs could give them a run
for their money in conviviality. Boring, temperate,
anti-social dry, domestic bliss.
