1% A.B.V.
I don’t remember how old I was exactly but I know I was a fucking dumbass, so that narrows it down slightly to anywhere between the ages of five and twenty-three. (For simplicity’s sake I’m going to eyeball it and say I was seven, or eight.) I’d just got home from school. My school – as I now recognise as being some sort of fifties-era idyll in comparison to every other person my age alive – was just up the road from my house, so I was trusted to walk there and back on my own from a young age, like olden days, before child molesters were a thing. And when I got home from it my dad, as he ever was, was on the sofa.
Something was off, this time, though. Dad had his sofa that he shared with the dog, and Mum and I had ours. I think everyone’s dad has a sofa. I do not know if this is something inherent to fatherhood – that the moment a baby is born, scalped with red blood and thin sacs of skin, and cords and screaming and yellow-orange liquids, origin unknown – something within the male psyche clicks and unlocks, and they go home and put A Real Ridge in a sofa cushion or their favourite chair, and they get antsy and agitated when they cannot sit in that chair, if guests are over for example, and they keep the butt ridge deep and maintained, something close to sacrosanct, a Shroud of Turin personal to their own dad-arse. I know I do not yet have this urge. But Dad always had his cushion – to the left of the sofa, to get a better angle on the TV – and this time he was slumped face down across the whole thing, orange and moaning slightly.
‘Dad,’ I said (this was the way I addressed my father). ‘What’s up?’
‘Mmrnnf,’ he said, or something like that.
And I noticed the pint glass he had on the floor, by his trailing hand. Again, you probably had this in your childhood home, but there was a hierarchy of glassware – beakers and tumblers that you, a clumsy boy or girl, were trusted with for your soda or squash; nice glasses, such as you may drink water out of at dinner with the dinner cloth down; then something crisp and crystal that might only be broken out if it was Christmas or a grandma was coming to stay. Dad had his special pint glass out – ornately formed, slightly blue-green in colour, and stemmed, sturdy but elegant at the same time – and it was filled with something see-thru, and sparkling. I was, and remain, a fat sugar-crazed gurgling idiot of a child, and I was jolted and ecstatic to see lemonade – previously considered contraband in our household – on full display.
‘Is that … lemonade?’ I asked him. Dad paused for a second.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That— yes. That is … yes. Lemonade.’
And I drank the lemonade. And it wasn’t lemonade. Dad was drunk.
2% A.B.V.
The thing with having an alcoholic father is you don’t really realise you have an alcoholic father because even when you see other, non-alcoholic fathers, it doesn’t exactly strike you as unusual. (It does not help, of course, that alcoholics are very famously reluctant to admit their alcoholism – I mean it very literally is Step One of The Program for a reason, people don’t cheerfully roll around with an extended hand all ‘Hi!’ and ‘I am an alcoholic! Nice to meet you! Please, if you have any port in the house, fucking hide it from me! My very bones are desperate to drink it!’). I suppose I did not notice anything was different until I was ten, eleven, say: that it wasn’t the usual childhood rite of passage to come home from school before Mum did, to make black coffee for Dad, drunk in the afternoon, to shake him from his slumber, to pat him round the cheeks and try and make him more lucid, to come to. And I didn’t realise, either, that in doing so I wasn’t doing it out of any particular care for him, but rather for me: that making my dad sober, or at least a hollow impression of sobriety, meant the house might go an evening without an argument about how drunk he is, and I would have a more peaceful life as a result of it. Draw a string from my dad cracking a cold one at noon on the dot and me in my room, cross-legged and playing Megadrive, trying to get Sonic through the Chemical Plant Zone and failing because the people downstairs keep shouting. My motivations were, as they ever are, very selfish. I never beat Robotnik and I squarely blame my father.
3% A.B.V.
He was dead at 15 (I was 15, not him) and I suppose you can blame the drink. I’ve been thinking about it for half my life now and I’m not sure I exactly do. He was found, prone and backwards, lifeless in his council flat, and for a while I thought he might have died while pissing, like a sort of unglamorous Elvis – the last time I’d seen him, he had a golf-ball-sized purple lump on the dome of his head, where, losing his balance while having a drunk mid-afternoon wee, he’d collapsed backwards and hit his head squarely on a jutting electrical socket directly in the hallway behind. ‘Maybe this is how Golbys die,’ I thought. ‘Ridiculously.’
