Thursday 8 October 2009
Some events require you to have a proper drink. In the same way that you wouldn’t go to an opium den and say "Oh, I’ll just have a Bacardi and Coke", neither should you go to a birthday party in a pub and order a Diet Coke. I don’t feel bad about thinking this: rather, it is a good lesson to have learnt.
There was an outrageous faff and palava concerning meeting up. I spent 20 minutes rocking on toweringly uncomfortable heels at Farringdon station awaiting Vicious (trapped in a trainless sea of angry people at Wimbledon on the point of emotional explosion), Jen (in throes of wild panic with new-job jitters) and Buster (trapped on the Hammersmith & City line because a woman thought the ‘pull-this-only-in-an-emergency’ handle was something to hold onto when the train was moving).
In the end, it was just Buster and me. By the time we lurched into the Three Kings, I was drooling at the thought a cold pint of lager with a fluffy head. “Can I have a pint of, oh bollocks – I… er mean, do you have any non-alcoholic beers?” I asked the barman. “No.” he said, taking a step back as if I were a dangerous pervert. “Do you think he has any Zinfandel?" Buster hissed in my ear for the third time. Buster loves his crap sweet wines almost as much as he likes his crap sweet coffees. I thought most probably not, and so we made do with a small glass of house white and a Diet Coke.
Oh – how I suffered. I at least vaguely knew most people and some people I knew extremely well. Yet something about the evil Diet Coke was sapping all my social grace and I remained, for most of the evening, wedged fearfully on a windowsill able to communicate only with those who entered my immediate vicinity. After the Diet Coke, I had a tomato juice and this time the barman recognised me as a woman on the verge and took pity on me. He spent five minutes squeezing limes into the juice and annointing it with spices so it was just like a Bloody Mary. Except, of course, it wasn’t a Bloody Mary. It was Another Bloody Soft Drink. Pah.
As the evening progressed I increasingly felt like a great, clunking oaf, locked cruelly in another dimension, waving at my drunken friends from behind a thick pane of glass. The Americans were off and away on their third bottle of red wine and I witnessed Buster trip that fine line from sobriety to tipsiness part-way through his second glass of white wine. One of the birthday girls, Margarita, weaved over for a chat. Margarita has just spent more than a year off the booze: nine months in production of a baby so utterly perfect that it is actually a Show Baby and Barratt Homes will surely soon be demanding its return, plus a few months of hardcore lactation. Add to this the fact that Margarita has already regained a waist the circumference of a birch sapling and… well, she might only have been on the spritzers but she was quite drunk. Not in a mad, wrestling-people-to-the-floor kind of way, more in a free-wheelingly seamless one-subject-to-the-next kind of a way with her glass tipped at an angle. I was, quite frankly, jealous.
I ate a vegetarian chilli and aproximately 200 olives I did not even remotely want as a dispacement activity. Here is where sobriety came into its own: I was able to spear the olives with an elegant fluidity, while the drunks plunged their arms in up to the elbow and sent the olives bouncing across the floor. By now I was starting to feel like a horrid spy. I am sorry lovely drunks for writing about your cack-handed olive-handling here: but I must. I felt as if I were stranded on a rock in the middle of a raging sea. Is it bad to say that? It matters not: it is the truth. Come 10.45pm, Buster and I made our apologies and left. Or tried to. Drunk people like to say goodbye to you and then say godbye to you again… and then again. And again. It was a prolonged but touching departure – and I was even more touched that Margarita had brought me a bag of Monster Munch for the train home.
Ahhhh. The train home. Really, when heading out to south-eastern London’s murky nether-regions at 11pm-ish on a Thursday night, it must always be like this: a fug of sharp-smelling alcohol breath; lurching, loose-limbed drunks; smeary-eyed girls spilling chips down their cleavages. Normally I must be one of these people myself, but tonight the whole journey home felt like an instructional government video on the dangers of drinking. When I got off the train a girl jammed her head through the railings and threw up. Another girl ahead of me looked like her right leg had been de-boned, but then I realised she was just pissed. A man was attempting to give his friend relationship advice: “So. You like. Just need. To… to fucking tell her. Yes. I mean just tell her. Right. That. Well. I mean. Have you fucking told her yet?” Friend: “Told her what?” Drunk: “Erm. What did I just say?”
And here’s another revelation about sobriety. Beer can give you beer goggles, but it also gives you safety goggles. At the top of my road a large, dirty, crazed-looking man was weaving past the Co-Op singing "Ain’t no mountain high enough” with both arms pulled out of his T-shirt. Had I been drunk, I might have asked him whether he was cold (the night was brisk) or possibly sung along with him for a bit. But I was sober… so I hid in a hedge.
I was afraid.
Units dodged: Ten. A four pints of lager and a Bloody Mary sort of night. Technically binge-drinking but what the hell – that’s what I’m having next time.
The Unit Dodger
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