Andalucia Steve

 

Normally when I write a blog post it's because I'm triggered about a topic. Something either angers me, amuses me or otherwise appeals to my sense of being a messenger to convey an important idea, as though I'm a frustrated cub reporter for a local newspaper. The opposite is true today. I'm writing about a simple milestone - I've just completed one year without drinking alcohol. Although I've had it in mind to blog about this for several months as the anniversary approached, I feel emotionally indifferent to it and I have no overriding message to get across. Still, here I am, bashing out the first paragraph at the keyboard but maybe if I'm lucky, the catharsis of writing about it may unlock a message for the big wrap-up at the end. Fingers crossed!

My doctor had been badgering me to quit or at least cut down my drinking for as long as I can remember. I dismissed the advice, thinking back to Harold Shand's quote from the movie 'The Long Good Friday' - "When my mum used to have a go at my old man about his boozing, he always used to say ‘If you drink less than your doctor, you're all right.’" Not that I did drink less than my doctor (though I'd heard stories) but this is more illustrative of the flawed rationalization, the classic pub logic that characterised my relationship with booze until recently.

Some weeks later, the results came back. They weren't as bad as I'd feared - no cirrhosis, no permanent liver damage. Yet. That would be the likely outcome if I continued drinking, the doctor explained. But I'd already made my decision. The problem was how to stick to it.

I'd never been without a drink for longer than three months before. I'd often made New Year’s resolutions, or embarked on foolhardy fitness drives in the past, only to find that maintaining these fads is almost impossible. They're impossible because they are necessarily 'displacements' from our normal activity. Just as a stretched spring snaps back when released, habits revert to their default state once the effort to change them fades. The trick seems to be to move the 'balanced' position in one's life but this is easier said than done. If we use the example of a see-saw, if you want to move an item on one side, the item or items on the other side have to move to accommodate the change. In our lives, the items that make up the balance on the other side of the see-saw can be anything - food, money, health, relationships, work, sleep. Any activity in one's life may need some adjustment. I should point out: I’m no life‐coach, just speaking from my own experience. This is how I feel after one year ‘on the wagon.’

Following the advice of one of the many sober influencers on social media, I decided to try to analyse my relationship with booze over the years, its origins and evolution. I certainly had to go back a long way. My parents used to enjoy a bottle of sherry at the weekend and indulged my curiosity about this as a toddler by pouring a glass for me too. The idea common at the time was that this was how the French took the mystery out of alcohol and had fewer problem drinkers in later life. I took to it like a duck to water and couldn't wait for the weekends to come around. In the celebration of things continental (these were still the days of Jeux Sans Frontières after all), as soon as I started work, having wine with dinner became the thing to do, and I explored with gusto the delights of Blue Nun and Liebfraumilch available from the Spar supermarket at the top of the road. Without a doubt though, starting work in the Civil Service really turned a mild interest in alcohol to a ritualistic compulsion.

Back in the ‘80s, when beer was less than two pounds a pint, the pub lunch was almost obligatory. We even nicknamed nearby pubs as "HQ" or the "social club". One afternoon truly felt like an episode of Life on Mars with Gene Hunt. I was having a pub lunch with the team from marketing. They were often out on the road, so having them all back at base was an occasion to celebrate, not that much of an excuse was ever needed! One guy stood up to get a round in and asked everybody what their poison was. The new girl, whose name escapes me, asked for a mineral water. There was an eerie moment of silence as the more weathered members of the group knew this was a less than ideal request. "Fuck off," he said. "I don't buy water. Get a proper drink or have nothing". She acquiesced and changed her order to a G&T. We all breathed again! This was what it was like back then.

Years later, when I ended up in Spain, the cards landed in a weird way and I found myself working on building sites to pay my mortgage. A similar orthodoxy prevailed. We’d meet up in the bar at eight in the morning for a coffee and a shot of whisky, do a day’s work, then head to the pub to drink (without eating) from six until about nine, then do it all again the next day. I gather this used to be the same back in the UK, although one of the guys I knew from those days recently reported back from building sites in blighty lamenting how empty the pubs were on a Friday afternoon, putting it down to the cost. Clearly for all its faults, Neoliberalism is having a positive effect on the health of builders’ livers.

Anyway, leaving the sojourn down memory lane, here I am today handling sobriety as best I can. I don't go to meetings or anything like that. The doctor offered to fix me up, but I figured it would be group therapy in Spanish, so of limited usefulness. I tried anti-depressants for a while, but these made things worse rather than better, so after a month or so I knocked them on the head. I console myself with the notion that I'm not an alcoholic. I can't be. It's not an available condition anymore. Today the medical establishment uses the term ‘Alcohol Use Disorder’, which is supposed to be a person-first, less stigmatising term, though I'm not sure I like the idea of being known as ‘disordered Steve!’ One small thing I do take comfort from is the reaction I get when people learn I haven't had a drink for a year. "Well done," they say, "I couldn't do that" Even people who are on the face of it quite moderate drinkers attribute reverence to the act of not drinking as though the very thought of not being able to have a drink - the concept of prohibition - is completely alien to them. I think something we all share at a deep level is the sense of being naughty and a bit rebellious when indulging in a vice of any kind. If I want to stick two fingers up at society and live life on the edge now I have an ice-cream, where the threat of type-2 diabetes is real!

So at the end of the day, what are the benefits of not drinking? Am I a nicer person? No, I don't think so. If anything I'm even more the judgemental curmudgeon I was before. That became apparent this week when I went to pick up my 'free' recycling bags and had to queue for 15 minutes at the designated town hall office. It seems to have grown to employ four people and is protected by a security guard, such is the unpopularity of the wretched scheme. Despite asking very nicely, the ‘jobsworth’ refused to give me two rolls of biodegradable bin-liners for my refuse (we were allocated two rolls when the infernal scheme started, now we're limited to one). On the way home, I couldn't help grumbling to myself. A roll of bags lasts three months if I'm lucky, so I would have to make this round-trip four times a year to satisfy the town hall recycling zealots. That’s two hours of my limited time on this planet sacrificed on the altar of corporate greenwashing - companies that exploit our planet’s resources without any financial accountability. Oops - see there I go again.

I have however dispelled the myth that it's the late night drinking that induces us to make dubious online purchases. Trust me - stuff still turns up from Amazon and AliExpress that I have only the vaguest recollection of ordering.

The only major benefit that quitting the booze has really made to my life is attention. Being more present means I spend a tad more time on things I would previously have deemed too boring and trivial. As a result I'm making better use of space in my house and time in my day. I had a six-month fight with sleep due to my dopamine system being wrecked to get to this place, but I'm glad I'm here. This couldn't have come at a better time as, and this will sound just a little bit weird, AI has come along on this journey with me, solving problems where previously there would have been roadblocks to progress. I can't help thinking if I'd tried to quit drinking five years ago, before Claude, Grok and ChatGPT were standing by my side as I go into battle against the demon drink, I just might not have made it!