But no, he’d died the normal way: his liver, fatty and engorged from years of cheap cider-shaped abuse, finally failed, and the rest of his body crumpled along with it. He and my mum had split a couple of years earlier – the arguments with the drink finally spiralling to breaking point, just as his marriage to his first wife had before me – and he ricocheted from one council flat to another, losing weight, incrementally, losing lucidity, growing ever less like a human being and more and more like a phantom. I never really knew him, I don’t think. I only ever knew a symptom of a disease. When I ask people what he was like their eyes fill with a sort of sparkling joy when they tell me how bright he was, how talented, his eye for a photo, the art he could produce, the way he could do anything, really, if he put his mind to it. When I was nine or ten every boy at my school and I got simultaneously obsessed with penknives – so intricate! So many blades in one small space! So useful! Toothpicks! – and, to stave me off buying an actual knife and inevitably stabbing myself with it, he crafted me one out of wood: a balsa blade, slotting neatly into an off-shoot of curtain rod, fixed in place with a wooden peg so I could still flick it and softly threaten people with it. I played with it endlessly one summer. He could fix my lust for knife violence. Why couldn’t he fix himself?
4% A.B.V.
Dad died at the age everyone at school got into alcohol and fingering, so he stole my formative drinking years away from me, because to be honest I associated alcohol with arguing and death, and that’s a real boner-kill when you’re trying to pass a bottle of Strongbow round a park with a group of your peers and do some artless hand-stuff with them (‘Hey wow, a great long chug of the poison that killed my dad – thanks!’ No.). This continued throughout my late teen years, and sort of pushed me to the edges of it a bit: my friends, a tight knot of whom have seen me through every major event of my life, were dabbling in beer, and weed, and clubbing, and getting off with girls, and I was just sort of very quietly eating pizza and staying in on Friday watching Robot Wars and scrolling through internet bulletin boards. Would I have fucked before the age of 20 if my dad hadn’t died? No. You can’t blame everything on your dead dad, you soft nerd.
5% A.B.V.
I don’t remember my first beer, precisely, and I don’t remember the first time I got drunk, either: often, people with that love–hate relationship with booze seem to be able to remember with remarkable clarity that first sparkling sip of it, how it danced on the tongue, how suddenly the pieces seemed to click into place, how they knew – right then – that this would be a long and stormy friendship. I remember my mum used to come home from nights out dancing – when I was old enough to be left alone in an evening and she was trying to piece her social life back together after the explosion of death through it, she would announce that she was ‘out boogying’ that night and spend like six hours getting ready for it, a cloud of perfume and that lipstick smell, leaving the house in a sparkly top, and then me, alone, with money for a pizza – and got in the habit of bringing me a single drink, drip-feeding it to me, hoping I would get the taste for it but not the thirst. Once she came home when I was still up – Vanishing Point with Viggo Mortensen was on late-night TV and I had decided it was the greatest film ever made about driving your car for 90 minutes until you died – and she thrust at me an Irn-Bru flavoured vodka WKD, which I sat and drank while Viggo drove himself full pelt into concrete, and I thought: I feel nothing. This does nothing for me. As origin stories go, it’s not a good one.
6% A.B.V.
When I was younger I was constantly paranoid that I would succumb to The Disease. It ran in my family, I was told – a cousin had struggled with it when I was a kid, distant grandparents ‘liked a tipple’, my sister quit abruptly when I was college-aged – and I always assumed I would take a sip of beer once and then one day, boom, wake up 40 years later, dazed and deranged on the sofa. One time, when Dad was out, Mum and I emptied an old cupboard, where we’d stored a case of continental beers left over from a New Year’s Eve party (these are the beers mums buy for guests when they don’t want them to at all drink beer, and so are always leftover, and in fact if you have a garage right now there is almost certainly at least 80% of a case of them left there, whether you bought them here or not: tiny 200ml brown-glass bottles of sour lager that are near impossible to enjoy, entirely useless things). Only, they weren’t: when we looked closer we noticed every lid had been carefully pried off the bottles, which had been drunk and filled with water again then put back. Alcoholics do this, with booze, like cats kick their sand over shit: hide it, disguise that it ever happened, the flawed logic of a drunken fool. Can you imagine being that desperate for a beer that you would do that? I watched Mum heave the case onto the kitchen counter and dust her hands in preparation for the bollocking to come, and I thought: that’ll be me, one day. Drinking beer and pretending I didn’t. (Dad’s excuse, by the way, was: ‘Maybe that’s how the shop sold them to us. You should complain.’ He maintained this for over an hour. He even lifted the beer up and made motions to walk it back up the hill to Lidl before he gave up and promised to go to AA, again.)
