Alcohol

and me

I was reluctant to write a piece called Alcohol.

I have circled it for a year. I have mentioned, in other pieces, that I did not drink for fifteen years. That I started again and drank for eleven months, and stopped again.

Anyone reading the autobiography closely can see the stretches in the 1990s where I got through my own hidden struggles with gender dysphoria with a combination of drink and other things (Ch 5, Ch 6). I wrote recently about reaching for the bottle when I was rejected, when I reached out to family and friends and got grief back. But I have never sat down and written about the thing itself. My actual relationship with it. So here it is.

It starts, as a lot of things in my life start, with my mother and something slightly ridiculous.

She used to make wine in demijohns. Those great glass five litre bottles with a tube poking out the top, bubbling away in a corner, turning into plum wine and elderflower wine and god-knows-what-else wine. And by the time my poor mother got to drink any of it, it must have tasted putrid, because I had been siphoning it off the moment it turned even vaguely alcoholic, taking great swigs, and topping the bottle back up with water. That is my earliest memory of drinking. Thirteen years old, robbing my own mother’s plum wine and watering down the evidence.

Then I got to sixteen, and the real thing arrived.

I looked older than I was. So the pub became possible. There were four of us, me and three friends, all of us just starting our A levels, and we worked out that if we did not push our luck in the rough places in the middle of town, but went instead to the golf club on the outskirts, they would serve us. This was back when the golf club was full of men who all looked like Jimmy Tarbuck, sporting Pringle jumpers with feathered side partings and nineteen-eighties moustaches. It was not cool. We did not care. We were the nice boys. The boys doing their A levels. We would turn up with maybe two pounds fifty each, enough for three pints and a bag of chips, maybe even curry sauce on the way home. Because I looked the oldest I would go to the bar, even though the barman only had to glance across the room at the other three to know exactly what was going on. He served us anyway. I would carry back our pints of whatever we drank in those days, and we would sit there and talk like young men who were free for the first time in their lives.

There was another place too, the Hare and Hounds, also out on the edge of town. They did the most delicious cheese and salad sandwiches with Branston pickle, and we would order those and our beers and put the world to rights. It was much safer for us out on the edge of town than in the rough flat-roofed pubs of the Skelmersdale council estates, where the local scallies, sporting their nineteen-eighties footballer mullets, would have beaten the living shit out of you just for looking at them. And I don’t mean looking at them the wrong way. I mean accidentally catching their gaze. Those places were terrifying. So we stuck to the golf club and the Hare and Hound.

And then I would walk home.

There was a subway underpass back to the council estates on the way, the kind with a long echo, and three pints to the good and full of sixteen-year-old bravado, I would belt out New Year’s Day by U2 into the echo, doing my half-decent Bono, knowing full well I was hoping my friends were marvelling at my voice. I was a vain little bastard. But God, I was happy. Free, sixteen, my whole voice ringing back at me off the concrete, my friends laughing, the entire enormous future still out in front of me and none of it gone wrong yet.

I think my entire drinking life, from that night until the day I finally stopped, was one long attempt to walk back into that underpass.

Every bottle of wine opened at home in front of the television. Every drink poured alone in a hotel while I was working away, killing time pretending to care about a Champions League match. Every single one was the same reach. I was trying to get back to the golf club. Back to being sixteen and free with my friends, the three pints, and the cheese and salad sandwiches.

I never got there again. Not once. The feeling was only ever in that one place, at that one age, and no amount of drink ever rebuilt it. I just kept ordering it and kept not finding it.

The first time I understood that, I was already well into adulthood and working in an office with a serious drinking culture. Pub at lunchtime, two or three pints, three times a week at least. Sometimes the pub again after work. By then I had a young son at home and a wife who had been stuck with him all day, and there were evenings I came back to her half cut, which was not acceptable, and which I hated. Don’t get me wrong, I had worked in plenty of companies, some with a drinking culture and some without. When there was no drinking culture, I didn’t drink. But when there was, I would be first at the bar, chucking cash at the barman.

Then one afternoon we had what felt at the time like a marvellous idea. We sent our new Turkish colleague out to Sainsbury’s to buy us premixed gin and tonics in little bottles. He was brand new, pretty green behind the ears, and we sat in our private glass office drinking them in the afternoon, hidden away from the rest of the staff. There was a young graduate who had just started, and we told him that our new Turkish colleague was actually a world champion Turkish wrestler. As the gins kicked in, we somehow managed to convince the Turkish developer to get the young graduate in a headlock. Just to show off his “advanced wrestling skills”. I am fairly sure the CEO walked past the door and looked in at this human zoo he was paying top dollar for. We all just burst out laughing. This was not good. This was not how one builds a career. After work that night there were a few more pints. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb. And then I made my way home, sobering up that little bit, the way one does. after an hour of London public transport.

