The friendly barman, two panicked boys... and why I’m glad no teen will ever order a Dubonnet again!

IT would be nice to remember the first time I ever got drunk, but the truth is I don’t. Clearly there’s a very good reason for that, because there have been quite a few more nights like it since. It certainly wasn’t before I turned 16, because I took the pledge and I stuck to it, even though some of the other lads in school did not.

Nor did I sneak a furtive beer, a glass of wine or a small measure of spirits at home. Both my parents were lifelong Pioneers who eventually got their gold pins at a ceremony in St Michael’s church in Dún Laoghaire. Neither ever even so much as tried it. That’s not to say there was no alcohol in the house, because they weren’t censorious of others and always kept some handy for friends who called.

Frost

The trouble was there was so little that even a sneaked whiskey would have been noticed, and there would have been hell to pay. Indeed, on one occasion early in my drinking days, I arrived home half cut, and my mother just said: ‘Get out of my sight.’ I did, and slept until the middle of the next afternoon, and I awoke to a frost that lasted a week.

When I sometimes stayed over at a friend’s house, his mother allowed us one glass of wine with a meal, usually something, white, sweet and German. Later, when we stayed at their caravan in Co. Wexford on summer weekends, John and I ventured into the pub one day and were astonished when, on walking to the bar, we were asked: ‘What are you having, lads?’

This was so unexpected, and both of us were so unfamiliar with drink (I may be wrong but think it also was my first time in a pub, because these were the days before they became creches), we actually hadn’t had the chat about what to ask for. Panic-stricken, I blurted out the name of the only drink I knew because my elder sister drank it, and asked for two Dubonnets with white lemonade. Every time John and I think back on it, almost 40 years later, we dissolve in a mixture of helpless laughter and residual embarrassment. The barman certainly thought it was hilarious too, and we slunk off in mortification after just the one.

One night, a few months before the Leaving Cert exams, we had to go to my school in the evening for mock interviews, to make sure we were prepared for workplace or college panels. I vividly remember slipping on a sports jacket, smart trousers, one of my Dad’s ties, and shoes polished to Army standard. The interviews went fine and afterwards, because we felt so grown up, we went to the bar in the long defunct Elphin Hotel in Dún Laoghaire, where we were served with no questions asked – ID wasn’t an issue back then. Mindful of my Dubonnet gaffe, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, and that was the night I had my first proper pint.

The usual teenage pattern followed – nights on the beach in Co. Wexford drinking cans around a bonfire, and hit-andmiss attempts to get served in pubs that mostly were stricter when it came to admission. There was a holiday in Paris when we bought a very cheap bottle of Blanc de Blanc and a corkscrew in Monoprix. We made our way to the Île aux Cygnes, where we drank it from paper cups beside the small-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, rather a Freudian choice when I look back on it given that it was my first real holiday without parents or teachers to supervise us.

Snakebites

I was young going to college, just two months gone 17, and that’s when I began drinking with some enthusiasm. Snakebites were all the rage in 1980, and consisted of lager and cider mixed together. On one occasion, we met for drinks at a friend’s flat before going to the pub – what kids nowadays call ‘prinking’, short for pre-drinking. She was from the country and opened a bottle of poitín, which felt very sophisticated and dangerous to a city boy like myself. Unaware of its strength, I got so drunk I couldn’t remember my name, and woke up with the hangover of the century. It was the first time I promised myself I never would drink again, followed a couple of days later by the realisation of the timeless hollowness of that endlessly repeated pledge.

I tell you all this because new figures released by the World Health Organisation this week showed that Irish teenagers now are among the least likely in Europe to drink in their early teens, and also among the least likely to get drunk if they do actually imbibe. Just 5% of under- 15s said they had been drunk more than twice in their short lives, and that’s a great step forward in our natural evolution. Our relationship with alcohol is complex and troubled, and it has caused the breakdown of many families, and in far too many cases is at the root of sexual abuse of children and domestic violence generally. Breaking that cycle would be a massively positive step on the road to a healthier respect for drinking and its genuine benefits.

Horrible

There have been many nights in my life when I shouldn’t have drunk so much, or even at all, and waking up with The Fear is just about the most horrible feeling there is. What did I say? Who did I insult? Do I phone to apologise or just hope they, too, were drunk and promptly will forget all about it? Those are the days you know you really should be more careful, show more restraint, be just a little wiser. That holds as true today, at 55, as it did 40 years ago.

But I also would be lying if I said there weren’t nights when alcohol overlaid the proceedings with a sprinkling of pixie dust, breaking down awkwardness and shyness and intensifying all the sensations that etch memories on your cerebral cortex, never to be chiselled away.

There was that one session with friends in the bar on an Emirates A380 when we spent seven hours at 39,000 feet polishing off a bottle of tequila between five of us: I can’t remember laughing as much. There have been nights in the great capital cities and among the wonders of the modern world where, paying extortionate prices mostly for the views, I’ve drunk caipirinhas on Copacabana Beach in Rio, cocktails on the deck of a cruise ship sailing through the Panama Canal, champagne in Windows On The World at the top of the World Trade Center before the atrocity that changed our world forever and, just these past few days, I’ve sat on the terrace of the holiday home of friends in southwest France drinking wine grown and bottled just a few kilometres away.

These are the days and nights we remember. Used responsibly, alcohol has a role to play in the enjoyment of those of us who enjoy it and, yes, sometimes abuse it, too. Certainly, last Sunday, the third Calvados apple brandy might best have been left in the bottle.

Today’s more responsible teenagers send a bright signal for the future, though. They will see alcohol differently to us, hopefully, as something to be enjoyed rather than craved, to burnish an event rather than to dull a memory, and as the social lubricant it always was meant to be, rather than as mummy and daddy petrol that can prove explosive.

And I’ll bet you something else, too. They’ll never be so gauche as to walk into a bar at the age of 16 and ask for a Dubonnet and white.