7% A.B.V.
Every guide I read before I went to university told me that Freshers’ Week was a sort of bacchanalian week – days of excess, where I would drink and fuck and make friends and fuck and drink and join a rugby club? For some reason? And fuck and drink and fuck and fuck and fuck and drink and fuck. The pamphlets mostly lied. Week One I was the victim of some sort of accounting error that meant my loans didn’t come in, so I was living off a £20 note my mum left for me, and in the end bought one beer at an English department meet-up, vaguely hoping I would like the taste, more so hoping it would push me far out of my social comfort zone into the free-talking cool guy I always suspected I would become one day and never did, more so than that, hoping it would push me through various developmental stages of pubescence during the course of one 500 ml bottle and make me brave enough to talk to the tall brunette I spent the next three years silently lusting after – but never, very crucially, ever talking to – on my course. It didn’t. I looked down at the bottle – Spitfire Amber Kentish Ale, I remember very vividly – dark and brown and nutty, foamy but not fizzy, out in the car park on a hill behind what would become the English dept go-to pub, looking out dark across the channel that separated mainland Wales from the island of Anglesey, perched from my position on the path towards an unillustrious 2.1 from Bangor University. It was cold, and the beer was sort of lukewarm, and there were no fuzzy lights or agitations to speak to anyone, and I kind of looked at everyone else jealously – they were all of them in the same smoking corner, bathed in yellow-white light and soft and relaxed with drunken giggles, and though they were a few yards over they may as well have been a million miles from me – and after that I went back to my dorm and ate three apples and went to sleep. Maybe I’d never catch the bug, I thought, for better or worse. Maybe I’d be alright.
8% A.B.V.
You can make chilli vodka a variety of ways but the way The Skerries in Bangor, North Wales makes it is like this: dozens, hundreds of dried chillies, left in a demijohn for months, years maybe, occasionally topped up with the most methylated clear vodka they can find. Nobody orders this shot because they don’t want to die. The Skerries in Bangor, North Wales is an old man pub with a tatty pool table and fuzzy corner-mounted TVs showing uninteresting continental football and red-pink-faced men shouting catastrophically in Welsh. It does not like two boys who have spent the afternoon drinking cider crashing through that delicate atmosphere, ruining it. That is why they give them the shot.
By Year #3 of university I had discovered drinking. I do not recall where, exactly, or when – I remember a giddy, gleeful realisation that I was drunk one summer evening, sat next to my friend David after what must have been two or three pints of fizzy lager, euphoric with this odd new feeling (my arms were … wow! My … wow! I … my head was … ha-ha, wow!) – but when it became a regular habit I don’t know: the tracks imperceptibly slipped, and I switched from one to another, and I never saw the join, like a skilled magician had guided it with unseen hands. I was living with a housemate who had two medical strikes against him – an allergy to gluten and a stewing, nascent alcoholism – and we would rail cases of cider together, splitting them halfway down the middle, to accommodate his allergy. ‘If I get beer, I’ll bulge up and go all red,’ he would say, and I would look at him – bulged up, red – and think: hmm, okay. We would take semi-weekly trips to a pharmacist to pick up his doctor prescribed carbohydrates – crumpets, breads – then stagger back with heavy bags of them, deciding on the way that we deserved a pint.
The Night We Got Shot was a big one. We’d started early – splitting a case of Strongbow Dark Fruits between us, cracking the first can a little past noon, then staggering up to the off licence a few hours later for another. Friends texted us to say they were in a nightclub further up the town and that we should join them, and we decided to go: not changing from the jumpers and sweats we’d been drinking in all day, instead downing our cans and grabbing one for the road and staggering to The Skerries, the nearest pub to our house. ‘One shot, please!’ we said at the bar, and the barmaid said: of what? And we said: ‘Surprise us!’ And that was our first mistake.