I cannot say with any certainty what caused it. But I remember walking through the front door feeling absolutely disgusted with myself, to a level I never had before. Seeing my wife at home, dealing with an enormous boxer dog and a baby, and me, acting like a bloody half cut fool. It all suddenly hit me. I went upstairs and, totally uncharacteristically, got straight into bed, and I cried, and I said to myself, I am done with this. This is no way for a human being to live. Where does it lead? Here I am edging towards middle age, in terrible condition and drinking like this, and for what?

To be fair, I was never rolling around. People never saw me staggering or aggressive. I never screwed much up except myself. My wife never saw me drunk. It was not that kind of problem. It was that I looked at the whole thing and could not find a single reason for it that survived contact with daylight. It was leading nowhere. It was just me, still chasing a night from when I was sixteen that was never coming back.

So I stopped. And for fifteen years I did not drink a drop. No AA, a didn’t need it. I’d applied the rational argument and just stopped. People say, “well, it can’t have been that bad if you just stopped”. I honestly don’t have a clever answer for that. Everybody’s path in life is their own. This is what happened. This is why I stopped.

I want to tell you about the cabinet, because it is the part that matters most.

In my living room there was a large cabinet, painted in some lovely Farrow and Ball colour, full of crystal glasses and crystal decanters, laden with fine whiskey and brandy and all sorts. It was mine. And for fifteen years I never touched it. It simply sat there. When people came to the house they would say, can I have one of those whiskeys, and I would say of course, and pour it for them, or hand them the decanter and tell them to knock themselves out. They would take a sip and say, Christ, this is delicious, what is it, and I would say I genuinely have no idea, I bought it years ago, I think it might be Ardbeg.

Fifteen years of the finest whiskey within arm’s reach, in my own home, every day, and it held nothing over me at all. I could pour it, smell it, serve it, and feel precisely nothing, except a mild inability to remember what any of it was. That is not a person heroically resisting. That is a person for whom the drink is simply not a need. That was my baseline. That is who I actually am.

Then everyone in my life left when I transitioned and I decided to have a drink.

I rationalised it the cheat way. The thing that had been making me unhappy for so long was finally solved. I had transitioned. I was myself at last. So a drink was allowed, surely. That was the thinking, and it was thin, but it did the job at the time.

And these things always start the same way. For me it was espresso martinis, of all things. A drink I had never once had in the past, because it was never a fashionable thing in the circles I drank in, and I used to watch other people order them and genuinely wonder what the hell they tasted like. So that is where I started. One espresso martini, to find out.

But when you are carrying the level of grief I was carrying, it does not end at one espresso martini, does it. It never does.

And at times it got out of hand. I drowned my sorrows in it. I have written elsewhere, in a lot of detail, about why I think that happened, so I will not labour it here. Again, not rolling around drunk, but certainly a pattern that was heading toward heavy drinking. The short version is that it came in bursts, and the bursts were always tied to rejection. Whenever I reached out to someone from my old life, by WhatsApp or by phone, and got turned away, I drank. The drink was never really about the drink. It was the anaesthetic for the reaching.

And when I worked that out, and stopped reaching toward the people who had closed the door, the urge to drink went with it. I did not quit alcohol. I quit the reaching, and the alcohol simply had no job left to do.

It has been over a month now. I have no interest in drinking again. None. I have returned to the baseline I held for fifteen years. I wake up with that beautiful fresh feeling I had for years. I lay my breakfast out the night before, the way I always used to, to save time in the morning, and it is such a glorious little habit. The skincare routine done properly EVERY evening, every step. I watch a little TV with a large Goldfish Bowl gin glass of tonic water and Angostura Bitters, as I did for fifteen years. At the end, I turn off the TV, give Colonel Chesterton a little kiss, and go to bed for a good night’s sleep. All of that had been slipping with the drink. And now I am delighted to face the day at six in the morning.

Today, there are half-finished bottles of whiskey in that same cabinet in my kitchen. There is a bottle of gin sitting on the shelf of my little non-alcoholic bar, open, within reach. I look at it and feel nothing. I am not fighting it. I am not denying myself anything. There is nothing to resist, because the want is not there. I am simply someone who does not drink. I was that person for fifteen years before the most difficult year of my life, and I am that person again now.

What changed was not my willpower. It was that I stopped trying to control the one thing I was never going to control, which is how other people decide to treat me. Once I put that down, the drink had nowhere left to live.

I will end with this, carefully, because I am not a doctor and this is only my own story and not a method for anyone else.

If you are struggling with drink, or with anything in that family of things we reach for when the reaching hurts, I am very happy to talk. I cannot fix anyone and I would not pretend to. But I know the shape of it from the inside, and sometimes it helps just to hear from someone who found their way back out.