3 hours ago
13
The first time I tasted alcohol that wasn’t licked off a cork would have been at about the age of five or six. I’m terrible with years and the memory is incredibly hazy. But I was at the house of my godmother, Heather. For some reason they were drinking champagne. I don’t think I remember my mum drinking any kind of alcohol more than a dozen times in my whole life. She claims, and I believe her, to never have been drunk. Considering her son has been drunk, and I’m working from the back of a fag packet here, 4,000 times, that’s quite a contrast. But champagne?! What could the occasion have been? The opening ceremony of the Seoul Olympics? The formation of the Lib Dems? (Wikipedia page doing a lot of heavy lifting here.) Had my dad just moved out? Had the divorce papers come through? Maybe they just had a silly moment, in that wonderful way normal drinkers do – champagne on a Wednesday afternoon! Aren’t we naughty!
For some reason they let me have a sip. Maybe I nagged them until it became intolerable; maybe I just put on my most irresistible face. Maybe they just let me, because of how normal it is to let a child have a sip, and I mean a sip, of wine or beer. Nothing could be more normal. There wasn’t a lot of alcohol around when I was a kid. If we went to a restaurant, Mum might have a gin and tonic. It’s a cliche, but there may have been a glass of sherry at Christmas. It wasn’t a big part of our lives.
But looking back, it was, even then, a big part of my mind. It loomed large. I remember noticing them drinking. I remember seeing that it changed them. Not because they were drunk (they weren’t), but because they were at ease, happy, giggling maybe, smiling. Something had been added to the regular domestic scene of a living room with board games and cups of tea and The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Something had enhanced it. I remember thinking, as they held up the glass for me to sip, “What will happen?! Will I see dragons?! Will I fall asleep?! Will I be drunk!!!”
Like the precocious child I was, and slightly grandiose man I was to become, I made a big play of swirling around and saying, “I’m drunk, I’m drunk!” The strongest part of this admittedly vague memory is me lying down pretending to pass out. I remember lying there just desperate for things to happen, mock-comatose among the Radio Times and pot pourri and Boggle, willing my mind to change. I’m sure as I lay there, stretched out on a footstool, waiting for spiritual enlightenment or at the very least a wizard or witch to appear, my mum and Heather would have rolled their eyes, or smiled.
I’m sure you have half a dozen similar stories. A sip of champagne! A sucked cork! It’s no opening of the heavens I can point to and say, “It was then! That is why I am the way I am!”
And then came the bottle of wine.
It would have been around the time that the film My Stepmother Is An Alien was released on VHS in the UK and no more significantly Around The Time My Parents Divorced And My Dad Unexpectedly Moved To Canada Because God Told Him To.
I watched MSIAA at Auntie Anne and Uncle Bill’s house with their son Simon (my hero) and my mum (my mum). Simon was my hero because he did things like take me fishing and do handbrake turns in his Renault 5 GT Turbo, bring me back penknives from holiday and light bonfires with a flaming arrow fired from a bow. All manner of things that the dads of dreams do, and if there’s one thing I was really on the lookout for at this age, it was a dream dad. There was an unexpected sex scene in the film and Simon said they were “bonking”. Classic Simon. I think I knew what he meant, but I asked, “What’s bonking?” and my mum said, “You know full well what it is!”
Oh no! Had my stolen glances at Elle magazine been captured on CCTV?! Had I left fingerprints by the entry for “sex” in the Collins dictionary?
Instant shame.
Well, after I had asked what bonking was, Simon poured himself a glass of wine. I doubt my mum had any. Maybe Uncle Bill had some.
The bottle of Jacob’s Creek was in the kitchen, and we were in the living room on the sofa where I’d pretended not to know what bonking was. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the bottle on the worktop just 20 paces away.
It sat there, minding its own business, no different from a pepper grinder or a bowl of fruit. But in my head something was beginning, something was making that bottle of wine very different from the pepper grinder and the bowl of fruit, something that would lead me, in later life, to use the booze aisle in Tesco as a form of transcendental meditation.
And then I did my first ever alcoholic thing: I told a lie.
Now, you may jolt at the notion of describing a seven-year-old’s behaviour as “alcoholic”, and may feel it extreme to suggest so. I do not. The reason is because I do not confuse alcoholism with evil, weakness, bad behaviour, stupidity or any kind of moral failure it might be unreasonable to blame on a child. I was preoccupied with alcohol because I have an illness and I believe I had it then. This wasn’t just another thing I liked the taste of, like a favourite sweet or chocolate – I’d have just asked my mum for one of those. No, this was something whose mystique and mysterious adult qualities I was becoming subconsciously obsessed with. The behaviour is alcoholic because I lied to get alcohol. I didn’t say, “Mum, can I try some of Simon’s wine?!” or, “Can I have some Jacob’s Creek?!” I said, “I’m just going to the toilet.”
I walked out of the living room, down the hallway, past the toilet, into the kitchen and did my second ever alcoholic thing. I drank alone.
I picked up the bottle and drank straight out of it. I then poured a glass and drank that. I didn’t splutter or gag or spit it out. I remember feeling that I was doing something wrong and that I was doing something good.
I then did my third alcoholic thing. I poured some orange juice into the wine in order to conceal it. I’ve heard alcoholics talk about hiding bottles around the house, in toilet cisterns and glove boxes, handbags and hedges. And my first reaction is always, “I never did that! I wasn’t that bad!” And there I am, seven years old, hiding my first ever proper drink.
I had yet to perfect the art of concealment, however, as after one mouthful of the never-to-be-repeated cocktail of Jacob’s Creek and orange juice, my mum was stood behind me. My deception had been rumbled.
Much drinking of water, questions and a telling-off followed. And then the long, slow walk of shame back into the living room with a de-Creeked glass of orange juice. I remember Simon saying something like, “Been at the wine, have you?!” I don’t remember feeling any buzz or effect from the alcohol. I don’t think there was shouting, or slapping of wrists, just low-level panic and concern.
On the surface, a seven-year-old walked into a kitchen and stole some wine. Big deal. And had alcohol not come to dominate my life for the next 33 years, I would see very little out of the ordinary. But another reading of this innocent vignette is that an alcoholic lied, drank alone and tried to hide their drinking. That’s said with no judgment. To be honest, I feel worse about the whole “bonking” palaver. I don’t blame that child for a single thing – he was just, unbeknown to him, trying to change the way he felt. An overeater may have similar memories of food, an anorexic of hunger, a sex addict of pornography. In later life, I would blame the adult me very severely, engaging in the kind of self-laceration that alcohol would fuel and relieve, fuel and relieve. Did it all start with a bottle of Jacob’s Creek? Who knows. Maybe it started with the idea that in that bottle was something special, something different, somewhere else.
