EVE OF DESTRUCTION

Sean Guthrie

FOR a while – a decade, give or take – it was expected of you. Friends would tolerate nothing less than the return home for Christmas to be accompanied by prodigious bouts of alcohol consumption, sessions so intense you felt you were making history. Everyone was at it, as though it were a race to obliterate the most brain cells in the 10 days around Christmas and Hogmanay, a middle-distance contest in which we all felt like winners.

December 24 was the daddy, the biggest night of the year, when the stiff-hipped, big-bellied regulars of the pubs of Largs were augmented by legions of zealous young drinkers on leave from studies and/or work in the outside world. Duly, optics were drained, pints pulled and minds melted, and as the night careened to a close there was always the temptation of indulging in a little religion, care of a seat at the back of the watchnight service in one of the town’s many churches. With a boak here, a row there and a stagger home along the promenade in the vain hope of sobering up in the inevitable wind and rain, the night was complete.

Christmas Day itself, therefore, was rarely experienced through anything less than bloodshot eyes, a fag-blasted tongue, a blocked nose and quaking hands. They say youth is wasted on the young, and it is hard to argue with that.

One year I was so hungover that I didn’t make it past the first course. Bear in mind the fact service of our Christmas meal rarely commenced before 4pm and you get an idea of how much drink had been taken. I managed to down a wisp or two of smoked salmon and a morsel of buttered wholemeal bread before the sudden annexation of my mouth by a flood of salty saliva and the draining of blood from my face heralded a mumbled apology, a swift egress and my return to bed.

I was back among the pack that same night, lurching towards the finishing line.