Last Orders: A Drinker's Guide to Sobriety

Last Orders

A Drinker’s Guide to Sobriety

By Andy McIntyre

Copyright © Andrew James C. McIntyre 2009

Smashwords Edition

Published in 2013 by Andy’s Books

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Print edition available, ISBN 978-0-9565512-0-7

This book is dedicated to

Donovan Brian Camerford McIntyre

Chapter One: Straight In ’08

Alicante

F.I.B.

Straight In ’08

Sinking In

Refining and Defining

Chapter Two: January

New Year Hangover

I Need A Drink!

Elusive Sleep

Friday Night Anxiety

So Many Hours In The Day

Fishing

Comedy and Anaesthetics

First Nervy Nights Out

Who Am I?

The Pink Cloud Passeth

Coffee Shop Conversations

Dinner For Two

A Big Gig in Brixton

Music Industry

Chapter Three: February

A Day At The Races

A Night At The Opera (Kind Of)

Concert Crawl

Outdoor Swimming

Hyper-Sensitive at Van Morrison

Valentine’s Day Writing Class

Sleazy Soho

Old Man, Old Man!

The Drugs Don’t Work

Chapter Four: March

In The Beginning Pt.1

In The Beginning Pt.2

Alcohol Free Beer

Book Club

An Excess of Energy

Ultimate Frisbee

A Night At The Knees-Up

Affordable Art?

O.D.s and Spring Cleans

Community Theatre

Old Man, Old Man! Pt.2

Chapter Five: April

Walkies!

Expensive Art

Belfast Revisited

Friendships in Flux

I Need A Drink. Really.

Dance Class

Zero Balancing

Chapter Six: May

Ham House of Horrors

A Maltese Epiphany

Fine Wine and Dining

Touring On The Wagon

A Relationship Starts

Movie Marathon

Eurovision Party

Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit

Normalising

Surprises Over Dinner For Two

Chapter Seven: June

Walking and Talking

Camping Trip

Bingo!

The Tourist Bit

Flugtag

Live Role-Playing

Time To Go Home

Climbing

Metal Hammer Awards

Picnic In The Park

Shakespeare In The Park

Class Vs Discourtesy

Chapter Eight: July

Gardening

Playtime

Bullies at the Silver Clef

Festival Taster

Luche Libre Vs Queensbury Rules

A New Kind of Role Model

Climbing More Seriously

Binge Drinking

Bereavement

Belfast Requiem

Wedding

Dinner Parties

Chapter Nine: August

A Death of Fresh Air

Moving House

‘Professional’ Drinking

More Support from Unexpected Quarters

Designated Driver

Weirdness and Archaeology in Dorset

Bar Mitzvah

Chapter Ten: September

Bestival

Tai Chi

Pagan Wedding

Non-Pagan Wedding

My Sober Birthday

Chapter Eleven: October

In The City

Stratford Mop

Africa Rising

Mushroom Reunion

Campaign Awards

They Tried To Kill Me!

Halloween Horror Show

Chapter Twelve: November

Classic Rock Awards

Bonfire Night Damp Squib

In It vs Out-Of-It

Friends In Crisis

A New Generation?

Winter Wonderland Warmer

Irish Youth Foundation

Proud Gallery Ponces

Chapter Thirteen: December

Detox Dreams

Christmas Nibbles: A Beer Revelation

Poker Night

Tai Chi Christmas Dinner

Warwick Castle

Christmas

New Year’s Eve

Epilogue:

The Morning After

Appendix i: Links from the Text

Important

Miscellaneous

Restaurants and Bars

Music Festivals

Music Venues

Bands

Places to Visit - London

Places to Visit - Nationwide

People

Appendix ii: Further Reading

Appendix iii: Acknowledgements

Chapter One: Straight In ‘08

Alicante

The great irony is, if we hadn’t been mid-way through a 16-day bender of Bacchanalian proportions and twisted as Slinkies in a blender, there would never have been a ‘Straight In ’08’.

