On Tuesday 21st December 2010, I posted the following status update on Facebook:
So, in the absence of any apparent reason to stop drinking, just where did this crazy idea originate?
Like many British adults, alcohol had quietly become an integral part of my life. This doesn't mean that I'd wake up in the morning, switch off the alarm and pour myself a gin. More that an evening in with a bottle of wine and a movie was an almost everyday occurrence, except at weekends when I'd have an aperitif while cooking, a glass or two of wine with dinner before going out to the pub to meet my mates, drink beer until closing, and then probably a nightcap or two after getting home. I've never been into (nor very good at) team sports and most of my leisure pursuits (writing, cinema, photography) are largely solo activities. But I am a social animal and there are few things that I value more highly than a good conversation, so the favoured social environment of my adult life has always been the pub. Drinking was something I excelled at. Not in a competitive sense, but in that I could just drink, and drink, and drink without getting rowdy, wobbly or feeling sick. It was rare for my speech to become slurred. As with cigarettes when I was a smoker, drinking had become such a casual and regular occurrence that I'd forgotten what life was like without it.
Actually, that's not quite true. I can remember what my life was like without alcohol and it was really quite dull. The last time I went for any significant period without drinking was in 1995, when I was 20 years old. I had a steady (and insanely paranoid) girlfriend, drove my mum's car everywhere and went to church every week. A year later I'd split up with the girlfriend, stopped going to church and thrown myself wholeheartedly into my career, working as the sound engineer at Manchester's legendary Hacienda nightclub and enthusiastically taking full advantage of all the fringe benefits a job like that provides. Now that the Hac has long since closed, been demolished and replaced with luxury apartments, the only regret I have about diving headlong into all the fun and games that came with working there is not getting started sooner.
To me, Heaven is a street full of drinking establishments, ranging from warm, woody boozers to plush, shiny bars, well-stocked and with plenty of clever, well-dressed people to meet, all of them stacked high with good conversation. Since discovering the pleasures of drink I have been an enthusiastic consumer of some of the finest drinks available. I was a founder member of Milk and Honey. I have a signed and dedicated copy of Dale DeGroff's book The Craft of the Cocktail, sent to me for my birthday by Ben, my good friend a fellow cocktail connoisseur, while I was travelling in Australia. ("To Rob, Happy Landings! Dale.") And, like all the best drinkers, I have garnered a wealth of extraordinary drinking stories, ranging from the funny to the frightening. There is no way to tell, of course, how many of these would have happened anyway. But my guess is that the vast majority, had alcohol not been involved, would never have occurred. So why would such a keen exponent of the benefits of drinking suddenly want to give up something that has apparently served him so well?
I wanted to know whether and by how much my life would change if I stopped drinking. Would I feel somehow cleansed? Would I feel happier? I wanted to know how - and by how much - I would differ as a person. How would my social habits change? Would I lose some friends and gain others? Would I just lose friends? Perhaps the most terrifying prospect of all, despite such a potentially jarring change in my social habits, would everything remain disappointingly familiar?
You'd be right to think that an entire year without alcohol seems like a pretty ambitious goal for someone who hasn't gone more than a week in the past fifteen years without at least one drink. (And I don't remember ever having had just one drink.) An increasingly common practice within media circles is to stop drinking during January, by way of apology to one's body for the excesses of the festive season. This unofficial annual alcohol fast ends in the drinker's equivalent of Eid; a secular moveable feast commencing at sundown (or, more accurately, the moment you finish work) on the first Friday in February: Retox Friday. All this is tremendous fun of course, and is followed the next day (and sometimes the day after that) by some of the most monumental hangovers ever seen in the industry. But, happy as I am to join in with Retox Friday, I've never taken part in the month of abstinence. This is partly because I'm against the idea of denying yourself something if doing so is just going to make you miserable, but mainly because I see the whole exercise as a bit of a cop-out. One dry month is hardly going to undo the damage of eleven previous months of high living, and those who do stop drinking for the month tend to lock themselves away from their real lives, avoiding any and every temptation to drink, until it's time to re-emerge from their self-imposed penance and start boozing again, with nothing having really changed.
The primary aim of my dry 2011 is to discover what real life is like without alcohol, and a single month of hiding away and simply avoiding situations that involve drinking isn't the same as living life without it. Birthdays, parties, dates, weddings, funerals, weekends, holidays, Christmas and eventually New Year's Eve. And after that, who knows? It is not my intention to stop drinking permanently, but what if I decide I like life better without it? Will my idea of Heaven have changed? And if so, into what? Will I become some raving anti-booze evangelist? Or will I hit the bottle on January 1st 2012 with renewed enthusiasm, having just escaped the most boring year of my life so far?
As an all-or-nothing kind of person, and having kicked a fair few habits in my life, (from biting my nails to ten years of smoking 40 cigarettes a day) I'm well aware of the self-discipline required to make a fundamental change to your life for no other reason than personal desire. But of course that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. I'll be blogging my progress, and aiming to update at least once a week. This will serve not only to record my discoveries of life on the other side and to count down the weeks to my next drink, but also as a reminder that when temptation arises, I have someone other than myself, dear reader, to whom I must account.
To follow the progress of my year on the wagon, visit dry2011.blogspot.com
Welcome aboard.
Rob