The plan was to dip into every bar along the high street and have a shot in each, but that went out of the window as soon as the chilli vodka hit. The thing is, it didn’t hurt at first: we made it maybe a hundred yards before the searing started, first in our mouths and then in our throats and guts, a sort of delayed pain I imagine (Kill) Bill experienced after the Five Point Exploding Heart technique, chest pumping and burning at the same time, tears streaming, snot just everywhere. There was a thin rain in the air, and we held our tongues up to it for solace: ‘MILK!’ we were crying, trying to gulp down drops of water from the clouds, ‘WE NEED MILK!’ One of us vomited in a bin. I think every hardened drinker has a story where they ruined, forever, one drink for the rest of their lives – some recoil at the smell of tequila, some can’t do red wine after a sickness with it, some even beer – but that’s the one for me. Not, oddly, chilli vodka. Waking up with the sickly medicine-fruit smell of Dark Fruits Strongbow in my house was enough to put me off it for life. Every time I see a can of it I am transported back to Bangor, back ten years again: me, alone, rain sodden, hands on the rim of a bin, begging an unyielding god for a sweet cold taste of milk.
9% A.B.V.
When I turned 18 my mum threw me a party, which was her way of getting out of buying me actual, proper presents. When your mum throws you a party it’s very rarely the party you want, exactly: me and all my boyish mates were confined to the house’s front room, where we played N64 and had arguments about whether the Foo Fighters were good or not, while at the front of the house a bunch of my mum’s grown-up friends, plus an occasional handful of family, were milling around a buffet. Occasionally I was dragged forth to be shown off to my mum’s work friends like some large, dumb prize – ‘An 18-year-old boy! A large, hearty boy! I made that!’ – then sloped off with a paper plate full of lasagne and birthday cake to go and get sugar-high and rowdy with my mates. When you turn 18 it’s not for you, really. It’s just an occasion where your mum can remember that time she turned her body inside out for you, the agony, the agony, and now look: you made it to adulthood, sort of, you might yet turn into something, all the gore and stitches might one day prove to be worth it.
I barely saw my mum that day – my teenage moodiness clanged against her life-of-the-party electricity – but when she said goodbye to some friends and stopped outside the front gate to have a fag I briefly joined her. ‘I might have a beer,’ I said, and she nodded. ‘Well. You are 18.’ I looked to my friends, inside, yelling at an ageing copy of Mario Kart, seemingly deep in a well of fun I couldn’t quite tap into. ‘I might get drunk.’ And she stopped for a second, and looked at me, and it wasn’t begging, exactly, in her voice – it was something more fragile than that – but it was weak, and naked, and human. ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘Please.’ And she flicked her cigarette out into the road and walked inside.
10% A.B.V.
So I just woke up one day and my tooth was chipped. My tooth was chipped. My tooth! Was chipped. My tooth! You know how many teeth you get? Not many. Run your tongue across the front of your teeth. Are they chipped? No. Exactly. Mine is. Right side, front and centre, slight chip along the base. It’s wild how much a small chip can throw off the feel of your whole mouth: once so pure, so smooth, like an inverse of a pebble, and now just a slight snag of jaggedness, lingering there, something you could catch a strand of cotton on. My tooth, forever chipped. I surveyed the room around me – blankets tied around my legs like a knot, the air in here warm and close, the whole room smelling like my breath, clothes discarded and thrown slumped in the wardrobe, all the signs of high drunkenness – and thought back: where was I last night? In the same pub we always went to after work. But why did— oh, right, yeah. Around my third or fourth pint I’d really swung the glass up to my face – that’s thirst, baby – and clicked it against my front tooth. I guess it had chipped then. I ran my tongue along it again, sharp enough to just cut the flesh. Fuck. I cried a bit then got up and brushed what was left of my teeth and washed my face, then pulled on last night’s jeans and headed to work. My dad’s drinking injuries were always so extreme – the golf ball, the time he fell face-first down some train station steps and shattered his nose and his camera, that time his liver failed and he died – so I guess I got off lightly. But I still had to get off the bus halfway in and vomit on the side of the street. There was still a golf-ball-sized bulge on my dignity.