We’d been giving Oliver Reed and George Best a good run for their money ever since we arrived at Gatwick airport ten days previously, each clutching a budget ticket to Alicante in Spain and a seven-day camping pass for the 2007 Festival Internacional de Benicassim, buzzing with excitement and anticipation. The whole trip had been meticulously planned in advance with the military precision customary to the experienced caner; get it all scheduled down to the finest detail before you start, that’s the thing, because once the boozing kicks in you’ll be in no condition to make any kind of sensible decisions regarding your itinerary. And boozing was very much going to be the order of the day for the next couple of weeks. Having successfully negotiated the Orwellian nightmare that is airport security in the 21st Century, we located a table at one of the many airport bars and settled down to run through our agenda over the first round of the holiday (pints with brandy chasers if memory serves).

We’d be spending the first five nights of our trip at a house just outside Alicante. This opening phase of the operation was critical, and might have been termed the ‘limbering-up’ phase. It was to be used to raise our already frighteningly high alcohol tolerances to the levels necessary to sustain six days and nights of non-stop festival mayhem. With days spent at the beach bars drinking cold beer and sangria, evenings in the local restaurants where wine would be the lubricant of choice, and the nights working with various combinations of spirits whilst rampaging our way around the myriad bars comprising the Barrio in Alicante until the call of the 4am bus, we’d pretty much got all the bases covered. Thus suitably prepared, we were to head down to FIB in a rented car, set up our base on the festival campsite, and get on it properly for the next seven days. After that we’d need a break. Any festival is a serious proposition for the heavy caner; usually comprising four days and three nights of non-stop self-abuse, very loud music, very bad food and very little sleep, it is advisable to allow at least two days of dedicated recovery time afterwards before attempting to reintegrate oneself into civilised society. In this context, FIB is a festival best tackled by what you might term the ‘professional festival goer’. With four days of music book-ended by another three nights camping and partying, it’s a full week of pretty much non-stop drinking. With this in mind we had allowed ourselves a final four days and nights back at the house in Alicante to dry out afterwards prior to returning to the real world and our positions on the torturous, never-ending treadmill that is the London rat-race.

The build-up to the fateful moment when Straight In ’08 was born had gone splendidly. Our time in Alicante had been well-spent. It’s a fabulous undiscovered pearl on the Mediterranean coast of southern Spain, only a few miles from the hell that is Benidorm. Unlike the latter, with its forest of tasteless concrete high-rise hotels, beaches full of British tourists squabbling for each valuable inch of sand like a colony of demented pink-and-white walruses, and sea turned the consistency of putrid soup by gallons of cheap suntan lotion, discarded copies of the Daily Sport and used condoms, Alicante is a charming and peaceful town set around a beautiful curving harbour and a good few miles of virgin white-sand beach. Undiscovered by the hordes of British holidaymakers that descend on Spain each summer to burn themselves silly and behave as irresponsibly as possible, it retains a very Spanish feel and outlook, a million miles away in temperament, if not geography, from the Costa Del Sin and the antics thereof that grace the late-night programme schedules of the lower-rent cable TV channels back home. For this very reason it is a favourite holiday destination for the beautiful young people of south-eastern Spain.

The nearest beach to our accommodation was situated a couple of miles west of the main town, and was stunning. Fringed by gently rolling sand dunes and framed by red cliffs it was two miles of paradise. On the first day we got down early and found a spot near a beach hut selling cold local beer and good sangria. Coincidentally it was also near the section of the beach frequented by naturists, and so we spread out in the ‘undecided’ area, between the Wears and the Wear-Nots, and got down to the serious business of acquiring a decent tan and acclimatising ourselves to drinking large volumes in the searing heat and unrelenting sun of the Spanish summer. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that. Still, just as a finely-tuned athlete must perfect their fitness by training at altitude or in unusually hot or cold climates, so the professional drinker perfects his art by practicing in conditions normally considered ill-suited to his purpose, and avoided by those of weaker constitutions: early mornings, late nights, working lunchtimes, blazing sun, church services, and so on. Thus over four days we finely-honed our tolerances to heat, sun, beer, sangria, and nakedness. All these tolerances would be crucial to surviving FIB.

