Let's have a drink . . .

I don't really drink. Which means that I often go an entire week or sometimes a month without having a drink. When I go to the doctors or fill out health questionnaires online I do not have to lie about my units per week because there are very rarely any report.
I can drink and I sometimes like to drink but I have never liked being drunk. For some odd reason despite having grown up around plenty of alcohol, and worked in bars on and off for years, I just don't have the strange love affair with booze that other people my age seem to.

This doesn't make me better than anyone else and I honestly believe that. It is difficult to come across as genuinely meaning that. Whenever I try to have a conversation with anyone about it the self-righteous 'drinking is evil' and the anti-hedonistic 'drink is the devil' soap-boxes ruin things for me. I don't belong in either of those camps. I actually find it awkward sometimes that I don't like to drink, and that when I do drink to excess, that I get freaked out and upset more than I get deliriously happy and have a great time.

Standing behind a bar every weekend doesn't help. I actually make a living out of observing and contributing to drunken behaviour. I also watch my evening disintegrate into a chore rather than a pleasure as the people I enjoy talking to slowly get more and more drunk. Sadder even still is that so many of them are back night after night putting away 10 - 15 pints and not seeming to register that it isn't healthy or normal. But there is the problem; I think that it might actually be normal.

Last night was particularly difficult. A girl, can't have been much younger than me, let's say around 22, came into the bar, on her own, very, very drunk.
She sat down, pestered the people around her in that way that really trashed people do by slurring and stroking them inappropriately, by gesticulating wildly, shouting and knocking things over. I served her. That is my job and her money is as good as anyone else's. Initially I served her because when she came in she was so familiar with a guy at the bar that I thought they were together and I had already served him. Unfortunately for him he was just her first victim. Then she asked for a shot of tequila which I really shouldn't have given her. But I did. I simply didn't realise how drunk she was. So often it's difficult to tell - if you don't know someone then you don't know their limit. Another girl might have fared better after that shot of tequila. Might not have thrown up at the bar and then in the street. Another Bar Person might not have been so horrified. Or surprised.

I can't explain how sick I felt for her and at myself for having served her. I did the hair holding, water bringing, where do you live thing but honestly I had no hope. The little sense that I could get out of her seemed to indicate that she lived around 20 miles away, that she lived alone and that she didn't know anyone in the city. I couldn't force her onto a train [which she might not have been allowed on in her state] and I knew she wouldn't be let into a cab so when she left there was nothing I could do to stop her.

That is an extreme example, but what the hell happened to her? She was in no state to protect herself or make rational decisions. And she was a stranger.

One of my friends has recently become tee-total after realising that she actually did have a problem. I didn't even know she had a problem. Because I don't drink I never really drank with her, and so I never realised how much she drank, or what she did when she was drunk.
At university I lived with a girl who gave herself alcohol poisoning at least once a month and eventually learnt after many nursings, that if she kept boiled sweets by her bed she could stop herself from uncontrollably vomiting when she woke up without telling anyone.
Almost every girl I know has told me a story about a time when they really shouldn't have gone home with that guy, or when they really shouldn't have walked back on their own or when they really should have reported that taxi driver/doorman/random over that horrible thing that happened.
My Dad is probably an alcoholic and has been for as long as I can remember.

I don't hate drinking or our drink culture. I don't worry about drink prices or 24 hour licencing laws. I don't want to ban public drinking or raise the age to 21. I don't advocate stronger controls over pubs, clubs or bars. It's your life - if you drink then it's your choice.

What does bother me is that drinking is something we accept without thinking about it because it is all around us. Our society promotes it. We all 'need a drink' sometimes. We all laugh about the last time we got wasted and what a awful hangover we had.
But you know what? It's not actually funny for some people. For some people it is a serious problem.

Blind Love . . .

Here is a concept not previously considered in any depth. One that was forced on me last night whilst watching television with my hysterical mother and Pickling Friend.

I have thought on the complexities of Love At First Sight and its likelihood [not very]. I have wandered about the effects of Love Sickness and Puppy Love. I'm not sure I have experienced either. How can you be Love Sick and not hate the person who is making you Love Sick?

Anyway - Blind Love is apparently a phenomenon where you are fall madly in love but cannot see the disaster you are about to encounter. Where you cannot fight your way out of a relationship that is fundamentally unstable. No, not unstable, damaging.

Love it seems is subjective. Perhaps not a surprise to most people. But think of how love is marketed. How we commercialise, package and deliver love - in films, in advertising, in product promotion, in sport, on animal rescue programs, on television. We have a single view of love. We are sold a one-time-one-stop-solution-if-you-feel-like-this-then-its-love theory. In our society now this has even less restrictions than it used to; you can now love someone of the same sex, or of a different race/culture/religion, you can marry an animal, you can fall in love with some decades older/younger than yourself, you can fall in love online. But we know what it feels like don't we? It feels like it felt for Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It's like it was for Alfie and Kat, or Katie and Peter. But perhaps not always.

You see Blind Love is even more obsessive and destructive than the Hollywood template. It's love with no reason. A love with only one feasible outcome. An unhappy ending.
But who am I to say that this is psychologically damaging and that these people aren't really happy? The way that I 'love' might not be Hollywood and it might not be blind but it isn't right either.
Blind Love is the ultimate emotional extreme.
Who can say that isn't the best way to love?

The Little Mermaid . . .

Here is a old tale with a new twist and it's not Disney.

My oldest friend has recently come to shore and is now happily living with me in the glorious sea-side town of Brighton. We have been friends for 22 years but I am discovering things about her now that I never knew. One of them is her midnight transformation. I'm not talking about the spine-cracking, fur growing, spiky toothed, howling kind of transformation, oh no, this is better.

I am referring to what happens when my dearest friend looks up from her drink and gets a strange twinkle in her eye, suddenly leaps from her chair, canters out of the pub and disappears across the shingle yelling about "Midnight Sea Swimming".

Now this isn't so unusual, in fact, it's almost a phenomenon around these parts. I have known many succumb to the waves after a few. In fact I have shared beds with still salty people in all their clothes. I have distracted taxi drivers with precarious kebabs whilst a gang of dripping drunks have piled into their cabs. But not one of these events has been executed with the style that this siren so seamlessly possesses.

What makes the Midnight Transformation so special is her ability to recruit. On the stormy nights that she has thus far stripped off and plunged into the waves it hasn't been alone - but more amazingly it also hasn't been with any of the original party. No, this girl, whilst streaming down the beach shedding dress, shoes and bra, collects randoms from the shore and ensconces them into her salty frolics.

So whilst I am becoming used to waking up and staggering into the bathroom with a hangover only to hop and swear on the shingle strewn across the floor, I am also the only girl in Brighton who gets to make tea for the morning-after mermaid.