Disastrous romantic mini-break that proved booze makes me a bore
So, after years of drinking to excess, JULIE BURCHILL’S cutting back
THERE’S a famous definition of an alcoholic as ‘someone who drinks more than I do’. My definition has always been ‘someone who drinks at home’.
For, like those women who believe that calories don’t stick if you eat standing up by the fridge, I’ve always believed that my love of drinking in bars and restaurants makes me the opposite of an alcoholic.
My motto for boozing, as for most things, is playwright Joe Orton’s line: ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing in public.’
I think of myself as a ‘convivialist’ — I was a pathologically shy girl who became very outgoing in my late 20s, thanks to vodka martinis, and since then my idea of heaven remains a big gathering in a warm restaurant, the laughter of friends and the glugging of wine, and me picking up the bill.
Alcohol was my confidence medicine, as it is for many women, and it worked; I truly believe that if I’d never discovered drinking, I’d still be sitting in my bedroom in Bristol, reading.
It’s got me into a few scrapes though. The dumb things I’ve done when drunk are too numerous to count: I’ve left my passport on a plane, and had to get out of numerous taxis because I couldn’t remember my own address. I’ve been turned away from places, and asked to leave places and not known when to leave places. I’ve spent whole days in bed too ashamed to even see myself as part of the world.
But equally, a lot of the time, I’ve shrugged it off without a care. If I got turned away from somewhere or made a show of myself, I saw it as a chance to forsake old haunts and venture elsewhere. If I offended someone, I managed to rationalise it by saying I’d created a vacancy for a new friend.
Lately, however, I’ve started to wonder if drink and I are such good friends after all; maybe we should stop seeing so much of each other. (I can just imagine everyone I’ve ever been on the razz with choking on their cornflakes in disbelief). But for one thing, I don’t have the excuse that alcohol helps mask my shyness any more.
OVER the years, I’ve become one of those annoying people who can talk to anybody, anywhere, anytime, and who makes friends, even sober, with the ease that other people pick up fluff on their jumpers. Also, I’ve noticed that booze no longer makes me ‘normal’ or ‘better’. It can actually make me much worse: a bitch (which I’m fine with), a braggart (can take it or leave it) and a bully (which I hate). What started out as social drinking has become anti-social drinking.
And at my age (I’m 58) I realise that when I get helplessly drunk in public, people no longer look at me with disapproval, which I’ve always got a kick out of, but with pity. For someone as selfadoring as me, this is horrible.
But these are not the reasons for me deciding to ease back on the drink, although many would say any one of them would be enough.
Last month, my husband Daniel and I had booked a four-day trip to Amsterdam, a city we love. We arrived on a sunny afternoon. We checked into the beautiful W Hotel, and stepped out, experiencing the enchanting emotion of anonymity.
We took in a few exhibitions and museums but after two days I could sense myself rushing ahead; I had a rendezvous with oblivion. I knew that the way my interesting, interested husband was behaving was the right way: a few beers, then a desire to experience the glorious city we were in.
But when I demanded we go out and ‘experience’ Amsterdam after a breakfast of coffee and champagne what I really meant was experience the numerous bars lining the canals.
The drink had caught up with me, rammed the glass slippers on my numb feet upon which they turned into the red shoes, whirling me away on a mad dance of drunkenness — except that makes it sound more exciting than it was.
I drank myself into a stupor, then took to my bed, having picked an argument with Dan and sulked monstrously. Two swimming pools unswum in; four expensive breakfasts untouched; six museums unexplored. And even then as we packed, I still had the nerve to smirk smugly: ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Daniel quietly. ‘You were really boring.’ I gaped at him, dumbstruck. A
bore? Me? No one had ever called me that. Then the awful truth hit home. I had become a boring drunk!
I’m sceptical about addiction, believing that people often discover they love doing something (drink, drugs, sex) and then feel guilty about putting pleasure before everything else, attempting to wriggle out of taking responsibility for their choices by saying that they didn’t want to do it, they had to. Whereas I like to own what I’ve done — one of the side-benefits of being a showoff. On the downside, it leaves one bereft of the usual excuses for being selfish hedonists.
I can’t even use the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as a rationale for drinking myself into oblivion. Yes, it was very sad for me when my son, Jack, committed suicide two years ago at the age of 29 after years of struggling with depression; yes, my career isn’t what it was; yes, I’ve lost my looks.
But I drank the way I do now as a beautiful teenager, as a very happy young mother in my 20s, and as a highly-paid journalist in my 30s. And now I’ve got a husband who frequently delights me after a whopping 22 years together, fantastic friends, loads of money, work I still love and a volunteer job I adore. What I don’t have is any excuse.
Other people might be driven to dryness by health issues, but I suffer less from aches and pains than anybody I know.
In fact, I’ve come near to being struck off the registers of my GP practices in the last three places I’ve lived because I visited them so rarely that they believed I’d left town.
I don’t particularly want to make very old bones; dementia is now the top killer of women — 32,000 a year — and it’s not a fate I’m keen to save myself for. As Kingsley Amis put it: ‘No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.’
WHEN I stay home, I’m content drinking nothing but water all day long. But I’m a social animal. I just want to be more social than animal for a change!
My goal is to drink like a normal person — like the people I’ve laughed at over the years who can take a drink without the drink taking them. I’ve never sneered at teetotallers but what I’ve done all of my drinking life is mock moderate drinkers, and now that’s what I’m aiming to become.
Not drinking at all would be like doing a fad diet — easy for a bit, then undesirable and boring to maintain. What I want to do is change my drinking habits permanently.
I told my tale of woe to a colleague at my volunteer job who also works in a nearby addiction clinic. She told me about a brilliant therapist there.
I didn’t think twice; I called my doctor for a referral, describing my drinking to her and told her that I wanted to ‘recalibrate’ myself. She said: ‘That sounds very wise!’
Then, at the clinic, I had a lovely surprise. My therapist said I looked so sad at the thought of giving up drink entirely, the all or nothing rule that usually applies to tackling problem drinking, that he agreed to help me drink moderately.
Settling back in a comfortable chair, I closed my eyes. I had to stop myself laughing at first when he kept repeating: ‘You will only take three drinks. You will refuse more,’ after telling me to imagine walking down ten steps to a place I love.
Then I am told to walk back up the steps and, on the count of ten, I’m back in the room, just like in the hypnotism cliche, amazed to see that three quarters of an hour has passed.
I felt light-headed, fizzy and full of beans. And next day, at a lunch with a wild friend, a partner-incrime in many drunken past antics, one G&T, one glass of Chianti, one Limoncello and I was done.
Walking home someone called to me — my friend Galia, sitting at a pavement table, enjoying the lovely weather and a glass of wine. Usually I’d be sucked right in, but after a quick gossip, I left. I simply didn’t want any more.
What is more, after three weeks and just one session, my resolve remains. Will it remain for ever? Who knows. I hope so.
I love my life — I don’t want to change it. I just want to remember it.