Dining in Spain, as in most or the warmer European countries, is a drawn-out affair, with a typical dinner lasting the best part of four hours. The courses are generally small but highly numerous, and punctuated by bottle after bottle of excellent local wine. There really is nothing like settling down to an al-fresco food and drink marathon in the cooling Mediterranean evening with a gang of mates all merrily tipsy after a day of relaxing, swimming and drinking, looking and feeling healthy and glowing from a day spent in the sun. After dinner, well-fed and suitably watered after nine or ten hours of steady drinking, we’d get the ten o’clock bus into town adequately prepared to really get down to the business of some serious alcohol consumption.

The thing about the Spanish is, they really know how to drink. They need to, with the measures being the size they are in your typical Spanish bar, and the bars being open most of the night. Little and often whilst maintaining dignity, decorum and a general outward demeanour of sobriety at all times, that’s the ticket. Public displays of drunkenness are a serious faux-pas in Spain, and greatly frowned upon. Of course it was our mission to attain the ability to drink heavily and often whilst maintaining dignity, decorum and a general outward demeanour of sobriety at all times, and so the Barrio of Alicante was the perfect training ground. Situated in the most charming and picturesque part of the old town, it comprises a square mile of alleyways arranged in a near-perfect grid, with almost every doorway leading into a bar or club of some kind. It’s relatively quiet until about 11pm, at which point an invisible man rings an inaudible bell, and telepathically yells GO!, thus triggering the start of one of the best nights out in Europe. Almost instantly it’s packed with revellers, every young person in a fifteen mile radius descending on the town to bar-hop around the alleys for the next five hours, simultaneously creating a unique square-mile of ever-moving party. The atmosphere is pretty laid-back; we’re not talking Newcastle town centre on a Saturday night here. There’s drinking of course, and flirting, and nibbling tapas on the go, punctuated by dancing and more drinking, but no shouting, vomiting, fighting or fucking in the streets. It’s warm enough to wear short-sleeved button-down shirt and shorts, the girls are all legs and mid-riff, and the convivial air of merry sociability pervading the entire proceeding makes for a truly wonderful night out. When Barry and Kevin from Essex discover the place it’ll be ruined of course, but for now it’s sexy, sassy and sociable.

Overall we acquitted ourselves admirably, and managed to get away with being horrendously drunk in public without giving the game away with any uncouth or inappropriate behaviour. In fact, with the exception of an impromptu flash mob started by one of our number swaying and making ‘Ooooh’ and ‘Aaaah noises in time with a swinging light bulb in one bar, a behaviour that was soon taken up by the rest of our team and eventually spread to the entire clientele of the establishment, much to the bemusement of the bar staff, none of the locals would have noticed the tribe of drunken Englishmen and women in their midst. It’s not an easy thing do, to blend in after a seventeen hour drinking session, even in a town full of bars, and certainly not something to be attempted by any but the most accomplished of drinkers on their very best form, but we managed it night after night. We were ready for the festival.

F.I.B.

The plan was for me and my best friend Paul to share driving duties on the four hour trip from Alicante to the festival site in Benicassim, with me taking the first shift, but it soon became clear that I was in no fit condition to be behind the wheel of a left-hand-drive car on the wrong side of the road in an unfamiliar country. I was feeling very wired and disconnected on the morning of the drive. This was principally due to my having hardly slept for the previous five nights, having drawn the short straw and landed the dusty, sandy patio for my sleeping quarters, with the tiny blow-up lilo that refused to stay inflated for more than a couple of hours for my bed. It was also due in no small measure to my having discovered and summarily consumed a reasonable quantity of drugs the night before that I’d accidentally and unwittingly smuggled into the country in an old pair of trousers, in that strange little compartment of fabric above the main right-hand pocket whose purpose is never made clear on any instructions, but which seems perfectly designed to accommodate personal-use-sized wraps of recreational narcotics. Usually the waking nightmare that is a combined hangover, come-down and lack-of-sleep is quickly and easily banished by the application of a stiff drink to one’s system (vodka being my personal medicine of choice), but as that hadn’t been available as an option due to my driving commitments I’d gamely struggled along for a few miles before admitting defeat and handing over to my better-rested and therefore more capable companion. Later I would trace my unprovoked and uncharacteristic acceptance of the Straight In ’08 challenge back, through a sequence of weird and grotesquely unhinged experiences, to this low-point on the trip.

