50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

T“Of the ways in which we delude ourselves, there’s a mark of Satan about alcohol-free beer”

here was a time when I was trying to stop drinking, and I felt that I was doing quite well at it. I was still going to the pub now and again, but not as much as I had been. And I was drinking alcohol-free beer.

Kaliber, I think it was, but it could have been anything, really. I didn’t stay with it long enough to develop a preference for one brand over the other, and anyway, it wasn’t about the drink I was having, it was more about the drink that I wasn’t having — the drink which all the people around me in the pub were having. The actual drink.

Certainly, with each taste of the Kaliber, I imbibed a sense of virtue and high-mindedness, I felt like a better person than these boozers who were starting to get increasingly drunk and increasingly boring with it — and, of course, the best way to get past the mesmerising boredom of being free of alcohol in the company of people who are very much in its thrall, is to join them.

But I was better than that. I could put up with it; I could still enjoy a beer with them, beer with all the bad things about beer taken out — leaving only the good things, whatever they might be.

You’ll note that in this early stage of my development as a non-drinker, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was, perhaps, another way of doing this, whereby I wouldn’t go to the pub at all. Regardless of what I was drinking, it was so ingrained in me that I needed to be in the pub, with these like-minded individuals, that anything else was unthinkable.

Nor did it occur to me that I didn’t get into the whole beer game in the first place, because I liked the taste of beer. Like many people, I didn’t really like beer, as such, but I was prepared to endure the unpleasantness of the experience to get to the part that I did like, the part where you started to feel at one with all the benign forces of the universe — for that, I was willing to persevere.

Without that, I could still persuade myself that there was a purpose to this alcohol-free beer, even a higher purpose. That it could, in some way, compare to actual drinking, that it could… evoke… yes, evoke the authentic experience without the downside of that, without the red, red wine at four in the morning in Leeson Street.

Indeed, I would find it so… evocative… the time would come when I’d see no good reason not to take it to the next level, and have an actual drink. And looking back, I’m only surprised it would take me so long.

Because of all the ways in which we delude ourselves, all the false hope that we cherish, there is the true mark of Satan about the alcohol-free beer. Not only are we fooling ourselves there, we are tormenting ourselves with thoughts of this thing that we have loved. Instead of trying to forget, and to start anew, we are doing everything we can to remember the good times, to bring it all back. Something is stopping us from just walking away, and I think I know what it is — we don’t really want to walk away, and soon we’ll want to do it all over again. Do it properly this time.

We are like gamblers trying to give up poker, who are still playing cards most nights of the week, ‘decorating the mahogany’ with matches, not with money

— eventually, that old desire will return, to make it a bit more interesting.

Indeed, I would suspect that the non-alcoholic beers have kept a lot of drinkers ‘at the table’, as it were, unable to understand that they have the choice not to drink any kind of beer, in any kind of pub. That they can just do something else with their lives, that doesn’t involve beer at all. Crazy thought, I know, but somebody had a thought crazier than that, and called it alcohol-free beer.