11% A.B.V.
People tell me I am a very charming drunk. My eyes go heavy-lidded and I have a placid smile on my face, and I really lean into the tell-people-what-you-really-think-of-them ‘you know what, mate? I love you. And above that I respect you’-type pub chat, and I’m generous getting the rounds in and I’m not afraid to keep the party going if it starts to sag, and most importantly I’m me but with a few knots untied – day-to-day I can be quite uptight, a clenched fist vs my drunk version’s open palm, day-to-day I can be tense and unapproachable, throwaway jokes sometimes come out mean and unnecessarily cutting. And then I’m drunk, and the gears shift down, and everyone likes me more. ‘Hey,’ they say, everyone, in one perfect chant in unison (this is how I remember it, sober remembering drunk). ‘Fun Joel Is Here!’ Apart from one goth kid’s brother, once, at a bar in Chesterfield where he really wanted to fight me. And one extremely gnarly bouncer at a field in Leeds Festival that one time. A Deliveroo driver punched me quite recently, in front of some girls. But other than those three times and no other times at all: I think everyone likes me when I’m drunk, more so than they do when I’m not. Which, I suppose, if you think about it for more than one second, is part of the problem.
12% A.B.V.
My sister’s mum was coming to stay. I’d just broken up with a girl and had to move house in a hurry and needed somewhere stable where I could write (this.) (this book.) and my sister was going on holiday and her mum had already agreed to house-sit for them so there was me, 30-year-old child-boy relentlessly checking his ex’s Instagram account 30 or 40 times a day, and then there was my sister’s mum, 70+ and new to Slimming World and the recipes therein (the key lime pie? Not bad!), and we were in a weird Odd Couple situation for a week or five days sharing a house and tending to the house and the cats in it, and then in the evenings we would eat vegetable stir-fry together and silently watch QI. And then one night I was like Hey, What Was My Dad Like, and she was like, Oh—
It’s funny, actually, she said. She said: he was a brilliant man, really. He was a producer, when he had a career, a big player on the nascent advertising scene in London in the seventies. A golden boy, for a while. He could have done whatever he wanted. He had big offers from advertising houses all across Europe. And then he sort of … fucked it up.
And I am thinking: I hope my book goes well I hope my book goes well—
She said: he just sort of, got carried away with himself. And then the drink set in, obviously. He lost a job directly because of his drink problem: even in advertising, seventies London advertising, he drank too much. He drank too much for the advertising industry to deal with. And then they had to move from the house they had in London – they had to sell it, she said, and she looked up how much it would be worth now and it made her shit – and out to Devon, back where she was from, and then he started to get worse: to make ends meet he was working in a pub, which wasn’t ideal, bumbling home happy-drunk across country fields in the yellow–orange haze of a late summer sunset. And to think that, just a few months ago, he had been thriving, top of the world, a big hitter, a happy marriage with a young daughter. And now he was here. All his dreams shattered and no agitation to change.
And I thought: god I hope the book goes well god I hope the—
And things fell apart for them, a bit, afterwards. And he sort of moved back to London – he was sleeping on friends’ sofas for a bit – but he never got back to where he was. And I thought of the man I knew – chronically unemployed, yellowing slightly, quite often snoozing lazily on the same sofa he used to sleep on, ruining another relationship in slow motion with his refusal to quit. And I looked at myself – single, beer with dinner, at the height of my personal success but also everything balanced perilously on a knife edge, it could all tumble beneath me, I could be the Jenga block that topples the tower it sits under – and said: ha-ha, ha. Ha-ha. That’s really funny.
13% A.B.V.
For some reason I remember vividly the moment I realised I could just, like, buy a can. I was about 22, living in a shared flat in London but feeling alone about it, and I was doing my usual Friday night routine – home on the bus to an empty flat, nine episodes of Seinfeld and a chippy tea – when I realised, at the shop opposite, I could just: buy a can. Like: I could buy a can of beer. And nobody could stop me doing that. I didn’t need to be at a party. I didn’t need to be at a show. I could just: buy a can. I bought three, drank them alone with dinner, and thought: I have the greatest creative mind in the universe. I just invented nirvana.