The Festival Internacional de Benicassim is a music festival taking place in mid-July on a huge sun-scorched expanse of pitch and concrete twenty minutes walk from the beach. It’s too hot for anything sensible to happen during daylight hours, so the bands and DJs don’t start up until around 7 or 8pm, and the music lasts right through the night until 7 or 8am the following morning. The sensible thing to do during daylight would be to sleep, however it’s too hot for that too, so we had already resigned ourselves to between four and five hours sleep in any given 24 for the six days and seven nights we would be there. This calculation was predicated on the assumption that we would get into the second of the three campsites provided for ticket holders. The first (and biggest) site, nearest to the arenas, is generally best described as degenerate chaos, as it’s where all the kids and festival newbies go. With little or no experience of festivals, extended drinking and drug-taking sessions or extreme heat, it was likely that the majority of the inhabitants of this site would crash quite quickly into a state of primitive and agitated animalism. Think the Do Lung Bridge sequence in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, with glow-sticks instead of guns. Not somewhere you want to be if you’re over the age of thirty-three. Or twenty-three for that matter. The third campsite is right over the other side of town, about a forty minute walk away. Very quiet, no doubt; perhaps too quiet. After all, if you’re going to fly right across Europe to attend a festival, you at least want to feel like you’re actually at one! No, it was definitely the second site for us; fifteen minutes from the arenas, between the festival and the beach, and crucially in an orchard, providing essential shade that’s absolutely necessary for sleeping beyond 10 in the morning in that bright, hot country.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Our planning had been a little too perfect. We’d arrived in such good time that the maňana mentally of the Spanish hadn’t caught up with us, and our chosen site wouldn’t open until the next day. With all the hotels in town being booked up long ago, we had no choice but to brave the horrors of the main campsite, and so to steel our nerves and wait out the queue for pitches we plonked ourselves down on our tent bags and launched into the first beer of the festival. It was a Heineken. And it came in a litre cup. A litre for Christ’s sake! I should have known right at that minute, in the moment of realising I had to hold my drink with both hands because it was so immense, that strange and unsettling things were likely to occur over the next few days, but I was too twisted from the night before to make the connection. If I had done, perhaps I would have been better prepared and on my guard when the moment of truth came, and the portentous words Of course I can do it! flowed effortlessly and without editorial oversight from between my lips.

After battling hard with other less savvy festival-goers and what passed for campsite security we managed to occupy a reasonable spot on the campsite under a tarp between some low trees for shade, within sight of a ginormous aircraft hangar they’d converted into a bar, and near to the shower compound, and we soon settled into the rhythm of the festival. Every festival has its own rhythm, whether it’s the gentle meandering tinkle of The Big Chill, the demented experimental chunter of Glastonbury, or the psychotic tempestuous onslaught of Reading. The Rhythm of FIB is essentially tidal in nature, the low tide mark being the beach, the high tide mark being the site itself, and throughout the day and night hordes of inebriated revellers wash unrelentingly up and down between the two.

