Five Months Down, Seven To Go

This month has been the toughest so far. I am ploughing through books on alcohol, and learning a lot about the psychology of drinking.

I would far rather be reading them with a drink in my hand, because it is having the unexpected effect  of making me think about drinking far more often than I perhaps would have done if I'd given up booze for a year and decided to research gun crime, or cupcakes.

What I have discovered about myself is that the drinking I have been doing over the last few years can be classified as "low dependence" (according to one of the five questionnaires I've completed). And if you answer "sometimes" to any one of these fifteen questions, then congratulations - you're a low dependence drinker too.

Low dependence is obviously worse than no dependence, but there are few, if any, health problems associated with low dependence, and no intervention is required. The medical advice is to "watch it".

Having armed myself with more information than I ever expected to know about alcohol and its complex, insidious effects, I will.

I also fully intend to go back to drinking and spend the rest of my life enjoying it. But I want to do that within the context of a cultural and political understanding of alcohol, and its role in our society.

90% of us drink. That is, 90% of us take psychoactive drugs. In terms of the damage it can do, alcohol is one of the worst psychoactive drugs. Lots of questions about the law and public health policy here...

Why do we drink?

Here's a good list from The Diseases of Alcohol by Dr David Marjot. It does not try to describe every effect, so feel free to add your own:

A 'high' or 'buzz' - euphoria
Relief from anxiety
Permissive - puts you in a mood to do things you would not do sober
Facilitates uncritical social intercourse
Escape from yourself or present situation
Stimulate creativity
Assist healing
Treat symptoms (eg brandy for an unsettled stomach)
Rebel
Give energy
Sedate
Assist onset of sleep
Relieve pain
Enhance group solidarity
Pass time without boredom - alcohol destroys the awareness of the passage of time

This latter point is extremely important to Dr Marjot. When combined with the most significant thing about our relationship with alcohol - dose - we can start to unravel the complex mess of social, psychological and clinical signifiers we have constructed around it.

Dr Marjot's book was pressed on me by my local vicar when he discovered I'd sworn off the sauce. I'm rather glad he did, as the contents, to a lay drinker, are revelatory.

An actual old-fashioned proper book!

For a start it's full of really useful clinical information about what alcohol does to the brain, but, being a psychiatrist, Dr Marjot is just as interested in what alcohol does to the mind. There are some great moments in it, and the above list works perfectly as a stepping off point for thinking about why we drink, and how we handle its effects, personally and socially.

The conclusion Dr Marjot seems to be working towards is that we as a society don't handle alcohol very well at all, and therefore it shouldn't be much surprise when individuals don't either.

It chimes with a theory I am busy developing that we have got the way we acknowledge, celebrate, and stigmatise alcohol use completely wrong. This feeds into a wider discussion about all psychoactive drugs, but I'm going to focus on the legal one for the moment.

I am in touch with Dr Marjot and he is sending me his second book, Addiction: A Kind of Loving, in which he explores more fully his theory about our need to change the language of addiction. Should keep me busy.

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A decision

"There are better things in the world than alcohol, but alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.” - Terry Pratchett

Vic Reeves as Tom Fun. Cakes and snouts.

In a recent post I wondered whether I could or would voluntarily give up drinking for good. After spending the weekend home alone with three small children, I can confirm it's not going to happen any time soon.

Last week one of the directors I've been working with was having a conversation with a university professor who is a theoretical expert in the process of cannabis cultivation. My director had heard, from a bloke down the pub, that a lot of cannabis was being sprayed with heroin to make up for its lack of relative strength. The lack of relative strength coming from the recent fashion of speeding up the growth cycle.

"But why would you?" the professor replied.

Turns out if your cannabis is going to be sprayed with anything, it's more likely to be sugar solution, which as it dries will look pearlescent, mimicking the THC heavy trichomes at the optimum stage of maturity on the flower. Told you he was an expert.

It is impossible to achieve anything with three small children around other than continued mutual survival. Doing so is challenging, stimulating, irritating, repetitive, joyous and generally exhausting. But it is not an intellectual pursuit.

The amount of times I mentally poured myself a beer or a glass of wine over the weekend made me realise how useful alcohol is in alleviating boredom. And much as I love my little angels, supervising ablutions, overseeing homework and watching bad animated movies is not something I look forward to fitting in around the endless food prep, waiter service, dish-washing and floor-sweeping which constitutes the rest of my domestic schedule.

Introducing psychoactives into your bloodstream in order to let the world pass by in a warm, fuzzy dream is a famously bad idea, but staying resolutely sober throughout hours of inescapable drudgery seems positively masochistic.

The "why would you?" response articulates my conclusive position on permanent alcohol abstention.

I am counting the hours till 1 Jan 2015.

Going (London) Live to discuss not drinking

Claudia-Liza Armah, host of Headline London

Today at 1230 I will be a panellist on Headline London, a programme on the new London TV station, London Live.

The subject under discussion is whether alcohol is a requirement for a good night out. As a drinker who is currently undertaking a year of abstinence, I feel I've got a bit to say on the subject.

You can watch London Live on Freeview channel 8, Sky channel 117, Virgin channel 159 and YouView channel 8, or, of course, online www.londonlive.co.uk

God and booze

"I was forced to attend church four times a week. I vowed when I was free I would never darken the door of a church again—a vow I've kept, religiously, for forty-odd years." Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Good read, this.

"Where there's hipsters, there's latte."

Whichever way you look at it, it's still £6.60 for a coffee and a slice of cake

An inevitable side-effect of eschewing alcohol is my burgeoning caffeine addiction. Basically, I've been frequenting a lot more coffee shops and drinking a lot more coffee. Like beer, the more coffee you drink, the better you get at understanding various signifiers of quality.

