50 ways to leave your lover

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

There are drinkers who can keep notes so copious, they’re on their twelfth A4-size diary

If you’re starting to think that you might have a drink problem, you probably do. If you suspect that you’re getting in deep with the gambling, you probably are. If you are troubled about aspects of your relationship with food, there is probably good reason for it.

So what you should do in these circumstances is just stop drinking, or stop gambling, or stop doing whatever it is you think you are doing in a self-destructive manner. Just draw the intelligent conclusion, and then everything will be fine.

Ah, but life... life is always getting in the way of our intelligent conclusions. And by its nature, an addiction will never let you off as easy as that. Once it has any sort of a grip inside you, it will hang onto you like it was your best buddy; like it was the love of your life.

So no matter what your head is telling you, in your heart, you can’t just dismiss this presence from your life; you can’t just decide one day that you want nothing more to do with it, thanks very much.

I mean, you should be able to do that, but you can’t most of us, anyway, can’t do the smart thing in these situations; we are torn. And being torn, we can end up wasting a lot of time.

At some point in the mid-1990s, when I was starting to feel that I was drinking too much, I was advised that there was a very good man called Dr Tubridy, who was based in a well-known facility in Stillorgan. And he was indeed a very good man, who, as I sat across the desk from him, identified one characteristic in particular of the problem drinker the fact that we are basically immature. That it takes us longer to grow up than it takes others, that we want to keep living like “students”, as he put it.

I explained to him that my problem was not necessarily that I was drinking large amounts of alcohol all the time, more that when I started, I found it increasingly hard to stop. He suggested that I keep track of my drinking in a notebook, in the hope that it might induce in me a more grown-up attitude.

This I duly did for a while, though at some point I must have stopped doing it, because, about 18 months later, I accepted that this problem had gone beyond the notebook stage.

I guess if you can record your drinking in a notebook for a while, you may feel that you’re on top of the situation, but then again, there may be a question about the reliability of these notes anecdotal evidence suggests that a person who is very, very drunk may not always be inclined to complete the paperwork at the end of the night. Nor, after a few such episodes, will he have much appetite for tackling the backlog. Then, there are drinkers who can keep notes so copious, they are on their twelfth A4-size hardback diary before they realise that this may not be working for them from now on, they will just try to keep it all in their heads.

For me, in the fullness of time, there was the makings of a few hundred pages of a novel called The Rooms, into which I poured much of what I had found along the way about addiction, the publication of which brought me to a radio studio in RTE, just down the road from Dr Tubridy’s office, for an interview with Ryan Tubridy who happens to be his son.

I had travelled an enormous distance in one sense, without going much beyond the Stillorgan Road, or even beyond members of the same family.

But I made no mention to Ryan of where that journey had started, and with whom maybe it sounded too much like some unlikely tale that a drunk fellow might tell you in a bar, before going home and entering the night’s takings into his notebook.