A typical day starts at around 10am, when the light and heat turn your tent into something akin to the sweat-boxes of Tenko and sleeping becomes utterly impossible. First port of call is the shower compound, where the nudist beach training comes into play. It’s a giant unsegregated outdoor affair, with five long rows of overhead pipes feeding a hundred or so shower heads, each pumping out powerful streams of ice-cold water. It’s easy to spot those who have not previously acclimatised themselves to being surrounded by nakedness as we had; they stand gawping at the lithe, tanned, lathered, naked bodies, wet and glinting in the powerful morning sun. In fairness it is a marvellous sight, but I tended to have a different agenda for being there; the water is so cold, and the shock of it hitting your hot, dusty, sweaty skin is so violent that it literally takes your breath away for the first few moments. It also takes away any vestige of a hangover instantly, and blasts the sleep and grogginess from your brain like an H2O howitzer. After the morning shower, and suitably refreshed, everyone packs up their day gear and starts the half hour amble down to the beach, via the beer hangar for the first litre of the day. The beach gets pretty busy as you can imagine, but we managed to find a lovely spot away from the main strip with its own mini bay and the best beach bar in Benicassim. We’d lay around on the sand reading, chatting or just watching the world go by, occasionally swimming to cool off, and then retire to the bar at around 3pm when the heat was getting too much, to drink jug after jug of their ice cold sangria, that came mixed with some vodka-like spirit for extra kick. At around 6pm the festival tide would turn, and we’d mosey slowly back to our tents for another shower, another litre, a quick change into our night clothes, and then head into the festival itself. After drinking and dancing the night away to the best festival line-up of the year we’d retire back to the tents at around 6am, with a litre or double-vodka-something or two from the hangar, and dissect the day around an imaginary camp-fire until we passed out at around 7 or 8am. Two hours sleep, and we were off again.

As the week progressed, and the ratio of alcohol to water in our bloodstreams became ever more heavily weighted in favour of the former, things started to become a little unhinged and disjointed. We discovered the second biggest tat shop in Europe, and in it was this crazy dancing singing cow, which for some reason was the funniest thing any of us had ever seen. It accompanied us everywhere, never failing to elicit hysterical belly laughter every time it was switched on. The poor thing ended up being rodgered by a drunken Lithuanian out of his mind on MDMA and wearing an inflatable dingy on his head and a giant sausage float in his pants, sometime around 5.30 one morning. I almost died laughing. We had an amazing five-hour tapas and beer endurance dinner, served by a waiter who was the spitting image of Ian Huntley, but who clearly didn’t know who Ian Huntley was, because every time he came to our table he pointed at himself and bellowed Ian Huntley! at the top of his lungs before dissolving into fits of giggles, much to the consternation of any passing Brits (our table was in the middle of the pavement on the high street). A hand of giant inflatable bananas attached itself to our group, and mercilessly demanded to be carried absolutely everywhere. We figured out how to get the barmen to give us two-for-one vodkas without realising what they were doing, a skill upon which lies the blame for my passing out one evening inside the festival, waking to find a large Italian sitting on my back giving the ‘thumbs up’ to his photographer mate.

Then we started to really lose our grip on reality. People weren’t able to grasp the concept of the silent disco, instead bellowing over the din in their headphones across an otherwise silent room full of grooving bodies in the mistaken belief that the person to whom they were addressing their outburst could hear anything other than the music in their own. I found myself wandering the campsite at 9am trying to locate the random person who’d plied me with drugs earlier in the night, only subconsciously comprehending that everyone was asleep and that’s why I couldn’t find their group. Later that morning my friends were earnestly trying to convince me that the most effective way to rehydrate, and thereby banish the god-awful hideousness that was my state of physical (un)wellbeing back to the depths of the pit from which it had clawed and groped it’s vile form, was to snort a mixture of rehydration powder and paracetymol. I was so wrecked I almost did it too; the only thing that stopped me was a perfectly rational desire to maintain my no-puke record of fifteen years, a record already teetering on the brink thanks to the heat-stroke that was adding to my woes. Another cold shower did the trick in the end. When we started burying plastic effigies of large-breasted black women smoking unfeasibly large spliffs in remembrance of the world’s sex workers, and invented campsite Olympics using abandoned tents as long-distance wind-propelled runners, later cutting out their groundsheets and pegging them down over unsuspecting passed-out partiers, even the kids camped around us started to back nervously away with a mixture of fear, awe and reverence at the serious caner pushing the boundaries to the limit whilst staying just the right side of sane. This was a hand to be played only by the professionals left in the game; the pot was substantial, and this was no time or place for the bluffer, the amateur or the faint-hearted.

Anyway, you get the picture: the standards by which one is accustomed to judging normal, rational behaviour and perceptions of reality had been lowered quite considerably, levels of common decency were slipping almost beyond retrieval, indeed none of us were in our right minds. And it was in this context that Straight In ’08 entered my world.

