One for my editor and one for the road
I woke yesterday wishing that alcohol had never been discovered, and vowing that I would never touch another drop. It is the same every morning of my life. Only the most serious drinkers, such as me, know the utter devastation of mind and body that goes with a true humdinger of a hangover: the clammy skin, the bilious stomach and that all-consuming sense of desolation and self-loathing that makes us long for the end of the world.
In the depths of my depression, I knew exactly what my masters would say when I arrived at the office: "That Tom Utley is always in the pub. Let's get him to write about binge drinking." Reader, I was right.
There was a time when the great majority of journalists were more or less permanently sozzled. We told ourselves that it had something to do with the way we had to work - the hours of idleness, waiting for something to happen, followed by terrifying bursts of intense mental activity against the clock. We liked, too, to think of our visits to the pub as an essential part of our job: where better to exchange ideas and to hear what was going on in the world? These days, however, the culture of journalism seems to have changed.
Perhaps it has something to do with our move from Fleet Street, or the extra workload of having to fill ever-fatter papers. Whatever the reason, only a few of us stalwarts remain to keep up the old Lunchtime O'Booze traditions.
By all the definitions that I have read, I am a binge-drinker on a heroic scale, consuming many more than the Government's recommended weekly maximum number of "units" every day of my life. Yet I refuse to acknowledge that the description fits me. I know that being "in denial" is said to be one of the tell-tale signs of alcoholism, as it used to be taken as irrefutable evidence of being a witch. But I do not deny that I am an alcoholic (which makes me think that I may not be one). All I deny is that I am a binge-drinker, in the sense in which the expression is now used.
I like to think that my reasons for drinking such a lot (apart from the obvious one that I am addicted to alcohol) are very different from those of the lager louts who cause so much mayhem in our city centres on Friday and Saturday nights.
I drink to open the flood gates of words, when I am stuck for something to say on the page or to the fellow guest to whom I have just been introduced at a party. I drink to celebrate when I have written an article with which I am pleased, and to forget when I have written or said something of which I am ashamed. During the week, I drink to psyche myself up. At the weekend, I drink to relax. I drink to relieve the intense boredom of modern life, when Big Brother is on the telly, the boys are fighting and the papers are full of depressing stories about suicide bombers.
As TS Eliot observed (or so I have just been told by somebody in the pub): "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." Homer Simpson, that even greater sage, summed it all up brilliantly when he said: "Mmmm! Beer! The cause and cure of all life's problems!"
One of the extraordinary properties of alcohol is that its effects - on me, at least - are so very hard to predict. Sometimes, it makes people belligerent (I have a friend who worked himself up into such an alcoholic fury the other night that when his mini-cab driver asked him where he wanted to go, he snarled back: "I'm not telling!")
Whisky used to have that effect on me, more often than not, which is why I hardly ever drink it any more. At other times, it makes us maudlin and over-affectionate. The only thing that I can say with certainty, since I have my wife's testimony for it, is that drink always makes me staggeringly boring. But that is one of the most powerful arguments for drinking: there is no misery more profound than being stone-cold sober in the presence of a drunken bore, who thinks that he is the wittiest and most charming fellow on the planet.
Where I differ most markedly from the people I think of as binge-drinkers is that I never go to the pub with the intention of getting drunk (the determination to stay for "just the one" is itself the mark of an alcoholic, according to a friend who has long since dried out).
Nor do I ever throw up or make much of a row when I am drunk - although I have been known on occasion to treat my fellow customers to a tearful verse or two of Kevin Barry. Above all, I can put my hand on my heart and swear that I have never hit anybody, or felt the slightest temptation to do so, while I have been in my cups.
Yet tens of thousands of young people pour into our city centres every weekend, with no other purpose in mind than to get hog-whimperingly drunk. Many of them know, with complete certainty, that, before the night is out, they will be vomiting in a gutter or queueing up in A&E to have their heads stitched. It is a total mystery to me how this can be anybody's idea of a good night out. If only these people drank more during the week, perhaps they wouldn't behave like this at the weekend.
I don't pretend to know what the consequences will be of the Government's plan to allow pubs to stay open 24 hours a day. I have no truck with those who want to restrict licensing hours for the sake of protecting us drinkers from ourselves. But I have every sympathy with those who fear that their lives will be made a misery by rowdy drunks, caterwauling and brawling through the night.
By far the most sensible suggestion, I reckon, is that we should wait and see what happens, and then leave it to local licensing authorities to decide what is best for the people in their area.
Well, there's another column, done and dusted. Time for just the one, I reckon. But I have a sneaking feeling that I'll regret it in the morning.
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