Ten days of careful consideration as to whether I should attempt to embark upon a year without alcohol culminated in a rather restrained New Year's Eve. I refrained from having one final blowout boozathon, although this was more for financial reasons than anything practical.
So on Saturday - New Year's Day - I didn't feel particularly awful, and remembering how I gave up smoking (rather than having one "final" cigarette just keep putting off lighting the next one) I decided not to mark day one by doing anything dramatic or monumental like pouring the contents of any remaining bottles down the kitchen sink. Instead just loafed around the flat, giving it a bit of a tidy, watching TV and generally trying to avoid thinking about drinking.
Sunday was also pleasantly uneventful. In the afternoon I had to travel to London for some TV work, directing the breakfast programming for a live news channel down there, starting at 4am the following day. In marked contrast to the previous weeks' crowded, pre-Christmas travel, the chaos caused directly and indirectly by heavy snowfalls across Britain, I had an entire first class carriage to myself and arrived at Euston on time. As my alarm would be going off at 2.30am (to start work at 4am and be on air at 5am) I was in bed for 7.30pm, ending my second day sober, safely tucked away from any opportunities to have a sneaky drink.
Starting work that early means you finish equally early, leaving the afternoons free to drink yourself silly. And Monday afternoon brought my first challenge, in no half measure. I had been invited to the pub by two of my best friends with whom I have an exceptionally boozy history, in excess of ten years hard drinking. Prior to this I could only once remember having been out with either of them and not had a drink, and that was under doctor's orders. How would they react when they found out that I wasn't drinking, and for no readily explicable reason? More importantly, how would I react when presented with a well-stocked bar and a £20 note in my pocket?
All the way to the pub I was in two minds. I'd deliberately not yet broadcast my solid intentions for a dry 2011, knowing how much people love to see others fail. (Yes, I know I just described these guys as best friends, but I don't live in a sitcom. They love a bit of schadenfreude as much as anyone. And so do you.) It was January 3rd. There were 362 more days and potentially hundreds of trips to the pub before my next drink, all of them lacking even a single, silky pint of strong Belgian lager. A few days earlier, when I had first mentioned the idea of giving up for a year, another friend offered me a compromise pact: no beer during 2011, only wine and spirits. Was I going to use this as an escape hatch? Was I going to bail out before I'd even begun? After all, my initial declaration of intent on Facebook was only speculative, and would quickly be lost in the fog of constantly-updated statuses. Nobody would witness my failure. If I was going to fall at all, maybe the first fence was best place to do it...
But I if I had, I would hardly be bothering to write this. In a slightly shaky voice I ordered a diet Coke, failing to convince anyone listening that it was what I actually wanted. (Nobody was listening, incidentally - one of the best and worst things about London is that nobody actually gives a shit.) I quite contentedly sipped away at it while my friends sank a bottle of wine between them. The end of my drink coincided with the end of their bottle, and another round was bought. The same thing happened again and, to my utter astonishment, I realised that I was in a pub, enjoying some typically quickfire banter with my two boozy mates, and I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol the whole time. I felt like Dumbo suddenly realising he can fly without his magic feather! Like Luke Skywalker when he realised he could be a Jedi Knight without any more boring swamp training from Yoda! Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, realising he's stuck in a deserted hotel with Olive Oyl until the snow clears and, all things considered, chasing her around with an axe would actually be a pretty good laugh.
Okay, perhaps not exactly like that, but you get the idea. I left the pub on a high. I'd had a great time, not had a drop to drink, and bowed out gracefully before things got too messy. Was that it? Is it all going to be this easy?
Ha ha ha. Of course not.
I learnt some time back that if I want to do something like go to a gig, invite other people along and wait for them to get their act together, it all goes to pot and I end up missing out. So if there's something that I want to see, and I can't get anyone else to commit, well sod them, I'm going anyway. And on Wednesday, when my friend Clare Lomas was performing in her monthly cabaret night, Set 'Em Up Joe's, in Aldwych, I didn't think twice about heading down to see the show on my own. Now, normally I wouldn't have given this a second thought, but normally I'd also happily sink enough drinks to give myself the confidence to strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone. Would that confidence still be there without the booze?