Straight In ‘08

I don’t remember which day it was, or what time of day, only that it was light and sometime near the end of the festival. Slouched in semi-recumbent sloth around our tents we had been animatedly discussing potential charity challenges that Rob, a dear friend of ours, might undertake, partial as he is to a bit of fundraising. Usually they last a month, and are based on a rhyme befitting the month in which he will undertake them. Previous trials have included Dry in July and Sober in October, or the slightly more abstract NO-vember, but seeing as boundaries were being pushed it seemed only natural that his next challenge should last a full year. Cue an avalanche of suggestions for words rhyming with eight that might hint at some activity worthy of our hard-earned cash. After much light-hearted debate we eventually settled on Two Thousand and Pate, the challenge proposed (and duly accepted) being that he should go the whole year without cutting his hair or shaving his beard. Much hilarity ensued, along with increasingly preposterous suggestions for alternative challenges that may have been undertaken, sharing in common only that they rhymed and were unfeasible in any practical sense. Then it came to me in a flash:

Two Thousand and Straight! I exclaimed, total abstinence from any and all mind-altering substances, including alcohol, for an entire year!

Don’t be ridiculous, came the immediate retort. No one could manage that.

Rubbish, I replied, piece of piss. I bet even I could do it.

"You?! No way McIntyre," and the whole crew fell about laughing at the sheer outrageousness of my assertion.

Months later, on December 31st, as I sat staring down the barrel of a completely sober year having prepared myself by drinking the house completely dry, I wished to all the Gods in the pantheon that I had laughed too. Just laughed it off as the ridiculous idea that it was. But I didn’t laugh. Instead, fuelled by 10 days of non-stop consumption, I got boisterous.

Of course I can do it! I proclaimed, somewhat put out by this lack of faith which my friends were showing in me. Didn’t they realise how strong I could be? How stubborn? How if I say I’m going to do something I damn well do it? The mood around the group instantly changed, and a subtle prickle of electric tension stirred the sweltering air as everyone realised what I had only just begun to realise myself: I was going to accept my own challenge; I was going to commit to staying completely sober for an entire year. Right there, right then, in a drunken haze and half-crazy from lack of sleep, I signed away the next year of my life, solemnly, sincerely, and with a special secret handshake reserved solely for the acknowledgement of a deep and binding pact between brothers. At that precise moment, whenever it may have been, Straight In ‘08 was born.

I had no idea at the time that what I had agreed to do would change my life forever. Had I known, would I still have taken the proffered hand and shook it in mine? Probably. But then only because I wasn’t thinking straight, and any challenge, however ludicrous, would have been interpreted as placing my sincerity and ability in question, and hence an opportunity to prove my mettle in some ill-conceived way. It wasn’t until 2008 was in full swing that I realised that going straight for a year was probably the best decision I’d made in my entire life. The irony of it still fills me with wonder though: I had to get completely shit-faced in order to accidentally agree to get sober, and thereby transform my life for the better.

I remember very clearly waking up later that day after a couple of hours sleep snatched from the jaws of the fearsome summer sun. The first thought that went through my mind, after the now-familiar throb of pain and anguish from my poor punished body had registered, went something along the lines of Oh, Shit. I was instantly aware of what I’d agreed to. Had I not sealed the deal with that special handshake I would have been more than happy to write the whole thing off as another one of those stupid things you get yourself into when you’re drunk, and bail. But I had shaken on it, and was therefore honour-bound to make good on my promise. There was no debate, no hand-wringing, and no regret. What was done was done, and that was that. Better accept it and move on. So I crawled out of my tent, staggered slowly to my feet and stumbled off in the direction of the shower block to shock myself into some semblance of liveliness.

Sinking In

The rest of the trip didn’t go precisely as planned, in as much as the ‘drying out’ phase back in Alicante ended up being decidedly wet, mirroring almost exactly our earlier visit there only with much better tans all round. It’s a miracle we survived those last four days when I look back at them now. Many a celebrity has made the papers for collapsing outside a nightclub after considerably less punishment than we had already endured, and yet we were still going strong. At the time we saw this as an achievement worthy of considerable pride. Admittedly we had begun drinking bottled water in between the beers and sangrias during the hottest hours of the day, but it’s probably thanks to this last-minute concession to our biological needs that we kept ourselves out of hospital. I didn’t think again about my commitment to abstinence, and it wasn’t mentioned by anyone else until a few weeks after we had returned to Blighty, but the seed had been planted, and its roots began slowly and inexorably to establish themselves in the deeper levels of my subconscious mind.

