So it's a little bit weird. I had always assumed, as normally happens, once I had finished my time of alcoholic abstinence that I would have not only jumped off the wagon, but got completely pissed, gone back to the wagon and set about it with an axe and set it on fire, laughing, all the time laughing. That is to say I thought that given the opportunity to drink again I would have made up for lost time and drank 100 days worth of booze in 100 hours. But it hasn't turned out that way.
Though it was perfectly pleasant to have a couple of glasses of wine with a meal in Sicily, it didn't feel like I had reached an oasis after three months in the desert. And when I was drinking beer, though the first one was usually enjoyable if I had much more I felt bloated and slightly sick and I didn't like waking up with even the super mild hangovers that I was getting. I only drank a bottle of wine and maybe a couple of litres of beer (and a campari and lemonade) on the whole holiday and since I have come back I have not craved the sauce at all.
In Galway my arm was easily twisted into having a pint of Guinness, and I accepted a second pint after that, though rather wished I hadn't as it was a bit too much. And when the promoter was trying to tempt me into a third I have to admit I wasn't vaguely interested.
So I still haven't had a drink in the UK this year, but more pertinently I seem to have lost the thirst for the stuff. Maybe it's early days and in a couple of weeks I will be roaring down the streets of Soho with my pants on my head, but it's unsettling to not only not want to get drunk any more, but to not even be that interested in just having a glass of wine. It's not really a bad thing and I guess that some of it is down to not wanting to undo all the good work that has been done in the first 100 days of the year in terms of health and productivity. It feels like a switch has been flicked in my brain.
Maybe my age has just finally caught up with me. It could well be the case. I seem to be getting more forgetful of late -the other day it took me 25 minutes to remember the most famous book of my favourite author, Kurt Vonnegut. I was pretty sure it had a number in the title and was to do with the fire-bombing of Dresden, but knew it wasn't Farenheit 451 or Capricorn One. It was most unsettling. Only when I managed to remind myself that Vonnegut had escaped the bombing because he was underground in a slaughterhouse, did the name of ONE OF MY FAVOURITE BOOKS come back to me.
On the plus side, whilst my memory of things gone by seems to be dwindling, I do seem to have become able to predict the future, but only in a very mild and useless sense. Quite a few times recently I have been thinking of something or someone, only to have them pop up on the TV literally one second later, or their picture is over the page in the newspaper. Or I start singing a song and then someone turns on a radio and it's the same song at the exact some point I am at (though maybe with that one, the person just had the radio on really quiet and I hadn't realised I had heard it). Still if that was a side effect of Alzheimer's then I wouldn't mind too much. Presumably the more extreme it got, the further into the future I would be able to see. I could predict the lottery numbers and make millions of pounds and then be faced with the tricky dilemma of whether I should use the money to pay for a cure and thus lose my ability to see the future, or just make more and more money, winning the lottery every week. Probably after a couple of months of me winning every week, other people would get annoyed and stop playing, so I'd probably only make fifty or sixty million. Though then I could go on to horse racing or predicting football scores. Though they might stop me betting if I never lost. And maybe I should be using my powers to stop terrorist atrocities and save the world anyway.
Perhaps I have also forgotten how brilliant booze is - maybe that's another sign.
