On being and staying sober when everyone else is drunk
It's the most drunken time of the year so this is what I do to keep sober. I hope this might help to read if you're trying to drink less too.
Sometimes I urgently miss drinking. It’s the week before Christmas and this same week, a few years ago, I’d have been feeling all warm and a bit drunk right now. Every year brings hard and beautiful new feelings with it and until I gave up three years ago, alcohol was always the way to celebrate or forget them.
If I was much younger, say somewhere in my late twenties, I might have been going to see The Pogues play in London, since in my memory they always had a gig at this moment in December, and my friend Patrick always seemed to have spare tickets, so we’d see them while consuming lots of lovely cheap wine and certainly quite a few chemicals too. More recently, say in my early thirties, I’d probably have been cooking a large piece of smoked meat at home in Oxford with my sister Nell while we cheerily sloshed bottles of red into a saucepan bobbing with a clove-studded orange to make mulled wine, which was pretty disgusting but got us wonderfully drunk. Even as little as a few years ago, I’d have maybe been meeting Pete for dinner somewhere delicious and drinking quite expensive champagne, loads of it.
Tonight, though, I’m lighting some incense while trying to get excited about a hot shower. Incense helps me get into the “other” state I’m craving, but we don’t have a proper bath in our house in America and I definitely feel deprived of missing the liquid Valium effects of an exceptionally hot soak. I don’t even live in England any more and Nell is dead. Look, life is hard, even when it’s good. And while I am evangelical about sobriety and the good it’s brought into my life, if I’m really honest (I am actually incapable of being anything but really honest) there are certain times I really do miss getting drunk. When that happens I have to concentrate hard to keep sober. And because this is the moment in the year when you might also be trying to stay sober while everyone around you is fizzing with prosecco, or you might at least be trying get a little bit less drunk after multiple mornings waking up feeling like a paranoid piece of old rope, I wanted to share some of the things I tell myself in order to stay sober, because maybe they will help you. And I really want my writing to help you.