The teetotaller’s tale
A peek into the sobering reality of a Saturday night for a freshly minted sage
Idon’t go to parties. Well, what are they for, If you don’t need to find a new lover? You drink and you listen and drink a bit more And you take the next day to recover. These words from Wendy Cope’s pithily insightful poem, Being Boring, could well capture my future as a recluse. As someone who has joined the ranks of teetotallers a couple of months ago, I am prone to making dark prophesies about my spiritless tomorrows. “What vices will you take up instead?” a friend recently asked. I shudder to think of an answer.
Could you pass the carrots, please?
Ironically, I’ve never been a big drinker, primarily due to oppressive migraines, occasionally triggered by alcohol. Small, social drinks, preceded by healthy nibbles and followed by lots of water and rest, is my embarrassing idea of bohemian revelry. Having given up my little lifeboat in the vast and often dreary sea of social interaction, I’m floundering. My inner resources, the ones that would keep me nodding through a conversation about equity funds or slow-cooking techniques, are depleting quick. I never thought I’d be the person who needed alcohol as a social crutch. Or maybe it’s the pandemic, my all-purpose excuse to forgive any personal flaws.
Whatever the reason, I’m now doomed to face reality, especially on Saturday nights, armed with nothing but the curiosity of a social anthropologist observing the distinct (and dispiriting) qualities of the increasingly inebriated. “Have a drink, ya!” they yell uninhibitedly while I focus my depressingly sober gaze on the carrots and cucumbers surrounding a bowl of mint dip. “These migraines are all in the head!” they inform me, unintentionally funny and unbearably wrong. They might just find a cure for migraine. Aggressive ignorance, I’m not so sure about.
Bitter almonds and dirty martinis
Marquez began Love in the Time of Cholera with the unforgettable words: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” The rest of us, with our significantly lesser storytelling skills, begin anecdotes with words like: “It was inevitable: the taste of dirty martini always reminded her of the fate of unremitting nausea.” Hangovers are nature’s way of telling us too much fun can kill us. And yet we regularly flout the boundaries of good sense, thinking nothing of mornings spent with our heads down a toilet bowl if the preceding night’s punch bowl was pleasant enough. We humans might invent particle accelerators and magic realism, but we’re defenceless against the dark sway of a brightly coloured cocktail.
My last few visits to bars have been made in this freshly minted teetotalling avatar. While the rest of my companions wake up groggy and regretful, I rise with the conscience of a puritan, eager to seize the day. But is this smug superiority worth the pains of the previous evening where everyone around me was floating in a liquor-fuelled lightness, freed from the burden of clear thinking, while I stayed miserably grounded?
Social charades
HANGOVERS ARE NATURE’S WAY OF TELLING US TOO MUCH FUN CAN KILL US. YET WE REGULARLY FLOUT THE BOUNDARIES OF GOOD SENSE.
So, what substitute vices can one take up to lighten the load of the days, and, more crucially, nights? It’s easier during the week, when one can curl up with a book at an embarrassingly early hour. There is, of course, more high-quality televised entertainment than one can conscionably watch these days. But then a birthday party raises its perky head, or a Friday night arrives in its fancy frock, or a friend gets promoted or hitched or bored. Reasons to party in the pockets between pandemic frenzy are infinite. Whether it does it well or not, alcohol is known to lubricate the dry spots in life. In its absence, we’re forced to develop skills that go beyond happy-hour hunting and mixology.
Sadly, I have no wisdom to impart. When I was younger and wiser, the human drama unfolding around me was intoxicating enough. Now, parties are places where I’m acutely conscious of missing alcohol, and needing to pretend that I’m not. Does anyone care? Of course not. But these charades are the very fibre of our social fabric. Without them, meet-ups would be filled with long silences and awkward exits, like in a Beckett play. *curls up in bed with Waiting for Godot fearing the arrival of Saturday night*