I can see clearly now

In the next fortnight, millions of us will roll into work bleary-eyed - or just call in sick. Sean O'Hagan won't be one of them. After two teetotal years, he reflects on what he misses about drinking - and what he's gained

Saturday December 14 2002
The Guardian
 

Once, when confronted by a non-drinker, the late Dean Martin quipped: 'So, you get up in the morning and that's the best you feel all day?' Back in the days when non-drinkers made me nervous, I used to quote that one a lot. It's a great line, but I can see now that, like most alcohol-soaked wisdom, it is utterly bogus. It simply and conveniently inverts logic to suit the worldview of the lush. It took me nearly 30 years, though, to suss that one out.

These days I can safely say that one of the great things about not drinking is - getting up in the morning. No throbbing head, no parched throat, no sandpaper dry mouth. No queasy stomach, no vague sense of dread, no ragged conscience. It took me 30 years to figure that one out, too. Luckily, it was the same 30 years. That's three decades, though; well over a third of my allotted life span, the whole long, interesting stretch from adolescence to middle-age. Three decades of heartaches and hangovers to realise that if I didn't fall comatose into bed with all my clothes on the night before, I wouldn't wake up feeling like shit the morning after. I wouldn't need two Nurofen, a can of Coke, and several strong black coffees to kick-start the day. I wouldn't, on a bad one,  stare at the phone for half an hour before ringing around to apologise or make excuses for the night before.

'Tis the season to be legless, of course. In the next two weeks, 75 per cent of the population will be pissed way beyond their normal state at least once, and an estimated 2 million people will be ringing in sick because they are too hungover to make it to work. The other 25 per cent, me including, will be watching in horror.

Christmas is a scary time for non-drinkers: it means pressure to partake, and taking care of the inebriated; it means going to parties where, clear-headed, you witness the full extent of the seasonal drinker's ability to operate in a zone way beyond the further reaches of embarrassment. The teenage trainee snogging the middle-aged lawyer; the editor on his knees, shirt off, playing air guitar to 'Layla'; the drunk comatose on the pavement who, on closer inspection, turns out to be your boss. (I only made one of those up.) Christmas (and New Year) is the season of undiluted chaos: Saturday night on the razzle stretched out for a fortnight.

If I had to choose one word to describe my life before I stopped drinking, it would be 'chaotic'. If I had to choose one word to describe my life since, it would be 'slower'. That, initially, is what threw me about not drinking. Not the raging thirst (I didn't have one ) nor the fact that everyone else was drinking and I wasn't (though that was a bit of a hurdle), but the slowness of things. I couldn't believe how much extra time I had to fill, and how slowly it went by. I used to think, I'll just go down the pub as usual. In the pub, though, without a drink, time went by even more slowly than at home. After a while, I realised that pubs are for drinkers and that, when you stop drinking, you have to unlearn one way of life, and learn another one. It was only when I sat down to write this piece, though, that I realised just how much learning and unlearning I have had to do, how much my day-to-day life has changed in the past few years.

I stopped drinking in June 2000 and, give or take the odd single glass of champagne on New Year's Eve or at weddings, I have not only remained sober ever since but refrained from drinking altogether. I have now been stone cold sober for two years and six months almost to the day. Counting the time makes it sound as if it was an ordeal. The strange and surprising thing - for me and for everyone who knew me - is that it wasn't; it was relatively easy. And it sort of happened by accident. I had initially planned to stop just for a while in order to sort a lot of stuff out, stuff that I had neglected because of the chaos of my drinking life: relationship stuff, work stuff, debts, a sense of non-specific dread, deferred decisions about everything under the sun. Stuff that had accrued into one big looming crisis which I mostly dealt with by going to the pub. The pub was where I stopped fretting about all the things I hadn't done while I was in the pub. For a long time, at least, that was the case. As you get older, though, all those deferred decisions come home to roost, and all that wasted time accrues. Suddenly, though, the pub isn't so much a sanctuary as a bolt hole. As this was belatedly dawning on me, something else was taking place as well, a slow, creeping awareness that drinking was no longer making me feel good, was no longer making me feel anything other than anxious.

'One reason I don't drink,' Nancy Astor once remarked, 'is that I want to know when I am having a good time.' In the last few years I drank, I was no longer sure why, and increasingly I wasn't having a good time. I had not just grown tired of drinking, I had grown tired of my drinking self. I was feeling uneasy a lot of the time about nothing in particular and, even after just a few drinks, my moods would swing without warning. Where once I was mischievous, suddenly I was provocative. Or just plain aggressive. That's what people would tell me anyway. Drink was knocking everything out of kilter.

