Declan Lynch

The alcoholic who doesn’t like pubs

Sometimes I feel like one of those characters in a science fiction movie wandering through a landscape which seems vaguely familiar to me, but which I know is not mine.

Whenever I find myself in a pub these days, I feel no sense of belonging, as once I did. I don’t avoid them completely, as some people in recovery would do, but I wouldn’t have any problem about avoiding them, either. Because, basically, I don’t like pubs. For me to write that line would once have seemed inconceivable, because I used to like pubs so much, I virtually lived in a few of them. I was the sort of person who would cash cheques in the pub, though it must be said that they were easily enough cashed at that time. Still, it was all the money I had, and I was determined not to waste much of it in the outside world.

There are large parts of my 20s which, in the mind’s eye, consist almost entirely of nostalgic visions of pubs such as The Phoenix in Cork, the International Bar or Mulligan’s in Dublin.

I loved these places, or at least it seemed to me that I loved them. I had great times there with great people, who do not seem any less great, now that I’ve eventually discovered that I don’t like pubs — we should never pretend that we weren’t enjoying ourselves when, in fact, we were; indeed, I’ve always felt it is important to allude to the better parts of our obsession, if only to explain why we will go to such extravagant lengths to hang on in there.

But still I have found that I don’t like pubs, and in all likelihood I never did, no more than I liked being in any crowded room where people are socialising. I am not comfortable in those situations; you can call it shyness or whatever you want to call it, but it is something that I share with large numbers of people, a problem that we invariably treat with alcohol.

It is probably one of the main reasons that drink was invented — to make people comfortable in places which naturally make them uncomfortable, and no doubt it quickly became apparent that some people needed a bit more of it than others, to do the job.

Indeed, you can eventually need so much of it, just to function in that crowded room, you will, to a large extent, be turning into a different person. Sure, you can present yourself as being a most sociable type, even an extrovert, and with much trial and error, you can probably carry that off. But if you take the drink out of it, you will quickly find that you’re still the person you used to be, that you don’t really like being in these social situations at all — that there’s not much pleasure for you in running into people you’ve never met before, or not much, anyway, and trying to strike up some instant rapport.

Above all the other revelations that I experienced on the road from drinking to not drinking, this was one of the more startling. This fact that, for several years, I had been under the impression that I was quite a different person to the one that I am. That I thought I was a most gregarious fellow, when, in truth, I was just a fairly quiet fellow who liked drinking.

It seems so ludicrously simple, this observation that I was only going into pubs because they were serving drink, a bit like Butch Cassidy being asked why he kept robbing banks, and replying, “Because that’s where the money is”.

But sometimes it really is so terribly simple, and indeed I am astonished that I could have spent so much time in pubs, meeting so many people, talking so much. It seems utterly exhausting to me now, and if I was made to do it all again, without the drink, I think that I might actually kill myself. Which, in a roundabout way, was perhaps what I was trying to do anyway.

“I thought I was a most gregarious fellow, when I was just a quiet fellow who liked drinking”