Booze

Or

I Am A Drunkard. I Am Not An Alcoholic. Alcoholics Go To Meetings.

Hmmmm. Where do I start on this one. My first taste of beer was as a kid of 8 or 9. That’s probably as good a place to start as any.

My dad played golf. In fact he was a prominent member of Denton Golf Club near Manchester; committee member and, at one point, the Captain. I used to caddy for him occasionally. This basically meant pulling his trolley of golf clubs about but only at times when I could be bothered. He still caddied for himself half the time, even if I was there.

One afternoon we were back in the clubhouse. I had a coke and a bag of crisps. He had a pint of bitter. I don’t even know what bitter it was although it wasn’t Boddington’s or Robinson’s, it was too dark. It may have been Wilson’s. It was certainly keg (although I didn’t know of such things at the time. This is knowledge that has come retrospectively). Anyway, it was certainly a brown beer, not a light coloured beer like Boddie’s or Robbie’s.

As a kid of 8 or 9 this was the early 70s. Everything was brown, the wallpaper was garish, my mum was wearing hotpants and the Osmond’s were in the charts. If that’s not depressing enough, cask was in its nadir, keg ruled supreme, and CAMRA had only just formed.

I was given a taste of my dad’s beer. It is a taste I will never forget. IT WAS FOUL. How could anybody drink this evil, bitter, fizzy, brown fluid? Eeeeuuuchh!!

Move on several years. It’s now my cousin’s 21^st (or maybe a wedding. I don’t rightly recall). Anyhow, it was a big family event, held in a hotel or some such. My Great Aunt Agnes was freaking me out by saying things like ‘If I were a bit younger I could really go for a lad like you’. I was probably 12-ish. She was 70-ish. I think she scarred me for life. Mind you, I was allowed shandy. Not that canned, pretend shandy that was a soft drink. Oh no! I was allowed ‘real’ shandy. Made with real beer and lemonade. In pints. I think I had three. Probably in an attempt to forget what Great Aunt Agnes had said. At least the lemonade cut through the bitterness of the brown keg beer (Double Diamond?? Watney’s Red Barrel?? Wilson’s again??) and to my untrained palate, made it reasonably palatable. I remember getting a woozy feeling. Not exactly unpleasant, but somehow slightly disconcerting. My dad and my uncle both looked at my eyes and declared me decidedly squiffy as my pupils had dilated. I also remember feeling quite bilious. In subsequent years I’ve learnt that this was the over gassy nature of keg beer and fizzy lemonade. I mentioned the biliousness to my dad, although as a kid of 12 it probably came out as ‘I feel sick’ and consequently spent half an hour wandering the car park trying to walk it off, with my dad next to me saying ‘stick you fingers down your throat’.

Move on another few years. I’m fifteen. I’d started going out with friends. Initially to the youth club disco, latterly, when we had reached fifteen, to The Hyde Away, a pub we could get in to and get served, along with every other underage teenage drinker in Hyde. It was raided regularly, fortunately not while I was there. The jukebox was full of heavy metal, the toilets were full of drugs and the beer was still full of gas. But I was cutting my teeth on real drinking. I was supping pints of bitter in the relatively safe environment of a pub. We weren’t out on the streets, hanging around causing trouble, vandalising bus shelters and park benches, drinking Kestrel lager or Merrydown cider. We went to the pub and then went home.

A year later and now we’re at UMIST. Not studying. Partying. Part of Manchester University during the week, at the weekends it held a rock disco, sporting some fine music and an atmosphere of utter debauchery. Well, what more could a callow youth desire. Beer was about 50p a pint, for hand pulled Boddingtons no less (this at a time when Boddie’s was a good pint, before it had been bought out and the recipe changed). It cost 50p to get in, and I think the return bus fare was about the same. For about £4 you could travel all the way from Hyde to the centre of Manchester (10 miles or more), headbang until your skull fell off, drink until your legs fell off and get back to Hyde with enough change for some chips and gravy. Bliss.

Boddingtons isn’t a very strong beer so I used to drink bitter snakebites. God! they were foul but you didn’t half get pissed quick (and we go on about the youth of today. Nothing changes). It was during the UMIST years that I learnt the art of the tactical chunder; relieving the gaseous symptoms and leaving the system ready for a top up. I guess that’s probably a bit TMI. Sorry!

