I used to enjoy a drink...like the Cookie Monster enjoys a biscuit. Then I stopped
I’m one of those people who enjoys a drink, although in hindsight that’s like saying the Cookie Monster is fond of a biscuit.
I took to booze from the age of – sorry, dad – 16. Before, I was everything I thought real men weren’t – insecure, shy and prone to fearful mumbling around girls.
After a couple of pints, I was still all of those things but at least I was half-cut.
Life quickly became an endless carnival of cocktails but since I didn’t do it during work or if I was driving, it was, despite all the medical evidence to the contrary, completely fine.
In Scotland you can get canned most days and no one bats an eyelid, mainly because they themselves are too drunk to notice.
Far from being ashamed, I thought being able to effortlessly absorb lots of red wine was an essential ability, although, now I think about it, you can also say the same thing about a roll of Bounty.
It didn’t matter that I was blasting past the weekly recommended alcohol intake limit like a tanked-up tobogganist.
Yet although reality was cushioned in a comforting, softfocus duvet of drunkenness, I was vaguely aware that after two decades of punishment I probably had a liver like a boiled hockey puck.
Giving up for a month would, I imagined, regenerate my renal system like it was the superhero Wolverine.
It wasn’t particularly enjoyable at first – reality seemed washedout and one-paced, like a six-day episode of Eastenders where Phil Mitchell cries at a mirror.
But eventually I could feel my mood lifting and my body flooding itself with energy that didn’t come from anything triple-distilled or the Czech Republic.
Gone was the bloated, jaundiced ghoul who stared back at me from the bathroom mirror in the morning, too.
It was as if I’d been bodyswapped with someone a decade younger, like a human phone upgrade.
After my dry month was up I didn’t much fancy going back, and so I haven’t.
A year later and my wallet is heavier, and my beer belly has disappeared – I’m about a stoneand-a-half lighter than 12 months ago because, rather than hang out in pubs, I now hang out in the gym.
Who knows, maybe you also prefer treadmills to Bushmills?