Nevertheless, I persevered. It was, after all, a habit that I had pursued with some dedication and great gusto since my teens. It took something big and life-shattering to make me realise that maybe I would be better of without it. That something happened in March 2000. One of those phone calls that everyone dreads, one of those days when, without warning, your world moves off its axis. I learnt that my younger brother had been admitted to the Whittington Hospital in north London. Dead on arrival. I still hate those three words more than any other words I have ever heard. This is not the time nor place to dwell on the specifics of that loss, except to say that it sobered me up in more ways than one.

My brother's death was a precipitating factor in my decision to stop drinking - not least because he would have lived a lot longer if he hadn't drank so hard - but it wasn't the only one. A few months later, the relationship I was in imploded. Again, I won't dwell on the reasons here but some of them were grief-related and some of them were drink-related. Or, more specifically, they were related to my grief-induced drinking. I was drinking more - and more doggedly and joylessly - because it took more drink to obliterate the pain I was feeling. My drinking didn't help my grieving, though; it just made me more maudlin and more angry, more depressed and more aggressive. There's a Radiohead song, called 'Karma Police', where Thom Yorke keens: 'For a minute there/ I lost myself/ I lost myself.' I know exactly what he means. When I was grieving, and really drinking hard, I think I lost not just myself, but my self. The core thing that defined me, seemed to disappear for a while, and I became someone else, someone not whole.

Grief, I can see now, is tidal. If you surrender to it, which some experts say you must in order to re-emerge stronger, it can pull you down to a deep, dark place. Nothing I had encountered in the world had prepared me for that place. I was already way down there, almost drowning, when I woke up one morning in late June and decided I had to be straight in order to think straight; in order to find a way back up to the surface, to put my self back together.

In many ways, it should have been the worst time to stop drinking. Loss and grief are difficult enough without the white-knuckle ride of sobriety. That ride though, turned out to be nowhere near as white-knuckle as I had expected. Going sober was really no big deal. I wish I could impart some wisdom about this to the less fortunate who lapse and lapse again and daily attend AA, but I can't. I have never struggled with that kind of addiction. I guess, in my case, though it sounds odd given my track record, I never had the stamina to pursue self-destruction with the determination of the true alcoholic.

Plus, I found that I actually liked not drinking - or, to be more precise, I liked the non-drinking me that started tentatively to emerge. So, I just sort of stuck to sobriety, and, in retrospect, can see how I slipped slowly from one life to the other, casting off a whole set of mores, habits and, it has to be said, friends along the way.

It seems odd to me now that I stopped drinking because I had lost my self, given that that is exactly why I started drinking in the first place. Back then, alcohol was the thing that allowed me to transcend the self I was stuck with, the me I didn't want to be. I have a theory (all ex-drinkers have theories) about heavy drinkers. Basically, I believe that the way you start drinking defines the way you will continue drinking. In my case, I drank to feel better about myself; to conquer self-consciousness, to join in. When I was a pissed teenager, I could forget that I was this ginger, gawky, specky kid who didn't fit in. Suddenly, I could talk to girls who, when I was sober, were tantalisingly out of reach. Drink made me one of the lads. Now, I can't for the life of me see why I ever wanted to be one of the lads, but back then, in the macho, working-class culture of Northern Ireland, it seemed incredibly important. Put simply, getting drunk made me feel that I belonged. And sometimes, it made me feel transcendent. Invincible. At one with a world of possibilities way beyond the earthly one I was trapped in when I was sober.

Back there, back then, I can see that I bought into all the myths of romantic self-destruction propagated by my pantheon of adolescent role models, from Behan to Bukowski, Gram Parsons to Jackson Pollock. I was chasing some vague idea that the only way to be in the moment was to be totally out of it. For a long while, it was magical, or as close to magical as I have come in this cynical world; then it was wild, but punishing, fun. Then the fun stopped. The only part I would change, in fact, would be that last bit, the last 10 years. If I had given up when I stopped enjoying it, I would have saved myself and some of the people I loved, a whole heap of trouble. I am truly sorry about that.