Now, this is one of the main reasons I've started this whole experiment. When I had my initial crazy idea, sitting in the Prince Charles Cinema (one of my favourite places in the whole wide world) waiting for a film to start, I realised that I haven't actually spent any time with any of my friends sober in the past decade or so. And, naturally, this realisation brought with it a lot of questions. Do I actually like the people I hang around with? Do they even like me, or do they just like funny, drunk me? Do I even like me? And who the hell am I anyway? By deliberately putting myself in familiar social situations, but taking away my comfort blanket, I intend to find out just how I act, and exactly who I really am these days.
As I was standing at the bar in the tiny, shiny, former public toilet that is the Cellar Door, four men came down the stairs, one of whom I recognised. He wouldn't have known me, although we had met briefly a couple of years before. It was Sir Ian McKellen. I'd known for years but completely forgotten that he was a relative of Clare's, and he'd popped down with some friends to see her perform. After meeting up with Clare for a quick catch-up during the first interval, I found myself sitting near the McKellen party. And as three of them disappeared upstairs for a cigarette break, I was left with the other one sitting in such proximity in the tiny bar that it would have been more awkward to ignore him than ask if he'd ever had crabs.
I didn't ask him that. But I did ask him his name. He was called Nick, was from New Zealand, now living in London, and he was a painter; the artist kind, as opposed to painter and decorator. (And, I subsequently discovered, a bloody good one.) We had a very pleasant chat about what had brought us both down there that evening, and about his work and its parallels with my work as a photographer and director, until everyone returned to their tables and the second part of the show began.
Later, when my time came to leave, I said goodbye to Clare and to Nick and, as he was sitting next to him, I waved a cursory farewell to Sir Ian. Immediately, Ian leaned forward and warmly shook my hand. We spoke briefly about how Clare and I were old friends who had only recently got back in touch, and how he and I had met previously, during a photocall. It's always a delight when you get to meet someone famous and they treat you as an equal, and behave just as you'd expect anyone else to. Especially, as in this case, when that person is as successful as they are talented.
Friday came as a real shock. On the train home, asking for a bottled water rather than the usual glass of wine was a breeze, but I was not prepared for what would come later.
Returning home from a week in London where, staying in hotels, I am unable to cook for myself, the first thing I usually do is make myself something fantastic to eat with lots of meat and vegetables. And while I'm cooking I'll mix myself a G&T or Bloody Mary, launching the weekend from the shore. After that, if I'm not heading out for the evening to meet friends and sink pints until closing time, I'll open a hearty bottle of red and watch a movie. But not tonight. No aperitif while cooking. No wine with dinner.
On a Friday? My brain suddenly needed restraining. I'd just returned from a week of getting up for work at 2.30am and there was going to be no reward? No relaxing wind-down to mark the end of the week? Not this time. Instead I mentally sat on my hands. My mind spun around, needling me for something to calm it down. After bracing myself for it all week I had let my guard down. But finally my first taste of withdrawal had arrived unannounced. I tried to watch a movie, but fidgeted throughout. I surfed the net to distract myself further, until I finally decided that the best way to occupy this idle time was to create work for my swooping mind, and I made a start on this blog.
So after one dry week, what have I learnt? Well, it seems that I'm the same, gregarious chap, with or without a drink, which is honestly quite a relief. And I've seen that strange, fun things seem to happen around me whether I'm drinking or not. It's very likely that in a previous, less confident incarnation, I would have made a complete nervous arse of myself on Wednesday, with or without the help of alcohol. But that was then, and was quite some time ago. It seems that somewhere along the line alcohol has stopped being, to me at least, the essential social lubricant it once was. Without wanting to speak too soon, it feels like I'd already learnt to live without booze, even while living with it. The difference is that this week, for the first time in fifteen years, I've taken a step back and seen that life on the other side isn't so different.
Consequently, rather than dreading the straight-edged grind of the next 51 weeks, I'm actually strangely excited to discover what life holds when you get off your arse and start living it. Drinking as a pastime already seems like a strange idea. But exactly what I'll do to replace the deluge of previously lost hours is yet to reveal itself.
Stats at the end of Week 1
Weight: 213lbs / 96.6kg
Drinks: 0
Gym hours: 0
Mood: Upbeat
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