Demon drink
Jeremy Clarke
The intricate cunning with which the rebel faction of my mind tries to convince Captain Conscience that alcohol and me are the greatest of pals, and that we must spend more time together, is amazing. Of all the drugs, it’s true, I like alcohol best. But a relationship with drink is like having a lifelong friendship with Ron Kray: hilarious and exciting to begin with, then unexpectedly onerous, and finally, as you realise you are being drawn into a dance of death, very worrying.
Until lately I’ve appeased the rebel faction by going out and embracing my old friend on average about once a fortnight. I’d go out and get completely Harry Stoshers, as they call it in the army, deliberately, in much the same way that the government appeased its rebel faction by calculatedly laying reason aside and forcing through Parliament the bill to ban hare-coursing and fox-hunting. An outbreak of deliberate madness once in a while, by individuals, as well as by national governments, is, after all, I suppose, what makes the world go around.
But lately Captain Conscience has been anxiously reviewing the situation. The cost of appeasement, in his opinion, has become far too high in terms of shame and humiliation, not to mention physical injury. Take the last time, for example, three weeks ago. I bought two tickets for West Ham v Middlesbrough and travelled up to London and back from Devon, a 500-mile trip, by train, having not touched a drop for a fortnight. I didn’t even get to see the match. I stayed in the bar underneath the grandstand, drinking. Back at Paddington station afterwards, I passed out on the wrong train. In bitter hindsight, and in a nutshell, I’d racked up over 300 quid on my overdraft to swig lager out of a plastic cup in the concrete and steel toilet of a bar in east London.
‘Enough’s enough,’ pronounced Captain Conscience. (The emergency, I think, wasn’t my eventual dying in squalor so much as the very real possibility that I was becoming a bore.) So alcohol was banned for the foreseeable future, and the rebel faction gagged. As a distraction for the evenings and weekends, when the thought of popping out for a drink usually becomes paramount, I embarked on yet another fitness campaign, with gym sessions as the staple, supplemented by circling and hitting the punch-bag at home.
For a fortnight I didn’t even want a drink. However, during that time I was careful to maintain a humble and contrite spirit. The old arguments put forward by the rebels in favour of my drinking myself to death are so diabolically plausible I have to assume that Satan is at the bottom of it, and that I may have to ask God for a favour one day. But at the end of the third week of the alcohol ban, on the Friday night, I was so desperate for a drink I was climbing the wall. I thought it was strange that the rebel faction had remained largely silent. It was because they knew that physical withdrawal symptoms were their trump card.
For the latter part of the week I was consumed by rage that had no identifiable cause. I could feel my eyeballs hard with hate in their sockets. Punching the bag alleviated the rage slightly. And I took my hard eyeballs to the gym and that helped a bit, too. But by Friday night I knew that the only thing that would subdue it was to go up the pub and stick a few away. I put on my coat. But on the way to the door, inspired by Rod Liddle’s tremendously riveting TV presentation last week of the life of the Bible translator William Tyndale, I picked up a Bible. It fell open at the Book of Job.
Satan, yet to fall out with God, has the specific task of going about the world unmasking hypocrisy wherever he finds it. Satan finds hypocrisy to be so ubiquitous and comes to God to complain that he has lost all faith in disinterested human goodness. And that’s how poor righteous Job becomes victim of a cruel wager between Satan and God and finishes up stripped of family and possessions, covered in boils, apparently betrayed by His Maker, and lamenting that all he has left to him is to be ‘a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls’.
Well, Job’s situation put going three weeks without a pint of Foster’s sharply into perspective. And I was happy to find myself in agreement with Satan, who always struck me as an intelligent bloke, on so many points. I went out and punched the bag some more, then had an early night. And in the morning I found that my alcoholic rage had finally blown itself out, I’m glad to report, and that I was over the first hurdle.
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