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Saturday 16th July 2016

4974/17894

Fifty days with out an alcoholic drink completed. Imagine having to deal with the last few weeks without recourse to alcohol. Or maybe it was just me being constantly drunk that was keeping the world holding together (or I was so drunk that I didn't notice this shit was happening all the time). I know I have done this a few times before and have always slipped back to where I was before, but it feels different this time (or I have forgotten that it always feels this way). I have scarcely craved booze at all. Occasionally at a restaurant I have thought it would be nice to have a beer, but it's quickly passed and I look at the whisky bottle which two months ago I was taking a nightly large measure from and it doesn't seem appealing at all.

It wasn't my intention to stop drinking forever. My wife and I just made a pact to lay off booze for 100 days for the good of our health and in the hope it would make us more productive (and maybe that's finally working as I seem to be back in work mode properly this week). But now I am wondering whether I should keep this going after the next seven weeks. I have a big family celebration and a holiday coming up in the next month, but I didn't need to drink on my birthday and so I think I will be OK. I am sure you can find at least three Warming Ups where I say the same thing though. The blog proves nothing except that nothing ever changes and my life is a cycle of two years of “excess” (on a very puny, Flump-based level) followed by six or so months of virtue. 

But glad I have made it this far. Though don't think I could have done it without all the heroins to keep my perked up.


I became a hero to my usually mainly indifferent daughter today by managing to come up with a joke that proved to her (finally) why she's lucky to have a professional comedian for a dad (she seems to accept that she has a professional comedian for a mum and has always find her funny, but she makes me work for it). Admittedly I was initially funny by accident. I just did a sneeze and Phoebe laughed. I liked the feeling of her finding me amusing, even if she didn't realise that a sneeze is an involuntary response, so then I started doing fake sneezes, which she found just as funny. And it never got old. She started doing it too and I laughed, because a sneeze is an excellent joke. But after an afternoon of fake sneezing we had an unbreakable bond of finding sneezing amusing. And when we got home from the park even Catie could see that finally me and Phoebe were a team. A team united by sneezing. A bond that can never break. Until tomorrow when Phoebe no longer finds sneezing funny and I have to think of some other hack piece of comedy to make myself seem interesting.

But man, it was great while it lasted.



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