How I stopped drinking and became an alcoholic?

I’ve been sober now for two years and change. The decision came one evening walking back to my hotel after a night out in Locarno, Switzerland. It was like an epiphany. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of alcohol and the yearning, the planning, the organization. I want out. The thought was as clear as a typewritten page - “I’m never going to drink ever again!”

I told my wife as she woke up - she’d gone back early. And she received it with the tired skepticism that’s appropriate for such a statement, proffered with a wine belch as punctuation. I didn’t know if I believed it fully myself.

But the next day I didn’t drink and the day after that. When we stopped at our cousins’ house on the way home, we had our usual huge meal and beer and wine and grappa and everything was provided with baronial generosity. Lidia let it be known that if I wanted I was off the hook; she wasn’t going to hold me to some late night promise. But no, I said. I was done.

As the weeks and then months passed, I was amazed at how easy I was finding it. I wasn’t obsessing about it, or avoiding bars, or losing my temper, or biting my fingers. Instead I was enjoying waking up every morning without feeling I’d been poisoned during the night. I was enjoying having my evenings back. Not having to worry about who was going to drive so I could have a drink. I was also pleased to get encouragement from my friends, one of whom had gone down the same path himself. Some people I’d never met gave me encouragement from social media as well. I liked being in control of myself. All the time.

But I had a question: could I describe myself as sober if I’d never been an alcoholic? Tea-total sounded naff and in Italian “abstemio” - abstemious sounded worse. I asked on Twitter and someone replied: no, you can’t. Sobriety used in that context means you are recovering as an alcoholic, which I obviously wasn’t.

Was I?

A brief history of my drinking.

I started when I was fifteen. For the first months, it was irregular. As opportunities presented themselves. I’d only manage two pints and I’d be drunk. Vomiting was an inevitable and indeed funny part of this. We all have our stories. My best one is about a spiral staircase but this is not the place. As indeed that wasn’t.

Opportunities arrived more frequently and I enjoyed being drunk so much I would take every one I could. The only problem was never being able to quite get enough and the night ending before I wanted it to. There were all day sessions and all night sessions. Don’t worry; we didn’t neglect the drugs, but it was the booze that I came back to time and again. Pints of bitter or Guinness, gin slings or Bacardi and coke, vodka, whisky and whatever that was in Stephen’s dad’s caravan that they’d brought back from Portugal.

University brought more opportunity if less money. In fact it got so funding money for drink was such a prominent idea that I’d consciously use booze as a form of universal currency. As in: those shoes cost twenty pints; I’m not paying that. I hosted a pub quiz every Sunday as Johnny Lilac, a comedy persona, and was paid in as much beer as I could drink which proved expensive for the pub and tragic for Monday mornings.

Oh and I got hangovers. Deep Catholic hangovers full of remorse and nausea which would usually best be cured by a hair of the dog. At university this was not to be remarked upon and the real alcoholics were there to see, mostly among the faculty of the philosophy department, one of whom mistook a cash machine for a pissoir. Another crashed their car into the phone box outside the pub and wouldn’t stop trying to drive through it. Aristotle, Aristotle, was a bugger for the bottle!

I wasn’t them. And I wasn’t any of my heroic alcoholics: like Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Richard Burton and Tom Waits. The bottle of vodka in the morning kind. Malcolm Lowry writing “Under the Volcano.” This bottle of vodka in the morning was my definition of alcoholic and I didn’t drink in the morning. I rarely drank vodka. I drank beer and wine, cheap Bulgarian wine that cost £3 a bottle and I’d have the bottle to myself. I was a social drinker. I didn’t drink at home but I was never at home so that didn’t mean much.

Arriving in Italy I got fully on board with the drinking culture of drinking whenever you can. Celebrations came with beer, wine and grappa. Lunch was wine and coffee coretto - with a dash of grappa and then some more grappa to clean the bottom of the cup. Beer was a good aperitif or a work drink if you were working hard in the morning. The siesta was a good restorative and the wine was delicious and cheap. We bought from the local winery where they filled up my demijohn with 20 litres of Cabernet from a hose like I was at the petrol station. That would last a month. So it’s safe to say I had discovered the joy of drinking at home.

