No-booze January and other cliches
What do you do when the music stops?
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Trigger warning: article below contains references to sexual assault and alcohol dependency
It takes a lifetime to figure things out
January has always been my favourite month for going out. All the amateur drinkers are safely back at home with their box sets4, and the pubs, clubs, and gig venues are peaceful.
You always get a seat, and the staff are delighted to see you. In stark contrast to December, there are no groups of marketing executives in matching novelty festive jumpers, ordering individually at the bar, and attempting to drink their way through the awkwardness of where and what they are.
So why did I try to take January off from drinking, beyond the month’s wellness cliches?5
I am attempting to redefine my relationship with alcohol, one that has remained complicated for decades.
Drinking is something I find difficult to talk and write about, even though I shouldn’t. The January opinion pages were full of posh writers6 explaining why they’re giving up their nightly half bottle of plonk after the kids are safely in bed with the second best iPad.
The reason I find it hard is I know I have a problem. I’m not an alcoholic, but my relationship with the stuff is definitely dysfunctional. And it’s important to be able to admit that.
It’s complicated, and I’m still identifying all the reasons why, beyond the obvious truth of alcohol being an extremely addictive drug.
Strap in, as we meander through a life of drinking.
When I was growing up, in an Anglo-Irish working / lower middle class environment7, drinking was something done in the pub8 - predominantly by the men, though not exclusively.9
I learned how to consume alcohol in the boozer, not in the park. The ever-present geezers taught me what to drink (lager, mainly, though Guinness was an accepted alternative), how fast it was acceptable to drink it, how rounds work, and how drunk it is acceptable to appear.
That last one is fascinatingly elastic, as anyone who has spent a night on the alcohol-free beer but still feels giddy will understand.
Alcohol affects one’s decision making and judgement, but it’s incredible how much of “being drunk” is learned, social behaviour.
For my Dad’s group of friends and drinking acquaintances, a mixture of painter decorators, teachers, builders, office workers, shipping journalists, and booze professionals10, “not drunk at all” was the only admissible state, even after four or five pints.
Anyone who couldn’t drink all night and still seem perfectly fine was considered a lightweight, and - counterintuitively - a bit of an embarrassment; someone to keep an eye on and laugh about after they’d left.
This is, of course, extraordinarily problematic, but interesting from my perspective as - even then - an awkward outsider11 obsessed with observing invisible social rules.12
When I went to university, the wheels fell off. No longer burdened by the panopticon of pub men who vaguely knew who I was, drinking was now something that happened with people the same age as me, usually from higher social classes, under zero supervision, imagined or otherwise.
These people had had different upbringings to me. They had been allowed to drink at home - a glass of wine or two with dinner, for example, where they learned to have opinions.
They had also frequented many house parties when their parents were away, well-stocked drinking cabinets raided for the mystical and dangerously sophisticated concoctions contained within.
And so I was introduced to spirits, binge drinking, and the concept of “pre-loading” before a night out, an expression that hadn’t been invented yet but was very much followed by all and sundry.
I’m aware that today’s students are overwhelmingly sensible, austere people, without the money or inclination for such behaviour. They count their pennies and save their flirting for the gym and the glow of the infinite screen.
In the nineties, as with pretty much every decade before it since time immemorial, everyone in England was drunk pretty much all the time.
People were boozing in the union bar between lectures and seminars; people were drinking in their student kitchen til dawn; people were drinking in their own tiny rooms, while listening to the exciting new records of the day (Gomez, Morcheeba, that Oasis b-sides compilation).
There was one girl in my hall of residence who was drunk four or five times a week, snogging nascent bankers at 80s themed discos before collapsing into bed13, her heels, coat and sparkly top littering the corridor; a guy I knew developed serious liver damage before the age of 20, his lad-friends gathered ironically by his bedside, joking nervously about whether his drip was full of vodka.
And me? I was more feast or famine. One night out and four to five pints of snakebite and black would lead to extreme depression, nocturnalism, and terrible, terrible loathing. I marvelled at the metabolisms of those who could be hungover on the sofa at midday and back at the bar by evening; vomiting one moment and downing a pint of watery lager the next.
On my down days, I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why I was drinking to excess, other than social expectation, and whether there was anything I could do about it.
I’ve since worked out that there were two specific incidents in early adolescence that left me with a very strong desire to not be noticed, despite being - this isn’t boasting, just a fact - a very noticeable person.
Drinking helps with not caring about that, and I eventually I developed a specific out-drinking-with-a-bunch-of-people persona.14
Even now, I really struggle with being perceived, the imaginary issue of being talked about, and the idea of people knowing my business.
This is, of course, absurd, for someone who has always written about anything and everything, performs both music and comedy live in public, and used to write literal comment pieces for a national newspaper.
But it’s true.
Back to those teenage and pre-teen incidents, which turned me from a happy go lucky, clever, probably quite annoying ten year old to a paranoid and miserable secondary school kid.
The first was being hit by a car on the first year French trip.
Quite a traumatic experience, obviously, with the strange side-effect that I can still remember events leading up to it and immediately afterwards with weird clarity.
Unfortunately, as my second year began, being known as the kid who got hit by a car during the first year French trip did not sit well with my burgeoning self-awareness and massive desire not to be perceived.
