I HAD the worst hangover I’ve had in twenty years on Sunday. It started out as a dull but manageable frontal lobe ache, but by mid-afternoon it had promoted itself to an all-cranium eye-scruncher oblivious to the ministrations of Messrs Nurofen and Panadol.
An unremarkable piece of information, I hear you say, as you shrug so hard I can hear the clothes on your shoulders rustling. Half the city wakes up on Sunday to varying degrees of worse for a wide array of wear. But get this: I don’t drink any more. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, since I have no hard and fast vision of where the future will take me in relation to lager, I stopped drinking 18 months ago. So it’s a decree nisi, rather than a decree absolute, although it’s probably fair to say that with every Christmas, Cheltenham and Paddy’s Day that passes my divorce from alcohol moves closer to being finalised.
ALLEZ LES BLEUS: The Ireland-France mid-afternoon kick-off saw many people start drinking early on Saturday
By my reckoning I had between six and eight bottles of Heineken 0-0 on Saturday, a very considerable increase on my usual two or three – the mid-afternoon Ireland-France rugby match being the catalyst for my first sober sesh. The combined genius of Google, Twitter, my family, my mates and the bloke on the off-licence till have since apprised me that in a higher volume, the sulfites, histamines, carbon bubbles and artificial additives remaining in beer when the alcohol has been extracted can still take a toll. Hence the four-hourly searches on Sunday for headache tablets amidst the out-of-date eardrops, the empty plaster boxes and the misshapen ointment tubes.
In a week when we’re marking five years since the sounding of the first mournful Covid klaxon, I’m reflecting that the pandemic turned out to be both the high point of my drinking career and the agent of its end. Social scientists in years to come will likely steeple their fingers, nod their heads and agree that the breakdown of minor social inhibitions that led to exhibitionist online dance, food and music crazes was brought about by a combination of fear, anxiety and confusion. Me? I think everybody was doing the Blinding Lights routine, singing sea-shanties with strangers and making Macanese whipped coffee because they were pissed.
Lockdown was essentially a permission slip for people who drank to drink more. I know it was for me, and I know it was for most of the people I drank with. People like me who claimed only to drink on an obligingly elastic weekend ended up drinking seven nights a week at home. ‘Let us drink, for tomorrow we die,’ Corinthians told us. And since the teatime news further informed us that a Covid death would be preceded by agonising intubation and a slow drowning in thick, sticky mucus, no second invitation – from the Bible or elsewhere – was required.
When the pandemic tide receded, my drinking remained at the lockdown high-water mark. Seven nights a week. Four pints in the Roddy’s or a few tins from the fridge. Increasingly both. Not falling-down-drunk-ringing-in-sick-10am-hair-of-
the-dog drinking, but definitely spoofing-to-your-GP drinking. Every family occasion, every trip to the cinema or theatre, every concert came to involve a calculation of if and when a beer would be possible.
But a dull pre-Covid spark remained deep in the frontal lobe, and in bed in the half-light of another midweek morning it would crackle and leap the synapses in my cotton-wool head and I’d tut, fluff my pillow and lightly chide myself.
I didn’t want to stop drinking, I just wanted to get back to the pre-Covid days of drinking only on ill-defined weekends and special occasions. And to that end, I’d start writing things down: Pros and cons; whys and wherefores; ideas and plans. And – get this – that very process became another excuse: I was working on a reset and while I tried to figure out the best way to get back to where I was, I didn’t change a thing because redemption surely lay at some unidentified point down a line I was drawing. Hurray for me; where’s the bottle-opener?
And then something happened: A Friday night happened.
I was in South Belfast to pick up my son and his chums from their student flat and because they weren’t ready I dandered into the Hatfield Bar on the Ormeau Road and ordered a 0-0 beer. Very cold. Blandly pleasant. One turned into two or three as the practical implications of four young men and one bathroom played out somewhere around the corner and after I finally picked them up and dropped them off, I stopped at a Winemark and left with four alcohol-free Heinekens.
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT: An alcohol-free beer or two in the Hatfield turned into something else entirely
If you’re sticking with this in hope – or fear – of a delirium tremens, pink spiders, night-sweats, convent rehab drama, my apologies. Because that was it. My last beer was drunk. Or at least, my last real beer was drunk. I raised eyebrows with 0-0s in the Roddy’s and 0-0s in the house. And when six weeks later I found myself on a plane to the sun with a small tube of Pringles and a smaller can of Heineken 0-0, I realised – for the first time really – that I’d stopped drinking. And I’d done so not with a minimum of fuss, but rather with zero fuss. 0-0 fuss, even.
