Saturday, April 11th, 2009

Experiment: Can a Londoner give up the booze but still keep up their primary existence in the economic system of burning the candle from both ends?


Intro:

When Londoners abstain from alcohol, a strange reaction occurs. They listen more, say ‘fuck’ and ‘I love you’ less and stay in to watch Simon Schama’s Power of Art on BBC4. They’re diurnal, so they’re active in the day, even at the weekend and sleep during the best clubbing nights of the week. The point of going out in the cold, dark and rain is lost on them. However, paying extortionate prices to visit overcrowded galleries is not. Everything is done earlier, from getting up to going to bed via the washing up. They never go to the toilet in the street or in their pants, but they do go to the gym more than 4 times in a year for the first time in their membership.


Method:

I didn’t drink for three months, but still attempted to go to the planned nights out that I would have gone to if I’d been drinking. Obviously, the impulsive, ‘alright, I’ll go for just the one’ nights are irrelevant, as you never want to go for even just one diet coke if you can help it.


Results:

Attended:

2 binge drinking friends' birthdays

Mum’s 60th birthday weekend with plenty of champagne bought by parents.

2 work colleagues' birthdays with a tab behind the bar

1 x clubbing night

2 x gigs

Livery Company dinner in the city with 5 courses of alcohol.

Production company screening of Free Agents, with free wine.

1 x comedy night

1 x dinner and a show

3 x nights out with the girls

3 x pub lunches

1 x speed flat mate finding night with free glass of wine


Conclusion:

I managed to drag myself to all the nights out that I was asked to, but didn’t plan any myself or invite anyone out. I did in fact turn into my Mum, being more than happy to just stay in and watch Jonathan Ross on a Friday.

The hardest part was the thought of a night ahead in a bar with sweaty people, where the horrendous house music is so loud that the only things you can do is dance, make faces at people, stick your tongue down someone’s throat. Or drink. Those nights involved so much diet cola that I would lay awake in bed until the early hours chewing the insides of my mouth.

The worst bits were before everyone was drunk, because contrary to popular belief, people who are out of their boxes are generally a lot more fun to be with, even when you’re sober. This is especially true when it comes to work colleagues, because before they get tipsy, you might as well be in the office sharing a bit of banter over a desk top lunch. Also, if someone is going to corner you and talk at you for hours on end, it’s a lot more interesting when they’re smashed, as then they’ll divulge more secrets and say increasingly outlandish statements, with your encouragement of course.

The bonus is that you make sure you avoid the night bus of hell when you can. This means that if you find yourself in a crap bar, you know it’s rubbish, and no amount of diet coke will stop it from being so. Therefore you don’t waste your night and the next day trying to make it good, and call it a night before the last tube has gone.

Yet when the music, company and atmosphere are good, you enjoy the night far more than if you were drunk. For one, you can dance around like a maniac to The Prodigy’s 'Out Of Space' without a care, because people are drunk and won’t notice plus you’re able to keep your balance, therefore don’t end up flat on the floor, unlike them. Also, your senses are still with you, so you can see and hear everything around you, picking up the subtleties in the DJ’s mixing while keeping up with the intricacies of the five different conversations and situations that are going on in your group alone.

So you can burn the candle at both ends when you’re sober, but it needs to be a decent candle, that doesn’t get on your wick. And as there aren’t enough decent candles available, a life of sobriety does mean that a Londoner looses their identity, becoming more like someone from the suburbs, happy to spend nights in with thoughts of allotments and craft markets taking the place of the latest hip hop, fidget prog, freakbeat, janglecore, electro-sleaze, breaking, crumpin’ ‘n’ crimpin’ meltdown.