It was mid-August before Straight In ’08 came up in conversation again, and although I hadn’t forgotten about it I hadn’t given it much dedicated thought either. I’d been DJing for Rob’s club night at a bar in Tooting, south London, and was relaxing at the after-party back at his place. It was the usual carnage; the flat was full of exceptionally drunken reprobates in high spirits following a wonderful night of drinking, dancing and debauchery. People were sprawled over every available surface, bottles of Magners, wine and strong imported beer purchased earlier from the after-hours off-licence down the road littered the floor, and the clock tocked innocently towards 4am. I think someone was cross-dressing experimentally. I’d just collapsed into a chair having attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate the living room in a friend’s stilettos (how do girls walk in those things?) when Rob plonked himself down next to me and took a great contemplative swig from his freshly-opened can of Kronenbourg.

Andy, are you still planning to go straight next year? he opened.

Of course I am, I replied somewhat indignantly.

You do know it’s a leap year don’t you? he countered slyly, a malicious grin spreading widely across his face. My response was immediate:

Oh, Shit.

For some reason that one extra day in February caused me all kinds of anguish. It wouldn’t be until November 2008, as my year of sobriety was drawing to a close, that I’d discover those kindly chaps at the Greenwich Observatory had added an extra second to the end of 2008, in my mind making it the longest year in centuries. But for now the knowledge that I’d have 366 days to contend with, rather than the 365 I’d accounted for when I made my original proclamation back in Spain, caused me a great deal of concern. Completely thrown, and my party ruined, I called a cab and slouched off home. Even now I’m surprised at the ferocity of the jolt that the awareness of that one extra day gave me, but it was a jolt that was absolutely necessary as it turned out. After repeatedly trying (and ultimately failing) to get Feb 29th excluded from my pact, I realised I had to get to grips with what I was about to do, and get serious about it. The enormity of the task hadn’t really sunk in prior to being given that small piece of information.

You see, I work at the creative end of the music business. My professional life involves a lot of socialising, a lot of gig-going, and a lot of drinking; the drinking-every-day kind of drinking. If I’m out with musicians or artists it is expected that I drink. Many of them will test your ability to keep pace with them before they’ll have a serious conversation with you, and my job requires me both to be able to keep pace and to have that serious conversation immediately afterwards, often in the form of a negotiation. To give an example, on my first meeting with a certain Irish singer-songwriter of legendary drinking and drug-taking prowess he wouldn’t even talk to me until we’d had six large bottles of saké between us, and it wasn’t until after the thirteenth that he’d countenance the discussion of business. That was at a lunch meeting in a Japanese restaurant. After lunch it was back to the office before going to a boozy dinner with one of our consultants to discuss the continuation of their contract under terms more favourable to my company, and less favourable to him. Admittedly that day was a fairly extreme example, but you can see how the need to develop and maintain a serious alcohol tolerance seems a fundamental aspect of the job. Also, it’s a high-pressured job, and my preferred method of unwinding was to drink. Alcohol was a pre-eminent, omnipresent fact of life for me. My tolerance was legendary, and in any other line of work I’d have probably been considered a borderline alcoholic. If I was going to quit drinking I’d better get some kind of plan together, and quickly, because 2007 was slipping away, and the great dry wave of 2008 loomed ever-larger on my horizon.

And so I started thinking. Hard.

Refining and Defining

The one thing I had going for me was an end-date. I knew that however difficult the task would prove, there was a concrete entry in my diary to mark its conclusion. I would take my last drink prior to going to bed on New Year’s Eve 07/08, but I knew I could then take my next after the last bong of Big Ben had faded into silence on New Year’s Eve 08/09. With a finish-line to focus on I reckoned I was in pretty good shape to complete the year. But what if it was more difficult than I anticipated? What if some event caused a pang of desire for a drink that over-rode the end-date safety protocol? What if, to quote my Collins Thesaurus, the ‘boredom of a lifetime of sobriety’ got too much for me? Clearly I needed a less abstract, more day-to-day mantra to help keep me on track.