The ethnic make-up of Chesterfield is basically entirely working-class white apart from an old Italian community (there are: two Italian restaurants), a small Indian/Pakistani following and, after a brief swell of immigration in the mid-aughts, a bustling Polish population. I never quite understood what it was that drove Poles here, exactly: I was English and didn’t want to be there, much less travel across Europe for the chance of it, and most people outside the county didn’t even know the town was there: how did Poland hear about it? And I had been to Poland, too: it’s beautiful, and the pints cost £1, and they eat fat lumps of pork for every meal, surrounded either by high gothic architecture or rolling verdant hills, and I could quite happily live there, perhaps becoming a Legia Warsaw ultra, take a firm-faced Polish wife who hated me and everything I stood for. Why they came here – where the main thing in town was two Wetherspoons and a Frankie & Benny’s – always baffled me to my core.
The point is when we – just about post-teenagers, thirsty boys with our first jobs and our first few flushes of cash and a hankering for a party – realised that the new Polish shop on West Bars offered the strongest vodka in town, and, well. We just had to see it for ourselves.
The tradition was this: every payday, we would all throw £20 into a kitty, and then walk clatter down town to The Polish Shop, then group in front of the counter staring at the vodka selection and saying ‘errr?’ for half an hour until someone took pity on us and helped us. We drank Zubrowka that way, Wyborowa. Lubuski and Soplica. We had a muddy-looking vodka that came served to us in the shape of a glass cockerel, its head coming off at the top like a shot glass. We tried herbal liqueurs and intensely concentrated fruit mixers. And then one day we came in and the shopkeeper looked both ways then went back, and I saw what he had in his hands and heard angels sing: Spirytus Duch Pusczczy, rectified spirit. The label literally had a ghost on it. A tiny half-litre bottle that would cost us most of our stash. But there, on the label, bold as brass: 95% A.B.V.
Rule #1, the shopkeeper told us, keeping both hands firmly on the bottle like it was a mogwai about to go crazed if fed after midnight: Rule #1 is, you don’t drink it neat. Rule #2: you only have half-shots of it, never full (the cocktail he suggested was a Mad Dog, which is a half-shot of spirit, half-shot of blackcurrant liqueur and a shot of Tabasco: a shot that somehow manages to burn you three ways at once). Rule #3: keep it in the freezer at all times, to … well, to hide the taste. You don’t want to taste this, boys. It tastes bad. And Rule #4 is please stop coming to my shop.
Memories get fuzzy after this because – to reiterate – what I was drinking was 95% proof, which is essentially what Russian governments use to kill people. I remember our friend’s younger brother telling us he was training in judo and was a reformed Christian, so we made him do high kicks in the garden until he fell on his tailbone and cursed God. I remember having one Mad Dog, then another. Then … I want to say I had six more? Deep dark night fell around us. My friend Party (we called him Party because he liked to Party) was looking a little worse for wear, and so I volunteered myself to walk him home. ‘I reckon I’m the most sober one here, anyway,’ I told the party. ‘I’ll sort him out.’
The walk to Party’s house takes about 20 minutes each way but records on file from the time tell me I was gone somehow for two hours. At some point his brother, the Christian, spied some roadworks up ahead and sprinted towards them, clanging his fist on a shipping container that had been left there. Dogs barked, a cul-de-sac of lights came on around us. ‘What,’ I asked him, ‘what in the fuck are you doing?’ And he turned to me with deep, real fear in his eyes and told me: The Devil’s In There.
And I said what, in there. That’s a bulldozer mate. It’s not The Devil.
And he said: It’s The Devil. In there. I know.
And he pounded on the container – more dogs, more lights – shouting ‘I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE’, before turning his ear to the still-ringing metal and going: oh, no. My bad.
He said:
There’s nothing in there at all.