How could that have been so for someone who’d been drinking WHO recommendation-mocking amounts of lager for 40 years? The best that I can come up with – the pitiful, unsatisfying best – is routine. Ritual perhaps. The routine and ritual that 0-0 beer still allowed me to practise. I still drink beer from a green bottle in the Roddy’s with my chums, if not as often. At home, I still get up and walk to the fridge for a beer when there’s a break in the sport on TV, taking an opener to a bottle, cracking the tab on a tin. Like I always did. That wouldn’t work with a Fanta. And the amount of times that it occurs to me that I’m not really drinking at all? That would again be zero.
And what of the big question, the one that gets asked by friends and acquaintances who look at my 0-0 beer like there’s a frog on the table in front of me? ‘Are you off it for good?’
I have absolutely no idea – the question doesn’t arise in my life and so there’s no need for me to answer it. And no, I’m not taking it one day at a time because that’s to suggest that giving up real beer is a daily challenge for me when it’s not. If I’m sitting at a beach bar in Portugal later this year and feel the urge for a real pint, it’s entirely possible that I’ll succumb. Because I didn’t stop drinking because I wanted to – I stopped drinking because of what happened one Friday night. And if that can happen on a Friday night on the Ormeau Road, something else can happen on a Tuesday afternoon in the Algarve.
Anyway, join me round the table as we swall and laugh about what I’ve found to be true about being an unexpected teetotaller.
1. Sweet dreams
I had no idea how urgently my body would demand the replacement of missing alcohol sugars. I never had a sweet tooth. I’d take a Quality Street from the office tin at Christmas, but I never sought out chocolate and never took a dessert when out for dinner.
SWEET TO THE BEAT: You don't understand how much sugar is in alcohol until you start seeking the hit elsewhere
I had thought the sugar craving would stop after a few weeks or months, but no – I’m going through a lot more teabags because a cup of tea is never had without cakes, pastries or chocolate bars. And I can’t blame Covid for that. I’ve lost a stone, but it really should be two.
2. Running on empty
Drive somewhere and drink zero beer and you’re running people home, that’s all there is to it. And I accept it. I can’t say I embrace it, however, because running people home at 1am means you spend a lot of time on your own in the car listening to the muffled sound of your chums continuing their night’s fun on the pavement while you listen to a lesser-known Duran Duran number on Absolute 80s. Family members are always grateful when they phone and you agree to go and get them. Not grateful enough, however, to be where they’re supposed to be when you arrive; and not grateful enough to answer their phones. Taxi drivers: Cherish the luxury of being able to drive off if no-one shows.
3. Happy hour
Most of your pals are delighted when you stop drinking. They smile, express their admiration and say fair play. But the smile is a wan one; the admiration brittle; and the truth is they’re lying. They’d much prefer if you just cut the nonsense out and had a real drink so things could go back to the way they used to be and the awkwardness would be over. But I appreciate the social concern that compels them to play the game. It’s the stray properly-pissed-off-and-making-no-attempt-to-hide-it guy that makes things tough. “You still on that pish?” is a piece of typically aggressive Belfast banter that demands an equally brusque reply. But, Dutch 0-0 lager doesn’t deliver on the Dutch courage and so I let it slide – and on it goes.
4. Morning person
I’d love to report that I’m in the Andytown leisure centre swimming pool every morning at 7am, or doing Tai Chi in the Falls Park as the sun peeks over the Black Mountain. But while I do wake much earlier now without need of an alarm – 6.30 give or take – my body and the mattress remain Velcro loops and hoops. I’ll go online to see how mad Trump was while I slept. I’ll pick up the book that dropped from my hand at some unspecified time after midnight. I might even try to chip away at the crossword I’ve been stuck on. But cotton wool head or clear, I’m still in bed till the last possible second.
5. Money matters
It’s expensive being a swally merchant. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that before I stopped being one, but I always hid from it by never doing the sums. I can now, though, so let me just see here: Covid escalation to six or seven nights in the Roddy’s, times weekend early kick-offs, times beer in the kitchen fridge... a hundred quid a week, I reckon. Easy. And while 0-0 beer is the same price as the old electric soup, I only have a dig at it two or three times a week and I’m at the limit of my consumption when I hit the third (that hangover aberration at the beginning of this Sunday supplement lifestyle piece notwith-standing). Not sure what I’m spending on buns, though. Or – after the Sunday I’ve just had – on headache tablets.
