JOSEPH O’CONNOR

Novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick

I drink far less than I used to in my twenties, I’m happy to say. When I think of the hours I wasted talking gibberish (and listening to it) in the pub, I weep. I dislike being around drunks. They bore or frighten me.

As a teenager, I worked in latenight restaurants and saw a fair bit of drunkenness and the stupidity and violence it causes. There is one and only one good thing about the Irish dysfunctional relationship with drink, which is that it has enriched our language. To be scuttered, mowldy, blutered or locked is not quite the same thing as to be, in that marvellous phrase, ‘gee-eyed’.

I drink several glasses of red wine nightly at the weekends, rarely during the week. It’s great reaching the age when you stop caring about what people think of you because then you can stop going to the pub and pretending you enjoy it. And you can stop participating in that accursed Irish male phenomenon, the boastful recounting: ‘Man alive, some night we had at the niece’s wedding. I had 19 pints and a gallon of Bacardi and woke up in a builder’s skip. Mighty crack!’

I was in Toulouse at a literary festival back in April and I was in mildly literary state by the end of the evening. Which happened the following morning. At dawn. The drunkest I have ever been was in August 1985, aged 22, in Nicaragua. The evening before I returned to Ireland, I went out drinking rum and stayed up all night doing that and saying my goodbyes. I was still drunk when I got on the plane at noon the next day, still drunk when we landed for refuelling in Cuba four hours later and the hangover began to kick in just as we landed in Shannon. It’s a rare day when you can claim you were drunk in three countries.

I haven’t had a hangover in years, in fact since I was a student. The reason is that, during a very bad one, I offered God two options: (a) kill me now; (b) get me through this and I’ll never get so drunk again. He chose b. The best description of a hangover is in Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim. ‘Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.’

The best hangover cure is lovemaking. If that’s not available, a very cold Lucozade. If both are available, you’re in for a fun morning.

In terms of my favourite drink, It depends. In a New York bar, a Rolling Rock beer or a Moscow Mule. In Galway, a pint of Guinness.

I’d miss a glass of Italian wine but I can easily imagine not drinking. For health reasons, my father doesn’t drink, and I don’t think it has affected him negatively at all.