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It can't be just having not had a drink for three days (can it?) but my head is suddenly clear, my brain is working, I am reading a book, I managed a reasonably fluid run through an incredibly muddy wood and childcare seemed (at points) a bit easier. I am edging closer to giving up for good, but you know that this is Me1 writing. Me2 will be back soon saying how great it is to get buzzed in the evening and screw the brain fug, because I am cool.
But for now Me1 looks back at all the years of drinking and marvels at how I got through my twenties and thirties (and teens too I guess) getting drunk every night and then getting up and working (and sometimes not getting up and staying in bed all the day). Hobbled by my social anxiety, booze seemed the only way to lose my inhibitions and have any chance of meeting people and falling in bed with some of them, but it also means that I don't remember most of what was going on anyway. What a monumental waste of time and my scarce money it all was. But I guess it was better than sitting at home on my own. I guess I had fun. You know in amongst all the loneliness and depression.
It's not so much that I would change anything though, just wondering how I managed to operate. I had a huge capacity for alcohol back then, maybe not in terms of staying sober, but in being able to carry on drinking. Now a bottle of champagne and a beer and a whisky give me a two day hangover and make me want to stop drinking forever. Twenty years ago I would have got through that much in the first hour and still somehow turned up for whatever i was meant to be doing the next day.
Ah what a fucking old fogey. Come back Me2, Sure we waste the precious gift of life by getting wasted, but that's better than wasting it without getting wasted.
But it's great to be reading books again. Books are more intoxicating than alcohol, am I right, cool kids? The book I am reading is a lot of tun. It's One, Two, Three, Four by Craig Brown, a life of the Beatles in little snap shot chapters about them and the people they encountered and the effect they had on their fans, both famous and not. Also there's a nice injection of the personality of the author, especially when he gets annoyed with the tour guides showing him around the childhood homes of John and Paul. It must have taken some intense research, but manages to be fresh and interesting about a very well-trod but still fascinating topic. What made the Beatles work? How incredible was their sudden rise to superstardom? And it neatly looks at all those Sliding Doors moments where the whole thing might never have happened. I had no idea (or had forgotten) that after Hamburg the Beatles had more or less stopped meeting up and Paul had got a proper job and was being primed for middle management and had to make a choice between keeping his job or sneaking off for lunchtime gigs at teh Cavern.
How different would his life have been if he'd made the sensible choice?
I think it would have been a bit different. And so would everyone else's. Someone should write a film about what it would be like if the Beatles never existed.
Anyway thoroughly enjoyable book and admirably tries to get as close to the truth as possible, but openly discusses how many stories have become legend where it's impossible to find the truth.
