Mr Linnane Is Unwell

I dislike most words associated with not drinking. I don’t want to get bogged down in the semantics of abstinence, but ‘giving up’ is rarely a positive thing. I am giving up drinking, I am giving up sweets for Lent, I am giving up on life. Giving up sounds like defeat – same goes for I quit drinking. I have been bested by this thing, I have no self control, and I am now choosing a life less indulgent and less fun; I am a husk of a person. The best phrase I have heard for not consuming alcohol is to be off it. It’s not finite, everything is still to play for – it accepts and embraces the human potential for change, you are off it now, you may be on it again. It is simply a switch – on/off, off/on. Right now I am mostly off it, and have been off it since the start of the year, because I have to accept that although I love alcohol – the craft, the culture, the camaraderie – it sometimes doesn’t love me back. The older I get, the more one-sided the relationship becomes. 

At some point on New Year’s Day, I started to feel odd. I had overdone it across The Christmas and wasn’t really sure if I was sick or just saturated with fats, sugars, and booze. Soon there was no confusion – I was sick. I assumed it was the norovirus and that it would pass. Four days later it was only getting worse, and I was getting weaker and weaker, unable to hold down food or water. At some point I started to pass blood, which swiftly transitioned to simply losing blood. I got weaker again, and came close to losing consciousness. Part of the growing sense of horror was fuelled by the fact that my biological father, who I never knew, died of colon cancer when he was around my age, and the first thing he knew about it was when he started bleeding. You start to focus on your priorities in life pretty sharply when you think that some ticking time bomb in your genes has just hit zero hour and you will soon be dead. 

I made my way to the GP, then to an emergency department, and then into a CT scanner. Results – inconclusive, with more tests to follow next month. It’s unlikely to be cancer, but that’s not the most reassuring thing I’ve ever been told by a consultant. Chances are it was a severe bout of e.coli, or salmonella, but even with those, bleeding is rare. But while I was on a trolley in the ED I got chatting to a nurse, and she asked me if I had any other health issues, and I said well, I have been battling blepharitis and rosacea, and before I had finished the latter word she asked if I drank. I mumbled some vague-yet-optimistically-low estimate of weekly units and she cut me off – just give it up, she said. She had suffered rosacea and quit drinking and it cleared up. At that stage I was pretty pliable as I hadn’t eaten in a week and had lost a lot of blood so I did take it on board, and so once I got out of there and back home, I had to think long and hard about my relationship with alcohol. I don’t think I’m unique in this – it’s part of the midlife experience, realising that you have just one life. So I stopped drinking. It was never a permanent thing, but after a mildly hedonistic Christmas I had become bored with booze. My gifts to myself on Christmas morning were two beautiful armagnacs, a sublime 30 year old assemblage from the negociant Darroze, and an unctuous, jaw-dropping 18 year old Plant De Graisse armagnac from Château du Tariquet. I milled through half of each bottle, and did so without really savouring just how good they were. But abstinence makes the palate grow fonder and I’ve spent a rather tragic amount of time since January 1st thinking about them and yearning to get back on it so I can revisit them with a renewed appreciation. 

Alcohol is a large part of my life now – I never thought I would end up writing about it in any capacity, and when I started blogging a decade ago I would not have foreseen writing about booze professionally (even in the very, very small way I do). I’d say none of this was part of the plan, but that implies there was a plan – I just ambled through all this and ended up here. But when booze is your hobby, and a small part of the work you do, you need to think hard about what it does for you and what it does to you. I’m reminded of an interview with an adult film star I read many years ago in which he said that when he went home to his partner he just wanted to relax and watch nature documentaries. When pleasure becomes your business, what do you do in your down time? I can’t imagine what it’s like for full-time drinks writers who have to review spirits, but I know that when I worked in a newspaper I used to write a lot of music reviews and it got to the point where I would barely listen to the album, maybe read a review online, and base my judgement on that. Everything became very mechanical and tiresome. 

What I have found about being off the drink is that while my rosacea cleared up (possibly helped by me giving up tea and coffee at the same time as booze), my general health didn’t change all that much. I didn’t lose weight or feel brighter or more alert or alive. I didn’t drink all that much so maybe it made no difference, but I was expecting great things from not drinking and those didn’t really materialise. My weekend evenings became a little greyer and I found myself doing a lot more late night driving to collect people from places but overall there was no great transformation. 

I did spend one day back on it in the intervening period, when an old friend was home from the UK, and I had some exceptional pints of Beamish in various Cork city hostelries, but then went back off. I was surprised at how easy it was to stop drinking – I just decided to see what it would be like. It was fine. But this weekend is the Irish national holiday, St Patrick’s Day, and I have a four-day weekend, a four pack of Beamish, and a lot of bottles to reconnect with so I will be back on it. After that I will most likely be back off it again, because what I have found so alluring about booze isn’t just the mood altering quantities, but the peripheral stuff – chatting about it and thinking about it and arguing about it. There’s a great thread where someone asks about a teetotal whiskey sales person and whether that is a positive or negative and it shows that many perceive being a drinker as being part of the gig. I’d imagine it’s the same with drinks writers – I struggle to think of any who are teetotal, unless it is kept as a very private thing. I can think of some who have struggled with alcohol addiction, or whose health has been impacted by their drinking. The older you get, the harder it is to ignore that as much as I love it, a bit of conscious uncoupling now and again won’t hurt either it or me.