My Drink is Water Bright...

This business of not drinking alcohol...I am finding it odd. One feels the absence of the grog more, I think, when it is necessity rather than a personal resolution that has dictated one's abstinence. Without the armour of self-righteousness to bolster one, with only the clear knowledge of extremely unpleasant consequences to strengthen one's resolve, abstemiousness is surprisingly challenging. The ever present siren voice of one's personal devils, suggesting that surely one wouldn't do much harm... the strangely soothing noise of ice, clinking in a refreshing and well-deserved glass of Tanqueray...the rapier sharpness of a good dry champagne...the haematic rubricity of a fine port...Need I go on?

Dr Johnson once remarked that, in the matter of wine, he could achieve abstinence more easily than moderation. I know from bitter personal experience that this is so. But let us not have any nonsense to the effect that "easier" is synonymous with "easy". This business is dashed hard on a chap. It is a challenge to one' s stamina and willpower, but more than that, it is deeply dislocating. I mean, it's been years since I led a sober life.

So it is profoundly curious to come home at two-thirty in the morning and yet be sober as a judge...to have watched the wine bottles come and go across at table, to see the steady progressions from champagne to white wine to red to port...to whatever is left undrunk... and yet to retain one's acuity, to have drunk nothing but water and (daringly) tea. And to wake the next morning without pain, nausea, or existential horror... to be fully-functional, to potter around without the usual inconveniences attendant upon a hangover, to have a surprsingly full and clear recollection of the previous evening...to find (to one's surprise and faint alarm) that a highly entertaining time could be had without recourse to the Devil's Buttermilk... All very disconcerting.

I mean to say, this sort of thing makes an interesting experiment but I wouldn't want to live like this. Good Lord no.