I still suffered from hangovers and they were bad enough for me to make a resolution not to drink - a tequila session saw me sober for a month but only because it took that long to get out of my system.

I did the online questionnaires. And reassured myself with the results. I drank a lot and came from a hard drinking culture and was now in a very comfortable drinking culture which wove booze into everything, including your masculinity. That I could drink was something that bonded me to many before my Italian improved enough to communicate my startling wit.

So I allowed myself to conclude that I drank heavily but wasn’t an alcoholic. I was slightly disappointed in this because I felt if I was an alcoholic then I could really let go and dedicate myself wholeheartedly to the booze. I was an amateur alcoholic: not a pro.

One of the other reasons I resisted the reasoning was I deplored the whole idea of AA and that specious quasi religious twaddle. The chips and the confessions, the pernicious idea that if you have one drink you’d go back to the beginning as if this is some game of Snakes and Ladders. Despite its public image, there’s very little to show AA and for that matter NA helps more than recovering outside of those programs.

But when I gave up drinking, I quickly realized I had been an alcoholic my whole life. Every night I dream of drinking. Every night. During the day it is effortless. In my dreams I fail again and again. It is a recurring nightmare. Literally. And then I begin to think back to my past, soberly.

And here are the confessions. I’d hide my drinking. Volunteer to clean the kitchen so I could go at it some more, gulped down. Wait until everyone had gone to bed. I was always the last person to leave the party. Becoming a father, I left the hospital as soon as I could so I could go and drink, toast the baby. In the evenings, I couldn’t drive because I’d had something to drink so if the kids needed lifts it infuriated me. There goes my Saturday night!

The real blow out nights were becoming fewer and fewer - the Biblical, Old Testament hangovers, rare now. I watched John Malkovich clock watching in Burn After Reading, waiting for five o clock so he can declare the bar open and have his already poured and ready whisky and soda. That was me in the last years of drinking. My two beers before dinner. Wine and whisky. I was getting very into whisky that last year.

I also understand now I don’t drink how many decisions in my life were based on how close it could get me to a bar. How many things had I missed? I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my late twenties because I didn’t want to be a designated driver. How many times had I decided to do something uninteresting because there was booze there? Bad parties, one more drink and then we’ll go. Boring people who wanted to stay on and drink with me. How boring did I become? I remember that feeling of being too drunk to hold my own and keep up with the conversation, or worse still think I was entertaining everyone when I was haranguing them or being a twat. Once I apologized to a landlord of my local for being drunk and he told me I wasn’t a bad drunk: I just wouldn’t stop talking.

Drink had become so much a part of my personality that when I told a colleague that I’d given up, he said: “Well, what’s the point of you?”

It was a really good question. What’s the point of me? If drinking had once been the answer what a small man I’d become. I’d enjoyed drinking no doubt about it. I had magnificent days of drinking where the skies outside would rise to the size of cathedrals and the pubs were as snug and cosy as the womb, everything glittered like a remembrance of Christmas and comrades were warm, wise, generous and witty.

But I still have that now. The alcohol it turns out wasn’t central to that. Great parties are still great. Bad ones I can leave without hesitation. I can still talk your ear off and my giddiness has, if anything, increased. The sky towers above the cathedral. People are amazing and I don’t care if they drink. That doesn’t qualify or disqualify them. Some of my sober pals I like talking to because we share a certain aspect of our lives.

Unlike the AA, I would argue you can stop being something. I was an alcoholic but now I’m not. If I were to have a drink I don’t know if I would go back to being what I was. I doubt it if only because now I know how so much which I thought required alcohol actually doesn’t. But I made that decision to never drink again for a precise reason. I am better at making one big decision - like I’ll never drink again - than saying I’ll cut down and that forcing me to make hundreds of decisions every week. It saves time and effort.

But that’s just me. A diagnosis is not the entirety of somebody and I am a lot of things. I am - as my friends and family will attest - a lot. But one of those things is an ex-alcoholic and it feels good to say that.