On daytime drinking

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

“A sense of delirious dislocation comes over us, drinking when we shouldn’t be drinking”

It is a long, long time since I had a drink, and still I had this warm feeling of recognition when I read about pubs opening early for Ireland’s games in the Rugby World Cup — for breakfast, of course.

You’d have some ‘early houses’ which would be open anyway at 8.45am and licensed to sell alcoholic drink, but other pubs would, apparently, just be offering breakfast — because, of course, when you want to have breakfast to mark a special occasion, the place to do it is a pub. Right. You’d have the full-Irish, to be sure, to start the day in style. But wait... what if it’s actually the end of your day, because you were drinking since the night before in anticipation of the big match, and somehow you got locked into a pub where they were putting on the breakfast special? Yes, that would work, too. Indeed, it is said that it worked very well the last time a World Cup was held in Japan, the actual World Cup in which Ireland without Roy Keane were playing at similarly strange times — such was the state of anarchy which Roy had inspired, we believe that the usual stringent standards of policing were absent on these occasions, enabling Paddy to be watching the match on the big screen with a pint pot in his hand, early doors.

Which itself would have brought many flashbacks to the greatest of all such escapades, the perfectly legal orgy of drinking at strange times of the day that was Italia ’90.

Yes, until we were seized by those Italian vibes, the practice of drinking at strange times of the day was largely confined to our standing army of card-carrying alcoholics, in the aforementioned early houses or whatever house would have them.

Then, in the summer of 1990, a grateful nation joined them, getting massively drunk from midday onwards in order to absorb the magnitude of what the Republic was trying to do in Italy. Indeed, some full-blown alcoholics were said to be unhappy at this upsurge in degenerate behaviours by the sort of people who didn’t have the stomach for the long game.

So there is some rough magic at work here, a sense of delirious dislocation that comes over us when we are given a legitimate excuse to go drinking in an abnormal way — be it an all-nighter for a World Cup game, or just the old ‘holy hour’: there is some special kick to drinking when you shouldn’t be drinking..

Indeed, it was only in writing this that I remembered the old ‘holy hour’, whereby pubs would close for an hour in the afternoon, a break which seemed to reach some standard of ‘holiness’ that could exist only in the deeply alcoholic mind.

How sweet it was to be afforded the privilege of staying on the premises during that hour, continuing your fine talk, maintaining the rhythms of your intoxication.

Herein we gain an understanding of the lure of addiction — it is a ‘lock-in’, not just in a literal sense, but as a permanent state of mind. Whereas any normal person can see the attraction of the odd illicit session, if you are moving towards addiction, this is the place you want to be, all the time.

The mundane world for you is not normal any more; only this other world has the stuff you require. You enjoy those special occasions so much, you just can’t bear to drag yourself away from them — in the obituary columns, when they wrote of someone that “to him, every day was like Christmas Day”, it was one of the many euphemisms for: “he was a notorious drunkard”.

Because the thing about a special occasion is that when it’s happening most days of the week, it isn’t special any more. There is no beauty in the lock-in, if you can never get out.