THIS day last week I awoke in the middle of a field surrounded by strangers and I didn’t even have a hangover.
When I was first asked if I wanted to attend Ireland’s huge outdoor festival Electric Picnic, my knee-jerk reaction was to say no despite the fact that these were some of the most coveted tickets in the land. You see, my views towards camping and being social have changed a lot in the past eight years since I decided that alcohol was no longer my friend.
It was all fun and games in the beginning with ‘the drink’ and I would often recount my uni days fondly because I always say that to be a student is to be a semi-vagrant alcoholic for three years except your parents are really proud of you.
Drinking and doing silly things is par for the course when we are younger and in many ways we learn and grow from the trials and errors of our ways. For instance, I learned that a ‘Vótáil Gerry Adams’ election poster-board makes an excellent sled for going down a huge set of stairs and that coming home with only one shoe does not make me Cinderella.
Giving up alcohol was also the propellant to my beginning stand-up comedy because when I got sober, I thought to myself: ‘How am I going to humiliate myself now?’ Comedy ticks all the boxes because I still get to go to pubs and overshare with strangers, then wake up the next day worried that I’ve offended someone - so it would appear that I have abstained from the drink only to become a craic addict.
Being Irish, I find it took a lot longer to come to the realisation that I shouldn’t drink, given that not only is drinking the norm, it’s almost a requirement, with only three acceptable reasons for turning it down: pregnancy, antibiotics or alcoholism. Anything else and you’re simply being no craic on purpose.
I learned that a ‘Vótáil Gerry Adams’ election poster-board makes an excellent sled for going down a huge set of stairs and that coming home with only one shoe does not make me Cinderella
I’ve never been offered as much free booze in my life since I gave it up, probably because every skinflint in the bar will now offer to buy me a wine, safe in the confidence that I’ll say no. Times are changing, however, with zero-alcohol menus for beer and wine in most places, whereas not long ago we might have risked ridicule for simply asking if there was any non-alcoholic beer behind the bar. Men have been unceremoniously tossed out of Bittles for less but it would seem that more people are opting to stay compos mentis on nights out with recent studies indicating a growing movement toward sobriety and ‘mindful’ drinking in a significant percentage of the millennial and ‘Gen Z’ population. And here was me thinking I was special. Back in my day you only gave up drinking if they stopped serving ye.
I have had some of the best experiences of my life so far with nothing more than a fizzy juice in my hand, including last weekend at Electric Picnic. I went as part of Mothers Against Genocide, a group set up by women to bear witness against the atrocities occurring right now in Palestine.
Although it doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs, being around like-minded people with a social conscience and a determination to do something, anything to show their solidarity with a nation being bombed within an inch of extinction was an uplifting and powerful experience.
Not only was camping a pleasure rather than the chore I thought it would be, I actually ended up sleeping better on an air mattress with nothing but a nylon tent for shelter than I would in my bed, though this may have more to do with the fact that my two-year-old kicks me in the face a lot at home and I often wake with his toe in my nostril.
One of the gifts of my sobriety is having clarity of mind to focus on the important things that make my existence feel worthwhile. There will still be hard times but nothing as hard as when I was trying to manage my problems by consuming a depressant that is masquerading as a relaxant.
I tip my imaginary cap to anyone who can go out for a drink on a Friday and make it home in time for Mass on Sunday but that just wasn’t me. Safe to say, I’ve never been to America - but I’ve been in some states, I tell ye.
