But men are expected to drink

Earlier this year I gave up drink for a month. It was an unambiguously marvellous experience. I’m currently working on writing something proper about the whole thing. Until then, here’s an unexpurgated diary entry for one of the days.

Day 18.

In the pub last night, a shout of aggression — an alarm from a guy at the bar — but it was just bants with the barman. He’d smashed his hand down ferociously to emphasise, in the way I may have once, that he was firmly committed to his choice of beers.

I relaxed, but didn’t it make me fucking tense; hands and fingers, as O said, chuckling, drawn into myself.

Aren’t pubs noisy. We yell. Guffaw. Froth and roar. Sober schoolkids will do this too; booze not necessarily to blame. Volumes escalate with social licence. But booze catalyses. It always does.

I think it would take considerably more work for me to be comfortable in a pub without a drink. I feel withdrawn and hunkered there now. I am perpetually on the crouch for fear of balls being kicked across the playground. A raised voice at the bar is like the pthwack of a plastic football perhaps kicked in my direction by a boy, 30 years ago.

I think: but men are expected to drink in pubs; men are expected to drink.

We are slowly getting better, us men, talking about mental health. O and I did it last night, not entirely staring it in the face, but dancing clumsily with it nonetheless. Perhaps part of that is getting better at talking about our love for drink. What a strange love it can be. A vile, vile crutch; a mask; a numbing agent; a butcher’s knife; a sedative; a violent and oppressive slamming down of a hand onto a bar.