50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Afriend of mine who retired from the drinking game around the same time as I did — quite a long time ago, it seems — reminded me how far we had come.

He pointed out that in these isolationist times, the life of the problem drinker becomes even more problematic — an aspect of the crisis which had not immediately occurred to me, mindful as I always am of the broader issues of the common good.

There was a period in my life when this would have been one of the first things to spring to mind, now it took several days for it to dawn on me.

Which is good in one way, a reminder that you really can place a great distance between the way you are, and the way you were.

And my friend was right; indeed, he was only too right.

How could I not have realised this straight away?

They closed the pubs, of course, which for some alcoholics was clearly a disaster — there are many people for whom the pub is still the main arena; indeed, they will tell themselves that they are not alcoholics at all, they are just ‘social drinkers’.

Now they would be discovering that maybe the social aspect was not the main attraction, that for some reason they still have this same urge to drink all night — without the meeting and greeting.

If they were in a regular family situation, for example, they’d suddenly be in a very strange environment; things can deteriorate very quickly, for all concerned.

I think of this parody of F Scott Fitzgerald in the South of France during the Spanish Flu outbreak: “The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and Lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.”

Ideally — in the most twisted sense, at least — you would be already living in a sort of isolation, so that when your ‘social drinking’ has finished for the night, you can go home to the mobile home in which you live alone in the darkness on the edge of town, where the damage you can do is mostly just to yourself.

Yes, I suspect there has been an increase in this kind of solitary drinking; that the isolation craved by the addict anyway was given a new license by Covid-19, valid for 24 hours, seven days a week.

As for the proverbial bunch of lads living together in a house in what we used to know as ‘flatland’, we would presumably be talking eve-of-Prohibition scenes as a matter of routine.

And yet... and yet this plague has also opened up a serious chance for people to think about getting out of the drinking game, or whatever kind of game has been consuming them.

There has been this massive shock to the collective system of the world, and massive shocks are sometimes not all bad, if you’re struggling with an addiction or trying to pretend you’re just a ‘social drinker’.

Usually the massive shock will hit you in some way unique to yourself — injury or illness or breakdown of some kind. But if the whole of humanity is going through it, you might just be in luck here.

After all, a lot of us get into difficulties, not because we want to, but because it becomes a habit. We just get into a routine, until we don’t notice any more that it’s all getting away from us.

And there’s nothing like a pandemic to shake you out of the old routine.

Indeed, it forces you into a new routine, until you realise you might be starting to prefer the new routine to the old routine — can you ever go back there? Maybe in time you’ll hardly even remember what it was like.

“They closed the pubs of course, which for some alcoholics was clearly a disaster”