
(Continued from last week. Read part two here and part one here.) When I get on the number one train westbound out of Oslo on Sunday morning it’s full of healthy Norwegians with glowing cheeks, wrapped up in warm looking sports gear. The young and youthful are headed for the Holmenkollbakken ski jump. Everyone in this country loves ski jumping. I get off a handful of stops earlier in the relatively non-descript, snow covered, hilly suburb of Stemdal, and I do so alone.
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Notes On Giving Up Drinking For Fabio (continued)
“When the hangover wears off, and when the overwhelming desire to just run down the offie and get a bottle of vodka in passes – and don’t worry, it does – it’s like putting on the sunglasses in They Live. Almost to a cruelly comical extent, you will have a clear, unfiltered look at alcohol culture in this country and it is simply astounding. Walking through the booze aisles in a very big supermarket becomes like being in some weird Doom/Duke Nukem first person shooter. I’ve gotten lost in alcohol quadrants of some warehouse-sized supermarkets, like Father Ted in the lingerie section on the Christmas Special. I had to leave a trail of bagel crumbs behind me to find my way back out.
“Count the billboards, the offies, the booze ads, the drunks, the pubs, the ambient ads in papers, the bottles and cans lying in the street, the people lying in the street, the people pissing in the street. The piss, the beer and the blood on the floor. Walk through Liverpool city centre on a Saturday night, Manchester city centre on a Friday night, Newcastle city centre on a Thursday night and it’s like descending into some kind of Hogarth painting. Walk through Soho and count your drinking options. This clarity goes after a while, thankfully – a man could become a sanctimonious twat quite easily.
“I cannot describe the deviousness with which my brain tried to make me drink for the first three months after I got completely sober and dried out, but eventually it gradually started easing its foot off the pedal. I remember at some point around six months in I realised it had been a few days since I had been really tempted to drink and that was really the start of the end of it being a giant drag for me. Whether I do or do not think about drinking every day now, it’s really just water off a duck’s back – and to be honest, I very rarely think about it now.
“Having to give up drinking is like having your heart broken or having someone you love die. It happens. It is unpleasant. You will get better in due course. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. You can’t really remember the full extent of how bad it is when it’s over. It is totally natural. It has the same definable stages. The worst stuff is the bit in the middle where you’re just ruminating, going over and over the same stuff in your head, time and time again. Trying to work out some kind of way in which it will be alright if you just go and have a shandy or trying to convince yourself you really need a glass of wine, or to start again but this time only drinking real ale.
“But this rumination is a positive thing. You’re deprogramming yourself. You are Dave Bowman and your alcoholism is the mad computer HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and every crazy thought your brain sends you, is your disease saying: “Dave, I’m scared.” Or singing "A Bicycle Made For Two" like a Salem remix of Gucci Mane.
“And, like with heartbreak, the last stretch is not the worst bit but it is the most insidious. You have to want to let go. You have to make the decision to throw the last of the photos out or to put them in a box up in the loft, so you can start looking for a new partner. There will be people who spend the rest of their lives at this stage. Refusing to let go.
“Also, it’s like stopping drinking coffee or giving up meat or stopping smoking in a way. Either you stop or you don’t stop. There are no half measures. Don’t be the person who is constantly trying to find the really good caffeine-free coffee or gorging on Quorn or using loads of nicotine patches and sniffing other people’s cigarettes. Just give up and be done with it. Once it’s done it’s done. Don’t torture yourself. Move on.
“And then – touch wood – it’s over. Or at least, that’s how I’ve found it, up to now… it’s probably best not to get too cocky or complacent. But for the time being I’m happy enough that I don’t need to walk round on eggshells the whole time. I could be at a party now and sitting on my own in a room full of booze watching telly with an hour to kill before people turn up and while it would occur to me that I could drink half a pint of wine without anyone noticing, it would never actually occur to me to do it.
“Stopping drinking is not a cure-all and it won’t solve any other problems you have (and you almost certainly have lots of them if you’re drinking that much). If you drank for a reason – that reason will still be there when you sober up. However, it will ultimately be much easier to deal with dry. Like I said before, it’s an on-going process and sobering up isn’t the end result. The end result is stopping drinking and being happy with being sober and getting back the kind of balanced normal life you (maybe) should have had all along.
“All the reasons that you tell yourself now that you don’t want to stop drinking are completely wrong. It’s hard for me to explain but you will find out. I had some of the best times and some of the worst times drinking. It helped me in some ways when I was younger and I made a lot of enduring relationships with people via drink. Latterly, it also nearly killed me several times and made me really dysfunctional in many ways, both physically and mentally, so I don’t find it contradictory to say that stopping drinking was also the best decision I ever made and that now I’m intrinsically much more happy and healthy than I used to be. Certainly I have a better life for it now. All the stuff I wanted to be – outgoing, cool, the life and soul of the party, well, that’s just not who I am and I’m happy with that now and I don’t need drink to bring me completely out of myself any more. I’m happier in my own skin. Well, most of the time I am. And that’s a first.
“I can’t really go on about AA too much but I found it invaluable for the first three months of quitting. Go to a meeting and check it out. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are brilliant. Find one that suits you. Don’t say anything at first, just turn up and check out what other people are saying. If there’s one constant about people at AA, it’s that they can all make a great brew. And give me a good brew these days, and four times out of five I’m halfway to being happy already.
“Sorry if this has gone on a bit. Next time I see you, let’s talk about David Bowie instead.”Previously: Menk, by John Doran - The Emptiness of the PrizeYou can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.