I was in Manchester the other day, wondering aloud whether we'd find a decent coffee close to the area we'd parked up. A member of the team indicated the high proportion of men with beards doing whatever people in skinny jeans do.

"Nah, we'll be alright," he said "where there's hipsters, there's latte."

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The above photo was taken in a coffee shop in London. I paid £6.60 for my coffee and cake. That's the "exposed wood" premium on top of your chain shop rates.

Of course £6.60 for something which costs pennies to produce is ludicrous, but as we all know, you're not paying for that. You're paying for the staff to pretend to enjoy serving you, the presentation, the comfy seats and the free wifi.

And yes when the unsmiling be-apronned tubby fellow with a ginger beard appeared holding my beautifully arraigned order on its own cut of hardwood I was momentarily impressed. Momentarily, because despite asking for what I wanted twice, they got the order wrong.

People in coffee shops nearly always get my order wrong. In fact, they've got it wrong in four different shops on the last four occasions. My usual request is:

"Americano, extra shot with hot milk."

Not exactly a paradigm shift in consumer demand, but they always forget the milk was ordered hot, or just forget to mention it to the "barista" altogether. I presume this is because they're focusing on the remembering the extra shot and the reblahblablablablah.

I've taken to speaking slowly and clearly, trying to make sure the person taking my order has held eye-contact with me for the full three seconds it's taken to tell them what I want. If their eyes flit away or down to the till before I finish what I'm saying, I can almost guarantee a cold milk experience. Obviously it's not the end of the world if the milk does come cold, but... why is it so hard to get right?

I had high hopes this time round, as the exposed wood premium usually comes with a degree of staff attentiveness. The wide-eyed girl who took my order was attentive, but equally unable to work out what to do when I requested a slice of cake from the precariously constructed display between us.

There was a pause as we both stood there, giving me time to wonder how ordering cake with a coffee could be such an unusual request in a place geared up to sell little else.

The stand-off continued until the obligatory artisan cake supplier (who happened to be re-stocking the display) took matters into her own hands, used her tongs to pick out the slice of the cake I wanted and waved it in front of the wide-eyed girl's face.

The girl behind the till still didn't look like she felt she should be responding to this development until the cake supplier gestured to the side plates behind the counter. This finally prompted our heroine to swing into action. She picked up a side plate and allowing the cake to be dropped onto it. Unfortunately the five second cake distraction meant my coffee order had been forgotten, so I had an opportunity to repeat it.

"Large Americano, extra shot, hot milk." I said.
"Large Americano?" she repeated, taken by this new, bohemian variation.
"Yes. Extra shot. Hot milk." I smiled. She smiled. We had made a connection. It was going to happen. But then I made the fatal error of asking if the payment process was contactless. She shook her head sadly as she took my card off me, and in that moment my hot milk request fell out of her brain.

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I would never dream of taking the kids into a joint like the one above, but they do consider going to a chain coffee shop a treat. The deal is they get something chocolatey to eat whilst the grown ups enjoy a decent coffee.

Unfortunately the moment the children have finished eating whatever they have chosen from the counter, their interest in being in the coffee shop sinks to zero and they start tearing round the place, or in my son's case, out of the door towards oncoming traffic.

To avoid the dilemma of losing a child or losing the chance to finish my hot drink I have taken to ordering my Americano in a takeout cup. The moment my kids can no longer be persuaded to sit at the table, I can cut my losses and leave with the product I paid for.

Asking for this at the till is the challenge, though.

"Hello. I'd like a small Americano with an extra shot and hot milk in a takeout cup. I'd also like two baby-cinos in takeout cups and a chocolate pastry with two plates and a knife. And three cups of water. Please."

It's not a massively long order, is it? Or that complicated. But there's something transgressive about requesting a mixture of takeout and eat-in containers. All bets are now off as to how many times you have to repeat yourself and the amount of supporting contextual information ("you see I need two plates because...") required before the exact order is processed.

This morning was an exception. The boy behind the counter did not seem to be fazed by the crazy crossing of takeout/eat-in protocols. He listened to and repeated my order and even offered to bring it to me as my children had already disappeared out of sight to bag a table.

A couple of minutes later he arrived and put a tray down in front of us with a flourish. Everything I requested was there.

Except the milk.

A quarter of the way there

Life has reached a certain equilibrium. I still fancy a drink now and then. I wonder if that ever fades. When you read Russell Brand on the easy availability of heroin, and how simple he finds it to score wherever he is in the world, I think "really?"

What I'm spending the money I've saved from not drinking on

I'm not sure I would be able to get hold of heroin that easily. But alcohol is different - it is available everywhere, including my fridge. A moment of weakness is that much easier to act on than other drugs, which must make it tough for alcoholics. With illegal drugs, you can attempt to push yourself into an environment where those drugs are no longer present, or at least, in your face. That's tricky with booze.

My family and work responsibilities are such that the opportunities to drink a few pints don't come up very often, and haven't done for two or three years. That's not to say I haven't grasped those opportunities with both hands, but in the last year or so it would be less than once a week.

Since starting this project I've been out and around alcohol two or three times, and on each occasion I was rather grateful not to be drinking. I don't know why.

The occasion to be slightly tipsy comes around much more regularly, but it is so time-consuming, expensive (calorifically as well as financially), impractical (I am entering the Dad's Taxi phase of parenthood) and ultimately not that exciting, it's been easy to pass the opportunity up.

That's not to say I think I could give up alcohol permanently. Well, of course I could, but I'm not yet sure I want to. My default thought to counter most impulses to drink is - "ah well, next year". If that prospect had been removed I'm not sure I would be so relaxed about things.

PS If you're wondering about the badge, this link explains all.