Otherwise, I have few regrets. Most of the time, it has to be said, I had a really good time, a kind of good time you don't have when you are sober. The mess goes out of your life, but so does the mischief. Nearly all the trouble I ever got into in my life was drink-related, but, then again, so were most of the good times. The best times. You never really get into trouble like that when you don't drink. You don't, for instance, wake up in a strange bed beside the wrong person with only a vague recollection of how you got from that bar in Shoreditch to this bedroom in Notting Hill (or, indeed, Nottingham). Not going to bars in the first place seriously diminishes your chances of getting to the bedroom at all. When you stop drinking, it suddenly dawns on you that, on these islands at least, all the rituals of courtship and sex, casual or otherwise, are inextricably linked with alcoholic lubrication. Suddenly, sober, you are an outsider in this ongoing pursuit of pleasure. You have to relearn how to do all the courtship stuff without the great ice-breaker of two bottles of wine. It's hard but, like everything else I have learnt in the past few years, it has its rewards: it's just that they take longer to come about. And, maybe that's no bad thing.

I guess that's the problem most ex-drinkers have with sobriety: it's an oddly low-key experience. It's  like you're in a film which, without warning, changes from being a high-concept bio-pic to an understated ensemble piece and you only have a walk-on part. In short, your world changes but almost everyone else's world stays the same. Sometimes, sitting in the pub, surrounded by all that exaggerated bonhomie, you wish you were back there. Sometimes - when you see people falling down, or throwing up, or screaming at their partners on the street - you are so glad you're not. (Maybe it's sobriety, but drinking culture seems to have become more hardcore, especially among the young, who are being targeted by manufacturers as cynically as a drug dealers target users.)

On the whole, drinkers and tee-totallers tend to make each other feel uneasy. One of the first lessons I learnt was that while not drinking was making me feel really good, it was making a lot of other people feel really bad. About themselves. The uneasy drinkers tend to break down into two camps: those who have a drink problem, and who feel that your sobriety is shining a big bright light on it; and those who had an investment in the old you - the wild, crazy, alcohol-fuelled you who stayed out all night till the last drop was drunk. They find the new you a bit boring. Which is doubly ironic because suddenly you find them boring too, not least because they remind you of the old you, who, when viewed through the bottom of a glass of Perrier, doesn't seem so wild and interesting at all, just loud and repetitive.

The second thing you learn is that only drunks find other drunks entertaining. That was a revelation to me. I couldn't believe how alcohol flattened everyone out when, for years, I had thought it made everyone, including me, more interesting and witty and multi-dimensional. Sober, I can now see that the two defining tropes of the determined drunk - is there any other kind? - are loudness and the tendency to tell you everything at least twice. Not witty at all. Not interesting in the least. For this reason alone, a lot of reformed drinkers - and all recovering alcoholics - stay out of pubs and bars. I still frequent them (though I rarely make it to closing time), but I tend to hang out with people who don't drink like I used to drink, who don't like getting out of control. Sometimes, too, if I have the right person sitting beside me, I even experience a strange familiar glow of conviviality and oneness with everything that I assumed was exclusive only to drinkers.

I have no born-again moral axe to grind about drink or drinking. (I mean, come on, how could I? That guy dancing on the table used to be me.) I guess if I fancied a glass of wine, I would have one. It's just that I don't seem to fancy one any more. (In fact, I had one recently because it came from from a bottle costing бё120. It was interesting in a strange chocolatey way which I probably would never have detected before, but not interesting enough for me to finish the glass.) I honestly think I just fell out of love with drinking. I know that I was lucky in this, that the alcoholic has a life-long struggle and, given the booze-drenched society we live in, that must be purgatory.

From time to time, of course, I miss that old transcendent feeling. There must be a way of getting out of it without recourse to alcohol or chemicals, but I have yet to find it. It is hard to be sober and abandoned, so I have gone the other way and settled for calmness. I do yoga. It sounds a bit wussy but it works for me. Sometimes it makes me feel calm, sometimes energised. It never, ever makes me feel sick, or guilty, or remorseful. Right now, that's good enough for me. Feeling good, feeling healthy is still novel enough to be a buzz. A low-level buzz but, hey, I'm alive. And, I wake up in the morning with a clear head.

When I go to a bar now, my main dilemma is what to drink. Soft drinks are, well, soft. Good strong coffee marks you out as a non-drinker and, in my experience, that's not a good thing. People immediately get nervous. Best to cradle a soda water and lime, which at least looks like a vodka and tonic. People leave you alone then. They don't come up and say: 'On the wagon, eh? So you get up in the morning, and that's the best you feel all day?'
 
 

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