So
Christmas and New Year have finally departed, and I am left with the
usual sensations of guilt entangled with an increasing sense of my
own mortality, and I ask myself, When was the last time I went a whole day without drinking?
Good question, I answer myself approvingly, and am tempted to leave
it there, along with Where
did I leave my Christmas presents?
and How
long will the boiler hold out?
It
nags, though. I'm pretty sure I went at least one day in 2013 without
any alcohol, but that may have been because I was coming round from a
general anaesthetic. I used
to make a point of always taking one day a week off the booze - and
held to it pretty well until the last few years, when the regimen
started to collapse through sheer inanition and, oh yes, when I
started doing Sediment,
at which point it became my duty to neck everything in a spirit of
calm disinterested enquiry, spurred on by authentic slavering greed.
Equally
(I tell myself), in the days when one day in seven was dry, I used to
be able to go and get absolutely shitfaced from time to time, in a
way I am no longer capable of. I mean, I'm just too old to get blind
drunk any more, and in a way I'm grateful. So maybe (I keep telling
myself) it all balances out. But then again. A
whole day without drink.
I
start to get anxious. On the lookout now for symptoms of chronic
alcoholic dependency, I am at once rewarded with this horrible web
page from the BBC: Should there be a word for 'an almost alchoholic'?
Well, the BBC, if indeed it knows, isn't saying what that word might
be. But the timing is so menacing that, like some scaly penitent on
the road to Santiago de Compostela, I immediately draw the only
inference possible and quit drinking for a day, just
to see if I still can.
Actually,
it's more than a day, because I rarely drink at lunchtimes: in
reality it's a forty-five hour dryout from nine at night on a Monday
(when I take my last lachrymose swig of the muscular Jacktone Ranch Shiraz
my Pa-in-Law gave me for Christmas, might as well be called
Testosterone,
so burly and stuffed with fruity armpit overtones is it) to six in
the evening on Wednesday, the day after the day after, when the wine
is allowed to start flowing again. I go to bed in a dim frame of
mind.
Still.
Next day, Tuesday, goes by comfortably enough, not least because I'm
not expecting
to drink until the sunset hour of six p.m. I amuse myself by haunting
another website, Love Your Liver,
which gives me a relatively clean bill of health apart from telling
me I might want to visit my doctor on account of being (reading
between the lines, here) a burgeoning dipsomaniac. This judgement is
of course dependant on the broadly-canvassed idea that there is a
medically correct number of drinkable units of alcohol per
diem,
a notion which PK himself has taken issue with. So while I accept
that I could Love my Liver more by drinking less, I reserve judgement
as to exactly how much less would be more.
Six
o'clock comes and goes, and to my surprise, I still feel fine. In
fact, I carry on feeling fine right up to the moment when I sit down
with my wife to a chicken risotto with roasted asparagus, only to
observe my right hand clutching the empty air where my wine tumbler
normally sits, and feeling, not so much desperation or a fit of the
shakes, but a kind of grief, a moment of pitying nostalgia, as if
remembering a dead pet.
It
passes. We end up watching a DVD of Breaking
Bad,
like everyone else, and retire, about as headachy and querulous as
usual. I sleep averagely badly, but in the morning, feel unfamiliar
and alert. I feel as if my head has been kept overnight in a warm,
dry, cupboard; the dank fuzziness I habitually associate with getting
up, is somewhere else. I also seem to have lost two pounds in weight.
Coincidence?
This
mood continues, interspersed with moments of self-congratulation,
plus an uneasy background nag that it might all be about to end in
tears - crippling withdrawal symptoms, or a kidney stone, or a heart
attack brought on by the sudden depletion of red wine-based
antioxidants. Somehow I seem to have got a freebie: a clearish head,
a small saving in monetary terms, plus mildly heightened self-esteem
- and yet we all know that there are no freebies in life, only
deferred payments.
All the same, it's not going too badly. It's
borderline enjoyable. It would be fair to describe it as a good
thing.
So, now what? I end my prohibition era with some more of the
head-butting Jacktone (I've got another nine bottles to get through),
savouring the unfamiliarity of it all. Should I go on the wagon -
like some people I know - for the rest of the month? Should I just do
it from time to time, when the mood strikes? Should I go back to the
weekly dryout? Should I forget the whole thing? I'm inclined to try
for weekly temperance again, and see if it makes a difference.
How virtuous 2014 is starting to look.
CJ