Forward a few more years. I’d been to agricultural college and passed with……………..well, I passed at least. Passed out once as well, but that’s all in the learning curve and no more than most people get up to. Isn’t it? I couldn’t eat for three days after that adventure. I’d poisoned myself badly on cheap whiskey. I also managed to get wine banned at the dinner table on our French exchange trip for the same incident. Most of the photographs of me at the time feature me with a pint in my hand (or at least surreptitiously hidden behind my back) at the various parties, weddings and other functions I’d attended in my twenties (and even in to my thirties).

So now I’m at work. I’m on a farm in Surrey, not far from Dorking. I lived on my own in a little flat that had once been the security office at the entrance to the old Pains Wessex Schermuly fireworks factory, the land now owned by The Toad (the landowner, thus named because of his resemblance to he of Toad Hall). The flat was warm, dry and not uncomfortable, if a little sparse. But evenings were long and lonely so I started to visit the pub. I had an excuse for just about every night of the week. Friday and Saturday, well it’s the weekend. What do you expect? Sunday? Well the long working week starts tomorrow so let’s extend the weekend as much as we can. So that was Sunday lunch and evening sorted. Monday? Well that’s the start of the week. A pint was needed to keep going through the long dreary week. Tuesday? I never really had an excuse for Tuesday. I still went out though. Wednesday was the middle of the week so a break from work in the evening was required. Thursday? Now we’re almost at the weekend. Might as well get it started now. And so we’re back to Friday. And then I wondered why I was always skint. In fact not just skint but in debt. Work was difficult. Relationships with co-workers and the farm manager were strained, generally because I was hungover and grumpy all day which made me short tempered and an utter joy to be with. I lived in the Deep Dark Pit™. Sadly I dragged those around me in to it as well. I think I might have been a rather horrible person to be around. Put it this way. My nickname on the farm was Mona, basically ‘cos I wasn’t happy unless I was moaning. The morning I woke up and had a whiskey for breakfast was the morning I realised that things were less than peachy. I was drunk, skint and depressed, although I didn’t understand the depressed bit as yet.

Somehow I managed to pull myself together a bit and start to climb out of the Deep Dark Pit™ (again, retrospective knowledge. I didn’t know at the time that I was in the Deep Dark Pit™). I managed to stay at home a few evenings a week. Eventually my bank account turned from red to black and I got myself together enough to find a new job and put to use the Agricultural Diploma I had earned myself a couple of years earlier.

That’s the end of the darkest days in ‘My Struggle with Booze’ as the red tops would have it. Not the end of my struggle though. Maybe someone like me shouldn’t be a CAMRA member but at least I have a real appreciation for the craft required to brew a fantastic pint of ale. I have to watch myself regularly and keep an eye on my consumption. Sometimes it’s easier than others. Staying in during the week is quite easy now, although I go out Morris dancing on Wednesdays. We usually repair to the local for a couple of pints, but I stick to just two before coming home.

I don’t keep bottled beer in the house any more. It’s just too tempting after a bad day to open a bottle or two. And that’s the start of the downward spiral. You have a bad day so you have a drink to cheer yourself up in the evening which leaves you tired and grumpy the next morning so you have another bad day so you have a beer in the evening which makes you feel tired and…………and so on. Been there. Done that. I avoid red wine at all costs. Alcohol is a depressant, red wine doubly so. Well…it is in my case. I can cope with a few beers at the weekend. Give me a glass or two of red wine (which I love) and by Wednesday I’m ready to slit my wrists.

On the whole I’m pretty good at managing my intake although there is a fly that has just landed in the ointment. I need to work out how to flick the fly out. I’ll put you in the picture (and I won’t go on too much longer….honest).

As you may or may not know (and if you’ve been following my blog you will know) that I play whistle at the local music sessions. This is a great excuse to play music, enjoy the company of others and quaff some ale. I can usually play (to my own lowly standard) quite well for the first two pints. In fact as I relax I get better through those first two. Now, as I hit the third, things begin to go awry. To put it simply, my fingers stop working and my breath control vanishes. The resultant noise is, on the whole, rather unpleasant. Now this lack of control is not a problem when either a, driving to the pub (‘cos I have to drive back) or b, playing in a pub that is, putting it diplomatically, not the most salubrious (nuff said). As one of the local establishments has recently closed down the session has relocated to a new venue which, to put it bluntly, is overwhelmingly welcoming. The free jugs of (superb) ale that appear at regular intervals on the tables in front of us are exceedingly welcome. However this is currently playing havoc with my control mechanisms, meaning that rather too much ale is imbibed for my own good. I haven’t got the answer yet but I’m sure one will occur to me soon. 

In the meantime, your answers on a postcard please.