Around the same kind of time, my group of friends ditched me, as they were getting into girls and drinking, which I was a while away from.
This probably led to the second incident, which was a bout of skiving, or truancy, if you’re unfamiliar with midlands vernacular.
After which, I was known as the skiver or the kid who got hit by a car during the first year French trip.
The rest of my teenage years were spent building back up both my self confidence and my sense of self.
There were a few tricky years - a year spent living away from my parents, a story in itself - and moving from Nottingham to London and having to start making friends all over again half way through my GCSEs.
But I don’t want to overplay how difficult this period was for me. It was lonely and complicated at times, but I was learning who I was, and learning to explore the world around me and inside me with the glorious boredom and autonomy of those pre-internet days.
Then, at the age of eighteen, in my second year of sixth form, something strange happened.
I became cool, attractive, and (steady, now) relatively popular.
Girls wanted to date me, boys wanted to be me my advice on how to get girls to want to date them.
I was clever, had more self awareness than most people around me, albeit with less social experience, and started getting invited to parties.
I was still an awkward fellow, though. And I learned that, at these parties, drinking made me feel better - more likely to talk to strangers, more likely to be funny. More likely to dance.
I think I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since - that glorious time when you’ve had precisely two drinks, and your best friend is telling you, with 90s arrogance, that him and you are by far the coolest people in the room.
Then, in my second year at university, I was sexually assaulted after consuming more than half a bottle of absinthe.
I have no memory of what happened. Just waking up surrounded by my own sick in a student bathroom.
But I remember the public shame, the gradual finding out in not so many words, the embarrassment and humiliation. And close friends who should have known better finding the incident hilarious rather than troubling.
I hadn’t heard of consent in the year 2000.
The incident ruined my remaining years at university15, and it’s something I managed to push far, far down and avoid thinking about for almost two decades, for the brain is a powerful and clever thing.
I tried to get over it. I got on with my life, got the kind of job you’re supposed to get, got married. Lived with all the other liberal journalists in rapidly gentrifying Hackney.
When it all finally bubbled back up to the surface, it was hard, emotionally. There was a lot of guilt, frustration, and anger, both at myself and at the people who would still invite both myself and my attacker to the same party or sensible middle class gathering.
They would text me a “heads up” if he was going. So I could decide whether I wanted to go or not. It felt injust, but to protest would be to think and to explain, and I didn’t want to do that.
He knew, though. Of course he knew. if I attended, he’d sidle immediately up to me, all grace and shameless charm.
When the assorted kids were in bed everyone would go to the pub, and I would make my excuses, and go and dance or watch a band alone.
And drink, of course.
The assault, and my pushing the thing down as far as it would go, exacerbated my problem with drinking, but as the above hopefully makes clear, wasn’t the underlying reason for it.
Drinking to excess is something I was already doing. Though post-assault, I would say that doing so was… more conscious, on occasion.
Alongside drinking out of social anxiety, occasionally and accidentally to excess, came drinking specifically to excess because I didn’t want to be me any more.
This, as you don’t need to tell me, is much, much, much more dangerous.
I’m doing a lot better now. A lot of this stuff came to a head during the pandemic, when a lot of time on my hands equalled terrible things, like drinking on my own - something I’ve always tried to avoid.
And also very good things, like coming to terms with a lot of the above, and confronting it, to the best of my ability.
This is an ongoing process. And January was kind of a test - could I go a full month without drinking?
I couldn’t.
But I did bloody well. I didn’t drink very much, and people seemed to still like me.
This is progress, but there is still a lot of time, reflection, and therapy to go.
Also, writing about this stuff is helpful: for me and, I hope, anyone else out there with a complicated relationship with alcohol.
I’m off for a pint with my best friend.
Stuff I’ve found interesting or useful this week
The psychopath landlord trying to destroy Britain’s best cinema:
Bec Hill on why “anti-woke” comedians are about as edgy as one of Benny Hill’s farts:
You have grown complacent and lazy on this free content, and frankly you disgust me. But there’s a cheap way to earn back my respect: pay me! Pay me now!
This means I’ll be doing at least two posts a week.
Even if you don’t live in Brighton, I bet you come here sometimes. Don’t you?
“Streaming content” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Well, most of it. Our special fifth anniversary sketch show is on the 30th January and I do aim to last til then at least. Let’s see.
My background is Irish / English working class / lower middle class, where men drank and drank and drank. Mainly beer, and mainly in pubs. Middle class drinking is more defined by drinking at home and at dinner parties.
Class in Britain is so *granular*.
I don’t drink at home, though there are reasons for this: some of them class based as listed here, and some of them just circumstantial, due to housing uncertainty.
The wives would phone the pub phone to tell their husbands that their dinner was getting cold. This was the 1990s, not the 1950s.
Drunks.
I was also, as I now realise, undiagnosed ADHD, which comes with its own tendencies around drinking.
To quote an aborted stand-up routine of mine, “I’m as awkward drinking with my dad’s mates in the boozer as I am drinking at a dinner party, with cunts”.
She’d fall asleep with talk radio blaring out and her bedroom door half open. Unable to sleep, I’d gather up her possessions from the corridor, stick them in her pit of snoring and five live, and close the door.
Turns out I’m a very good actor lol
Warwick, one notorious for sexual assault amongst other things.