A few weeks ago I was on a nightbus travelling home from a dinner party and started feeling a bit nauseous. It was nothing to worry about; I'd just made the mistake of playing the Countdown-esque app Whirly Word on my other half's iPhone, forgetting that I'm not very compatible with anything reading-related during a bumpy bus ride. As soon as I got off the bus and got some air I was fine again, but that grogginess did remind me somewhat of being drunk, something I'd thankfully not experienced for many years.I'm not anti-alcohol and still go to bars regularly with friends. It's the culture of drinking that has always turned me off, so much so that when I quit three years ago due to starting medication, there was a part of me that felt almost relieved - and I've never gone back. Generally the booze just didn't do anything for me, other than make me feel dehydrated and sorry for myself if I over-did it.
To begin with drinking was quite fun, partly because me and my mates started a year or so underage during the lower-sixth, and I guess it added a bit of a buzz when we entered pubs and wondered if we'd be served. Actually the answer was almost always yes, even if the landlord knew we were under 18. One of them definitely did as we started doing a weekly pub quiz, and a regular team cheekily called itself something like: "There are six teams tonight and only one is underage". Laughter all round – even from those behind the bar.
We were well-behaved but ultimately still novices, and that meant quite a few entertaining moments, the best of which was one of the lads yelling "Oi, watch it!" as he crashed into a lamppost.
By the start of uni, though, the novelty had worn off. I just wanted to socialise and chill out but instead it became drinking against the clock, the whole "Right, next round!" thing. I guess there was a certain logic, given that beer does taste vile after its head disappears, but getting wasted every night didn't appeal to me.
Luckily, on most student nights I managed to get away from all that, mainly because I was in a minority of men who weren't afraid to enter the dancefloor and boogie to Take That and Kylie without five pints inside them. By that stage I'd virtually abandoned beer anyway and switched to alcopops. Being in bottles meant they were more portable, and their fruity taste meant I didn't get dehydrated as quickly as I did with bitter or lager – even if I'd been on the dancefloor for a while.
Ultimately I was drinking less than people thought, to the point where my flatmates and people on my course thought I was some sort of invincible legend. I’d get home from clubs at 3am but stroll into 9am lectures with time to spare, showered, breakfast in belly and more or less unscathed.
On the flipside, I was ridiculed for drinking alcopops, commonly thought of as a woman's drink and at the time also a cause for concern amongst parents, who thought the manufacturers were aiming to entice youngsters into alcohol. It didn't help that alcopop brands largely had kiddie names like Hooch, Two Dogs and Spoof.
The now defunct Hooch was generally my preferred choice, and one Christmas the brand brought out a festive spin-off called Ho Ho Ho.
"What can I get you?", a female friend of mine asked as she prepared to head to the bar at a Christmas party.
"I'll have a Ho Ho Ho, please," I replied.
"Kris, I know I'm a girl but I'm not going over there and ordering a drink called fucking Ho Ho Ho." Well, she is northern, to be fair.
I hated getting uncontrollably pissed – being out of my comfort zone, I guess. The whole room-spinning-around thing actually scared me. You hear about people choking on their own vomit after a night out, so waking up the next morning still in tact was always a relief. I could never understand people who rose on a Saturday morning after getting smashed the night before and gasp "never again!", only to do it all again that same night.
On the other hand, I was in favour of the 24-hour drinking legislation introduced in 2005 – and I'm equally disappointed that the law looks like being scrapped. When I go abroad and notice how much more relaxed drinking culture is, it frustrates me. Whereas our Mediterranean cousins enjoy a relaxing evening and good food, knowing their bars are open until the early hours and sometimes beyond, we hit the bars early on an empty stomach, knowing most shut at 11pm. Then there's a kebab on the way home instead.
Less pressure to drink against the clock, and the chance to have dinner first, means there’s a better chance of alcohol being tolerated, and a more relaxed atmosphere. The likes of the Daily Mail claim triumphantly that the legislation has failed here. Not really. It’s just establishments largely chose to pretty much ignore it; pubs and clubs on the whole haven't radically shifted their closing times – it's still generally 11pm and 2am respectively – so drinking patterns haven't shifted either. The Mail make it sound as though drunken brawls, vomit and A&E wards bursting in the early hours were new phenomena.
If bars as a general rule relaxed their opening hours - until, say, 3am - drinking patterns and behaviour would gradually change and pub-goers would have better flexibility. I'm not saying our binge-drinking culture would disappear overnight, but I'd be surprised if it still existed to such a high level five years down the line.
Let's face it, we're sluts when it comes to absorbing culture or mannerisms from abroad. People started speaking with Australian upward intonation during the Neighbours revolution and still use Aussie phrases ("No worries" is mine); curry is now more popular than fish and chips; our kids love High School Musical; we now kiss on both cheeks, etc. I don't see why our drinking habits couldn't change with time. Ultimately the public didn't reject the legislation; it was never really given a chance.
I've been on three pub crawls and hated each one. I have no excuses for the first; it was with Nottingham Trent University's football team and with people I generally didn't like at all. The team was incredibly cliquey and I only broke into the second XI in the second year because a guy in our student digs during the first year managed the team.