When I got back to the party things were starting to peter out, so I went to get another Mad Dog to steady my nerves. My friend Chris stopped me. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you know you’re not actually speaking, when you’re trying to do speaking?’ He explained: ‘You’ve basically been making just animal sounds for a few hours now. I didn’t know quite how to tell you.’ I agreed with him that it was probably time to go home (‘AUGHHGH! YUAUAHGHH!’ – me) and I woke up at 3 p.m. the next day with my head ringing like a clanged bell. Even my mum, who liked to treat my more regular hangovers with the delicacy they deserved – i.e. dropping every pan she owned loudly on the floor of the kitchen while yelling ‘GET UP!’ – knew to leave me alone, so deathly ill I looked. I tried to turn over once in bed and straight up vomited. I tried to watch a Steve Carrell film and nearly sobbed. I was essentially paralysed for 24 straight hours after that one. Was it worth it? I nearly saw The Devil in a shipping container, mate. Hell yes it was worth it.
14% A.B.V.
There’s a very particular clang that a bin full of empty cans makes when you decant it into a garbage bag. A clang on top of another clang. A very hollow, empty sort of clang – not a deep clang, like a gong, or a high alarming clang like a school bell – something weaker, more pathetic. I suppose I had emptied my bedroom bin out eight, ten times before I noticed. Man, I thought. I drink a lot of cans. After mum died I didn’t really notice it but I started drinking more – something in the fuzzy, liminal space between my conscious and unconscious would tell me ‘Hey, who’s gonna tell you off about it?’ – and my intake increased. At first I didn’t notice it – the routine would be, in a house full of boys, that everyone would come up to my room to drink beer and play videogames. But then there were those odd Tuesdays where no one was home but me. The times near the ends of the month where I would decant change out of my change jar and take it to the shop to buy as many singular cans as I could afford. I got into Desperados, which is a cheap lager sweetened and strengthened with a shot of tequila, which I can now no longer stand. A relationship crumbled around me without me noticing. I got fat as fuck. And still I didn’t really notice how unhealthy my bin-bag situation was. Clank, clank. A very specific noise of one empty beer can falling against another. There’s no other noise like it. It was the sound of the monster tiptoeing in.
15% A.B.V.
I’ve had enough periods of sobriety now that I can see it less like a fun sort of challenge (I now understand my own psychology enough to know that I am electrifyingly turned on by maintaining streaks of good behaviour: if I weigh myself every day, or stick to a gym routine, or ride my bike five days a week, or don’t eat meat for a fortnight. If I ever need to do something, I just need to give myself a time-dependent deadline on when I can do it again, and then I can abstain.) and can actually pull out enough and self-examine why I do drink when I do. Fundamentally it’s because it relaxes me: two pints in and the muscles in my shoulders unclench, my posture loosens, my heart rate slows, I flush gooey and warm, I talk more and without any mental gatekeeping on what I’m saying or who I’m saying it to. That’s fine, but it’s also possible to relax without putting two pints of very mild poison in your body (like: read a book, my guy. Have a warm cocoa and a snooze.), and learning that was a steep curve. Drinking to grease the rigid wheels of my own personality felt like a losing battle, so I also edited the amount I was drinking on nights when I was: switching from cans to bottles, pints to halves, pacing myself with soft drinks in between. Being drunk became less like the goal and more like the happy side effect: instead of racing after a hurricane I was falling backwards into a warm, soft swimming pool. You can do a lot of things drunk – charm, flirt, be funny, be open, be open to adventure, vomit in a bin, dance – and it’s entirely possible to do all those things sober, too. Literally the only thing in the world you have to be drunk for first is karaoke. Everything else can be done after pounding a load of Diet Cokes.
16% A.B.V.
