50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

‘I couldn’t persuade myself...” It was on the Miriam O’Callaghan radio show on a Sunday morning that I heard the late Guinness heir, Garech de Brun, explaining that when he was a young man, he couldn’t persuade himself to embark on a course of Irish language studies in Trinity, which he would have loved, because he would be required to do some Latin as well, which he did not love. “I couldn’t persuade myself...” These words kept echoing around my head.

“I couldn’t persuade myself...” I suppose the reason it wouldn’t go away and leave me alone was that it revealed not just the thinking of one man, but of a world in which he moved, that of the bohemian aristocracy — a world in which addiction to something or other was almost mandatory, as was the complete absence of anything vaguely resembling guilt — about one’s alcoholism, or one’s heroin addiction, or one’s terribly unfortunate squandering of the family fortune at the tables in Monte Carlo.

So admirably free of guilt are such people, they go around persuading themselves, or being unable to persuade themselves, of things that the rest of us just accept as stuff that we have to do, whether we like it or not — and if, like them, we decide that essentially we can’t be arsed, we might even feel bad about it.

They are an example to us all, the old aristos, but while their total lack of remorse is marvellous in itself, it can eventually catch up with them. Garech, if he could ever be bothered with such banalities, would have considered himself an alcoholic — but since he had so many other things running in his favour, it would have been damnably hard for him to change his ways.

When you have a butler greeting your guests at the door with flutes of Champagne on a tray at 10 in the morning, you are entitled to think that regardless of a certain over-fondness on your part for grape or grain, there is still much about this wondrously decadent life of yours in which you can believe.

If it is harder for the rich man to enter the gates of Heaven than for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle, how much harder it is for the rich drunk man to perform that, or indeed any other such life-changing manoeuvre? Indeed, the only one who finds it harder than the rich man, is probably the poor man.

And it’s not that easy for the rest of us, either — our addictions have a way of obliterating all the usual considerations of class or circumstance.

And still sometimes I think that if I had been a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, I might have been unable to persuade myself to give up anything, for any length of time — though undoubtedly, there are some of them who decide that they can live even better without their addictions, and, for that, I can only admire them.

They do not move much among the general population, but their soulmates in rock ’n’ roll have shown us that an aristocrat of that game, such as Bowie, can be humble enough to admit defeat, to seek help to get off the booze and drugs.

Likewise, I have seen poor people who have drunk themselves out of house and home, who have burned their bridges and then gone back and burned them some more, but who are still trying to turn things around.

I did not have to negotiate either the luxuries of the over-privileged or the deprivations of the destitute. And yet addiction brings us all under the one roof.

“I happen to be alive, so of course I celebrate it, but if I was given the choice, I wouldn’t be alive,” the Guinness heir told Miriam, sitting in his beautiful Luggala.

We’ve all known that one.

“Our addictions have a way of obliterating the usual considerations of class or circumstance”