Even worse, I thought I had a chance of making the first team if I could worm my way into the clique, so when one of the guys organised a pub crawl I put my name down alongside around 30 others. On the night barely 10 turned up. Now I was under pressure to binge without making a fool of myself.
To my surprise, I managed to hold my own and handled the booze better than several of the others. One of the guys went down an alleyway, threw up and shouted "Wahey!" before re-entering the city's Market Square. For me, vomiting means the end of the night. I survived until the club but wilted due to stupidly ordering a Coke instead of a bottle of water, which may have saved me from the inevitable.
The other eventful one, in Corfu, was a bit different. After being reunited following our respective uni exploits, me and four of the other guys from school went on – loosely speaking – a lad's holiday. I say loosely speaking because we went to Kassiopi, one of the quietest islands, which had only a handful of bars and one club, and we basically just chilled out.However, we signed up to an island-hopping pub crawl one night. Despite still being coherent by the end, I somehow managed to get separated from the others. To this day I can't work out what happened; all I remember is being in dire need of a slash, so I went to a nearby Gents. I was in there for barely a minute. When I left I saw our bus back to Kassiopi disappear into the distance, and disorientation kicked in.
"You've got two options, mate," said a nearby rep. "You could get a taxi, but what I personally recommend is to stay here, pull a bird and go back to her place. Then you can get a bus back tomorrow."
This was a female rep. No wonder we're hated so much abroad. Naturally I went for the second option. Well, you laugh but... no, you're right, and the taxi was fucking expensive.
My personal “never again” experience happened several years later at a house party in Walthamstow, east London. I actually know the exact date (well, via Google) – Saturday 10th December, 2005 – because of a serious incident in the early hours of Sunday morning (not involving me!).
The party, though lively, was pretty civilised. However, the wine totally knocked me for six. Of all alcoholic drinks, wine is probably the most deceptively evil if you are not in control of it. My large glass was constantly topped up by the hosts, and I lost track of how much I was drinking.I left the party at about half-past-midnight as I needed to catch a nightbus from the bus station back to Euston, and then get the last train from there to Watford, where I lived at the time. I felt a bit rough but no more. However, minutes after I boarded the bus for the 45-minute journey, the wine hit me.
Shit, I'm not going to make this, I thought as my guts started bubbling. In an ideal world I'd have got off at the next stop, taken some air, walked around and maybe found an offie to buy some water. But I didn't have that luxury. Sure enough, I threw up on the bus on two separate occasions. That's when I realised how much I'd had, because usually once is enough to clear everything out. But no, I still felt like shit. Bizarrely, I'm not sure anyone actually noticed as I was sat in a single seat tucked away from the rest of the lower deck; it's possible I was in the driver's blind spot as well.
The bus was late getting into Euston due to a diversion, and it became a race against time to catch the train. I had to run to the platform; not a good idea. I made it but my stomach churned again and I puked up twice more during the journey, which lasted another agonising 45 minutes. I may have got away with it on the bus but not the train.
The 2am train is always packed with piss-heads and I was ashamed to be one of them. Although some of them shouted at me, it wasn't in an aggressive manner, and some were genuinely sympathetic. They'd seen it all before. They'd probably all been there before.
I was massively relieved when I got out of the station. One lady wanted to take me to A&E as she thought I'd been puking blood, but I reassured her it was red wine. I've no recollection of my journey home after that but I'm guessing it wasn't by taxi if their cleaning fines are anything to go by.
Two hours after I finally got home and crashed out, there was a massive bang; so loud I actually registered it - usually nothing wakes me up that early into a post-booze sleep. Whatever was powering my brain at that moment did the equivalent of shrugging its shoulders, though, and I was out like a light again immediately.
I still had one obstacle left; I was due to play football for my Sunday League team that morning. My body did its duty and reacted to the alarm at around 8.30, and only then did I find out what had happened; there had been a massive explosion at a gas depot in Hemel Hempstead, and it was the first item on the news. Hemel is a fair distance from Watford but there were stories of glass shattering in nearby streets.
Although I no longer felt drunk or sick, I knew that, for the first time ever, playing football was physically beyond me. The ground we were due to play at was on the other side of town, and even if I'd had been fit enough to drive, I was probably still over the limit.
Amazingly I got a reprieve. The manager phoned me up to say the game was postponed. By a quirk of fate, our fixture was against the Metropolitan Police. Their players had been placed on emergency duty. Usually when a game is called off I'm irritated for the rest of the day, but on this occasion it felt like the best news ever. My head hit the pillow seconds afterwards and by the time I resurfaced it was three in the afternoon.
Red wine was never on the menu after that, though I still enjoyed a glass of white every now and again with a meal. Even now it feels weird drinking apple juice at a restaurant instead. Nevertheless, I still don't miss alcohol at all.
"I've often wondered what it tastes like," a Somalian guy once said to me in a nearby cafe.
"You're not missing much," I replied.
"It certainly smells like piss," he laughed.
I couldn't really argue with that. Orange and lemonade, please.
Photos by Dan Lynch, munitang, Matt Lucht and diamond geezer