By coincidence, 2008 would mark the fifteenth anniversary of my father’s death at the hands of Motor Neurone Disease. As his life was slowly taken from him by that hideous condition our whole family received immense support, practical, therapeutic and psychological, from the Motor Neurone Disease Association, a charitable organisation dedicated to helping the afflicted and their families, and to finding a cure for this currently incurable illness. The answer was immediately obvious; by turning Straight In ’08 into a charity fundraising endeavour whose beneficiary would be the MNDA I would have a cast-iron reason to keep going, both to ensure the maximum benefit to the association, and to honour the contributions of anyone kind and generous enough to donate. I figured the combination of my inherent stubbornness, the knowledge that there was an end to focus on, the benefit to the MNDA, and the guilt I’d feel towards my sponsors should I crack, all together would get me through, however hard it might get.

As time went on I became more and more comfortable with the idea of an abstemious year. If the truth be told, as September slid into October I was actually looking forward to it; I was drinking heavily every day as work and social commitments mounted up in the run-up to the silly season, and I was starting to suffer: I was always tired and hung-over, my brain was cloudy, my short-term memory patchy, I was unfit and putting on weight around my face, my beer-gut was prominent, my digestion shot, and I had an uncomfortable and painful bloated feeling at the top of my stomach that my doctor thought may be the onset of an ulcer. If even one of these issues could be resolved by a year spent in abstention then not drinking for a while may turn out to be a good thing after all.

There was one last area of concern for me however, and it was reinforced every time I told someone of my plans for the upcoming year. It invariably came in the form of a question that inevitably followed whenever I proclaimed my intention to stay tee-total for the duration of 2008. The question I heard time and time again was this:

"What are you going to do then?"

The continuation of this question that was never voiced but was always implicit in its asking was this:

"What are you going to do then, if you’re not going to sit in pubs, bars and clubs drinking with your friends?"

That this question even arises rests on two major assumptions. Firstly, that in order to socialise satisfactorily one must drink, and to not drink is by definition to render oneself unsociable. After all, what’s the point in going to the pub with your mates if they’re getting pissed and you’re not? The second is that there really is nothing worthwhile to do beyond sitting in pubs, bars and clubs drinking with your friends.

This really bothered me, not least because I’d been consciously worrying about it myself. I’d spent so much energy planning out how I would cope with not doing something that I’d completely failed to acknowledge that I may need to replace that something with something else. And what was that something else to be? Well, like my interrogators, I hadn’t got the faintest idea. Pubs, bars and clubs were all I knew. Beyond an unhealthy interest in modern politics and conspiracy theories (which in reality are more or less one and the same thing) I really didn’t have any hobbies, or even any idea what options were open to me. There must be something else to do I reasoned, because not everyone sits around drinking all the time. What do those people do? Where do they go? What are they like? I had no idea, but if I was going to make it through the year I needed to find out. And so I resolved to make my mission statement for Straight In ’08 two-fold:

I will stay sober for the entire of 2008, from last thing New Year’s Eve until midnight New Year’s Eve, in an effort to raise £10,000 for the Motor Neurone Disease Association;

I will spend the year attempting to prove that there is, in fact, life after pubs, and endeavouring to discover what that life is like.

And so it was that I found myself sitting in a flat completely bereft of all booze for the first time in my adult life on December 31st 2007. It was 8pm, the house had been drunk dry, my stomach was lined, fancy dress prepared for the bar, records sorted, and in about 20 hours I'd be passing out for the last time in 366 days. I was equal parts intimidated and exhilarated, and there was no turning back, although I didn’t really want to. I was actually excited. There was no doubt that the evening that lay ahead was going to be amazing, and a fitting send-off, if only temporarily, to my old life; warm-up drinks at a mate’s place, DJing in a bar till 2, after-party at the promoter’s house, then