I’m just jealous. Jealous of the pub-bound and proudly paralytic. Our true national sport. British bank holiday weather will be either apocalyptic or aggressively mediocre (it was actually quite nice, wasn’t it – I got a tan) but it won’t matter. Because the real forecast is a downpour of lager, prosecco and regret. We don’t drink to enjoy ourselves. We drink to forget we’re supposed to be enjoying ourselves.
Ok, I’ll stop. I’m over-egging the pudding here, I know. Not everyone was drunk this weekend but as a former drinker it’s feels like it’s pretty close. When I got sober one thing that really caught me by surprise was the Great British Bank Holiday™. It’s a completely free hit for the Monday-to-Friday masses, you know, if you’re a fully paid-up member of Club de Booze. The problem is that my membership has been cruelly revoked.
I felt banished by bank holidays early in my sobriety. I just wasn’t expecting them to hit like they did. It’s a prod in the chest replete with the sneering reminder that you can’t do what ‘the normal’ people can do. Whatever normal is. Everyone in my rehab cohort wanted to be ‘normal’ which seemed to mean having the ability to have a languid glass of Merlot with Sunday lunch. That was it. Faux sophistication and confidence trickster control so you can shift gears and quietly get down to the business of chugging from the bottle in the kitchen and having cocaine delivered over the garden fence.
Anyway, nobody in rehab with me stopped at one glass. My peers and I were people that downed a bottle of wine, and worse, in the car on the way home every day. As the old AA proverb tells us, for people like me, “One’s too many and a thousand is never enough.” If you want the truth, most of being an alcoholic in recovery is actually just learning sayings.
So why did those early bank holidays pack such a punch? Well, I got sober one week into the UK’s Covid lock-down and, whisper it, I quite enjoyed being locked-down. It was just Boris I hated. (I remember the inimitable Miriam Margolyes being asked who she would invite, living or dead, to a fantasy dinner party. Her hilarious reply was, ‘Boris Johnson: dead.’) Lockdown helped me stay focused by removing triggers that might have tested me. Driving past groups of pals outside a pub? Nope. Bumping into friends in a busy restaurant? Also, nope. I can’t be the only addict early in my recovery that benefitted from the seclusion.
I guess it must have been a bank holiday in 2021 when the collective reemergence of sodden society caught me unawares. Previously covert parties were going full Bank Holiday Bender®. A population let loose from its living-room, hungry for the grubby rituals of round-buying and bawdy banter – only, I wasn’t invited – and it hurt.
These days, I don’t get too many surprise triggers – aside from the idiocy of my ex-wife who seems to believe she’s playing the role of a character from the TV show Shameless – and I ride them without too much trouble, but they do leave their mark.
Every touch point is something of a dull ache, and that prod in the chest again, but before I go down that rabbit hole, I might play it forward and envisage where one drink could take me and the totally unpredictable risk that it would bring. Other tactics might be to replay the serenity prayer to gather some perspective, or I take a stock check on my gratitude list and what I have to be grateful for. That’s what nearly 30 grands’ worth of rehab gets you – a prayer and a list – which is nearly good Cockney-rhyming slang.
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