For far too many years I interpreted the phrase ‘enjoying
yourself’ as ‘drinking yourself steadily into oblivion’. In this
misinterpretation I was not alone as half of Glasgow believed the same thing.
I think what happened was, sometime early on in this liquid
career, I experienced a ‘great night out’, a night when the laughter and conversation
flowed and the bevvy was endless and tasted like honey from heaven, and I then
spent the next thirty years attempting unsuccessfully to replicate this.
“Remember that night?”
“Aye, it wis rerr”
“How much have we spent trying to recreate it”
“Many, many thoosands o’ pounds”
And all of this folly had led me here hunched over a
well-sooked roll-up outside a community centre which held AA meetings at the
same time as across the hall, the Weightwatchers class was taking place, Not so
much Alcoholics Anonymous as Alcoholics Apparently as you can bet all the
weightwatchers would be reporting back to the local community.
“You’ll never guess…”
“I always knew he was a piss-head..”
Now the fatties of the little town by the sea knew who the
alkies were.
Earlier he’d been touched by a story a wee, small woman had related to the group. She was a wee forgormik all hunched in on herself and nervous. It was one benefit of such groups that folk not used to or ever invited to talk in front of others found themselves doing so, maybe voicing their innermost secrets and emotions with other humans for the very first times in their lives. Soon they got used to it and you couldn’t get them to stop.
Elsie her name was (not really. This was Alcoholics
Anonymous, after all!). She had a mouth like a small beak like a wee-pea hen
and her eyes met only the ceiling and the walls as she told her tale. She’d
reached such a desperate low, she said, little money and now alone in a cheap
bed-sit, everything in her life now rent asunder by her desperate devotion to
oblivion, that she’d asked the kindly local off-licence man not to sell her any more booze under any
circumstances. It was a cold, wet night when she’d entered his premises begging
for ‘a wee hauf bottle of vodka’, pleading with him, but he wouldn’t give in.
She said she had to walk two miles in the storm to a more
obliging shop of booze.
Such is it to be controlled by something external to
yourself; when the only relief you can seem to find comes out of a bottle.
Back in the day, it was a regular occurrence to see some
bloke (sometimes a woman, though nowhere near as often) staggering
tragi-comically down a street, almost weaving into traffic and falling into
gutters. It was the stuff of humour.
“Some state the other night, Tam. Christ ye were birlin’”
“Aye, ha ha. It’s that Red Biddy. I think they put something
in it”
The fact that you went home and punched the wife and
terrorised your kids is never mentioned.
Strange how folk joke and make light of something that is so
devastating to themselves and those around them.
“You should have been there. I ended up in A&E, Big
Sammy was arrested and we think Wee Tam fell under a train. Some night!”
