It was always on the cards that I’d be an addict. The only question was, which vice to choose? Gambling’s out, seeing as I’m perennially skint. Womanising was great, until I hit 40, and the birds dried up overnight. Drugs I don’t touch, on principle. So that only really leaves the bottle - which, incidentally, was my mum’s prediction. Mothers have a nature for knowing their children better than they know themselves, and unless my memory is deceiving me, she always used to say my twin brother would become a vicar, my elder brother a gambler, and that I would turn out an alcoholic. One out of three ain’t bad, I suppose!
These things are relative of course. To one of my best mates, an alcoholic is “someone who needs to get up in the middle of the night to down a bottle of wine”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly up there with Gazza or Ollie Reed. But I do enjoy a drink more than I used to. Perhaps “enjoy” is the wrong word.
My relationship with alcohol got off to a slow start. I never pretended to like beer, the way my brothers did at the dinner table as teenagers. But I could just about get my laughing gear around a pint of cider, and that became an excuse to join in. It has taken me almost 50 years to say I enjoy a glass of red wine. But scotch, that’s a different matter entirely. Obviously at the outset, it helps if you can drown it in Pepsi (my preferred brand of brown piss), but I know it’s the scotch I crave, because I now refuse to drink Pepsi unadulterated.
Over the years, the measure has changed dramatically. When I went home to visit my dad in 2012, I took him a 2-litre bottle of the good stuff for us to ‘share’. His glass was 90 percent scotch, with Pepsi added (reluctantly) for colouring. My glass was the opposite. Suffice it to say, he drank the entire bottle almost singlehandedly in one night.
Fast forward a decade and a half, and I’d say that my average slug was an exceedingly generous double, if not a triple. As adults, it’s possible to kid ourselves our clothes are shrinking (rather than admit to becoming a tad rotund), but I have no such illusions when it comes to my alcohol intake. Forced to carry around a hip-flask in South Korea (where scotch is not always on the menu), I have noticed that the five to six drinks I used to squeeze out of it have become two or three at most. Pretty hard to lie to yourself about that.
So here you find me, a few years shy of 50; not exactly reaching for the bottle first thing in the morning, but certainly drinking more than is good for me. First it was a couple of nights a week. Then every night. Then occasionally spilling over into lunchtimes. Then every lunchtime. Curiously, it’s only ever one glass at lunch - but lunch without a glass can be hard to swallow.
Of course, I can make excuses for myself. I can say that as a young man, the combination of certain aspects of a fast-paced London job and being chronically shy, made lunchtime drinking a necessity. I can argue that an unhappy home life, stagnant career, and a divorce and separation from my daughters that makes Kramer vs Kramer look positively pro-men, haven’t exactly helped. I can even add that as a writer, a glass close to hand is as useful as Google for putting pen to paper. All of those things may be true. They are true. They’re also no justification. Because sometimes at night, drinking when you don’t even want one, you have to face facts: you’re an alcoholic. And that’s your fault. Or rather, it’s my fault - nobody else’s.
Some of my friends talk about a “dry January”. I don’t. In fact, my only recent ‘dry’ spell in the last couple of years was the fortnight I spent in the nick. Jack Daniels is elusive at the best of times in South Korea, but trying to locate the man in chokey is a challenge I don’t think I’d be willing to pay the price for! What was genuinely surprising was that I didn’t miss it. Not only that, I didn’t even notice I hadn’t had a drink until some way into the second week. If I wanted to learn about myself and the force of habit, perhaps I should reflect on that from time to time.
Such excess naturally takes its toll, physically and mentally. While it’s important not to overstate it, the fact that I rarely have a “good day” is connected to my relationship with the bottle. The fact that I awaken more Judy Garland than Julie Andrews, is more reliably attributable to my boozing. Beyond the expanding paunch and the low-level depression, there is something more concerning to me personally: the realisation that I am not entirely in control.
The question remains, whether or not to do something about it? I can see two pathways, and have been mulling them over in my subconscious for a while now: restraint or oblivion. There is a certain self-indulgent appeal to oblivion - “life refuses to let me win, so fuck it!” Restraint meanwhile, would obviously be the grown-up option. I must confess however, despite being a black-and-white sort of guy, the third way of teetotalism doesn’t appear to have much going for it. I suppose if the worst comes to the worst, I could always go back to prison - if not for me, for the sake of my liver.
Having said all that, I’m writing this piece at lunchtime. Thus far, I haven’t touched a drop. Maybe there’s hope yet?
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Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.
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