Friends have gone sober, and my attitude towards them has gone from hard to soft with it. In my early twenties, my friend Paul did a month off alcohol, and I was incredulous – ‘Why, though? Why?’ – and he shrugged and said: to see if I can do it. And later, when I tried it myself, I understood: it’s a feeling, of control and regulation, one my dad never got to feel and I did, and there’s a curious powerful buzz to that. It helps that your skin clears, your sleep loosens, you lose that puff of extra weight, you have more money at the end of the month. I never had the actuality to analyse just how much alcohol was affecting my mood until, six weeks into a stretch of sobriety, my friend remarked how much he had been on it lately and how run down he was feeling as a result. ‘It’s probably all those litres of depression juice you pour into your body,’ I said, and despite being the world’s most sanctimonious hypocrite, I was mostly right: unmoderated alcohol input leads to a tight, spiralling, subverted feeling of unhappiness, one that’s very hard to shake. But sobriety is the calm eye of a raging storm, and in my case it’s still underpinned by fear: in real life I am pathologically, near serial killer-levels of calm and composed, but internally the way my thoughts bend and lean towards alcohol lean to chaos. In bed, in the blue-black darkness, six weeks clear of a beer, fingers kneading against each other as I drop into a pure dreamless sleep, I sit and wonder – what if I’m not as in control as I think I am? What if it’s all a ruse drunk-me is pulling on myself? And then I can’t shift it. And then I can’t stop thinking about it.
0.5% A.B.V.
At first I started for a month to see if I could do it, then I read somewhere that that in itself is a sign of alcoholism, so then I extended it to two months, then ten weeks, to avoid that particular pothole. The thing is when you’re not drinking people get incredulous about it so you need to come up with some excuses to sidestep any uncomfortable situations that might arise (you can only pretend you are on antibiotics, ‘which will react very violently, with me, just vomit everywhere, honestly, the worst, so yes a Diet Coke is fine please’, for so long). One way I word it is by saying, ‘Oh, I’m not drinking … at the moment.’ It opens up this distant possibility that one day you will snap and go rage on the beers and tequilas and lines again, and you will open up and once again become fun, and not that the lid is tightly on you, forever, now. Another good tactic I’ve found is to order non-alcoholic beer, because holding it and drinking it and clinking it against others beers in a cheers-formation feels better, tickles the same synapses, as actually drinking does. I go bursts of not drinking, now: a couple of months here, a fortnight there, a big night out now and again. The worst realisation is, somewhere between 11 p.m. and midnight, everyone starts chatting shit: talking in circles, the same tired anecdote stretched long and repeated, awful, and they just want to keep going, everyone forgets every normal social cue, friends stop noticing you are disinterested hours before you can leave them. At a party at my house recently I went to bed at 1 a.m., clarifyingly sober, and when I got up at half-three for a 0.5% beer-induced piss there was a friend, on my sofa still, alone, fiddling with the AUX chord, looking for that one song, no honestly mate, you have to listen to this one precise song right now. I don’t think I’ll ever go sober-sober – too much of my social life, for better or worse, is tied in with drinking and going to the pub – but I’ve managed to screw the bottle from a different angle, now: I can say no to a beer, I never drink alone, I know when to order myself a taxi home, I haven’t shattered one of my front teeth in ages. I call it running alongside the wagon: knowing when to hop on, when it is good for me to stop, when I need the mental breathing room. But also being able to jog alongside it enjoying a cool beer on a hot day.
0% A.B.V.
The one interesting thing about me, I tell girls on dates, is my birth was registered in a pub. You have 42 days to register the birth of a child in the UK, is the thing. And on Day 41, so the legend goes, my dad – instead of, like, phoning every registry office in the south London area – went to his local pub and loudly moaned about the situation to anyone who would listen. ‘There’s a massive fine,’ he said. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Inexplicably, this tactic worked: I’m a registrar, a man three stools down said, and wherever my special registrar ink and registrar pen and registrar paper goes, well, that’s a registry office. And my dad said: ‘If I meet you here and lunchtime tomorrow and buy you a pint, could you register my large illegal son?’ And the man thought for a moment and said: yes.
And so in the bright August sunshine, in the beer garden of Peckham’s Clockhouse pub, so it came to pass: Yung Joel Golby, 42 precious little days old, soft and pink and snoozing, was legitimised under the eyes of the law. Apparently a circus walked past during the ceremony, which didn’t move me. Apparently everyone got drunk. I slept through it. And I think of that, sometimes: the great irony, that I was birthed and notarised in the same liquid that would blight my life, forced under a curse that would never truly be lifted, and that 30 years later, I’m still struggling with it today. That my dad clinked ciders with men he’d lose touch with when he moved away from here to die. That my mum sat there and watched, not knowing what doom this spelled for us all. ‘Raise a glass,’ my dad said, ‘to my son,’ and the people cheered. How little they would know. How little they would know.