Alcohol: a love story

Is it time to leave the party?

Still from Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (2020)

There was a scary moment, a few years ago, where every time I drank—even just a couple of glasses of wine—I experienced a weird ache in my side. I was paranoid that I might have a kidney stone, pancreatitis, liver cancer or some other horrific disease caused by drinking alcohol. I had blood tests and even went into hospital for an ultrasound, but the doctors could find nothing wrong.

Maybe, I thought, it was a physical premonition of pain to come if I carried on drinking. Maybe I would have to go teetotal.

Imagine …

No more champagne at weddings, crisp pint on a summer’s day, or hot toddy to soothe a winter cold. No more cocktails to kick-start a big meal or digestifs in huge, heated glasses to end it. No more post-prandial raki in Crete or whisky sampling on a distillery tour.

No more awkward encounters with hovering waiters checking the wine isn't corked in restaurants. No more wincing at private view rotgut. No more deranged volubility after one too many. No more waking up at 4am, dehydrated and regretting something I've said. No more lethargy the next day after poor sleep.

Not drinking would be a huge change and, though many of those changes would be positive, I can't help but mourn the idea that it would no longer be present in my life. My relationship with alcohol is exactly that: a relationship. It is a love story …

The first drink I enjoyed was aged 12 and a half, at home on New Year's eve with my parents. My Mum made me a Bacardi and coke to help celebrate staying up to see in the new year. I had two and recall how pleasant it felt to be tipsy.

In our house we had a pantry and in one corner of the pantry there was an assorted array of dusty spirit bottles, most of which were barely touched. As a 14 year old, I once took a plastic cup with a lid and poured a tiny amount from each bottle so it wouldn't be noticed and then went to the park with friends to drink it. It wasn't the most wholesome drink—and tasted disgusting—but what a buzz.

At 15, before my Aunt's wedding, I went with my Dad and future uncle to the village pub to have a couple of pints to calm the nerves. I was a man, initiated into the adult world by drinking lots of liquid before having to sit for a long time in a church.

At 16, I started going to pubs. The Princess Charlotte, Leicester's indie venue, served a pint of Flowers Bitter for £1 on a Monday night. It was a bargain, although given how it tasted we did suspect that it was a collection of liquid from the drip trays of other beers.

When I was 17, I worked in a pub kitchen alongside a guy who was ten years older than me and seemingly wanted to relive what it was like to be a teenager. We would get leathered, plastered, smashed, blootered ... so many words for the same feeling of losing all rational faculties.

At university, when I was becoming more introspective, I would sometimes buy bottles of the cheapest wine at the local Oddbins and sit in my room reading James Joyce or Marcel Proust. "White wine is like electricity," said Joyce, who ended up dying due to a perforated duodenal ulcer, almost certainly caused by drinking.

I never considered that I had a problem with alcohol and would never drink to oblivion or before 5pm, but whenever I find it mentioned in my diary I always seem to be regretting that I drank the night before and bemoaning the resulting procrastination. The idea that you would be forced to stop drinking has a certain appeal because at least you wouldn't have to decide whether to drink every time it is offered, the decision would be made for you. As it is, alcohol is so deeply rooted in every aspect of our culture that any kind of abstinence feels like undertaking a voluntary exile.

Around the same time I had my weird ache I found out that R, the ex of a friend who I had spent a lot of time with, had died of liver failure aged 40. Due to a shortage of office space owing, he had started working from home and had started drinking spirits in the day. I remember the first time I met him in 2000, he had just come top of his class in law at Oxford and had been celebrating in a garden party. He joined us, smiling, suffused with a pink Pimms glow. Now he is dead because of alcohol. It is such a sad end.

Whilst alcohol can be enjoyed by the majority of people without too many problems, the fact that a significant minority will have their lives destroyed by it should give us pause. According to Fergus McCullough’s research (mainly derived from David Nutt):

10.8m Brits drink at levels posing some risk to their health, and 1.6m ‘may have some level of alcohol dependence’. […] It’s estimated that alcohol contributes to 30,000 deaths a year in England, Scotland and Wales.[…] In 2017/18, 338,000 hospital admissions were mainly attributable to alcohol, and 23% of those were due to accidents.[…] Alcohol fuels violence: victims thought offenders were under the influence of alcohol 40% of all violent crimes in 2016/17  — that’s half a million incidents.

During the pandemic there seemed to be stories every week about dangerous levels of drinking. See the BBC’s related articles on this story:

There is a relentless propaganda in films and on TV that alcohol is normal, sexy, liberating and fun. And it can be. But, given the opportunity, alcohol can become a way of masking and avoiding any issues you have.

Thankfully, the pain in my side went away after I stopped doing a certain kettlebell exercise, so I probably don't currently have an alcohol-related disease ... yet. Studies suggest that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption and we should reduce it as much as possible. Indeed, more and more people, especially young people, are drinking little or no alcohol. The evidence is clear that your sleep, wallet, waistline, and mindset all improve without alcohol.

Maybe I should give it a try, especially living in Glasgow, which prides itself on its hard drinking culture. Intriguingly, the most successful Glaswegians—Frankie Boyle, Limmy, Stuart Murdoch, and Darren McGarvey— all of them are teetotal (albeit because of alcohol-related problems in the past). But I suspect I won’t.

Last night, I watched Another Round, Thomas Vinterberg’s film about the effects of alcohol on a group of friends. It is a heroic and honest film, with tragedy and joy, but the message I got from it is that alcohol should never become habitual and routine, that is fine for people from the Mediterranean, but for us Northerners it leads to despair and should only be enjoyed on special occasions.

Cheers?