No more for the road

I've quit drinking. After 30 years together, drinking and I are going to call it a day. We're parting as friends, before familiarity breeds any contempt. The party's over and it's definitely time to clear up the empties. I'd like to think that, a few years down the line, we'll bump into each other again (probably in a bar somewhere) and feel that warm glow of a past close friend regained. But for the time being, drinking's off on his lonesome to all tomorrow's parties and I'm going to let him.

It's fair to say that we don't owe each other anything. Looking back, I've enjoyed every single dram of it. Well, almost. My first ever hangover (lasted 36 hours and involved watching the TV premiere of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' in sunglasses) wasn't a highpoint. Nor was supping my weight in lager the night Barry McGuigan won his world championship, and then falling and wedging myself bollock naked between two wardrobes, requiring the emergency services of my father to pull me out. All relationships have their ups and downs. I can think of many more ups than downs.

Like sipping Singapore Slings in Raffles Long Bar and marvelling at the carpet of discarded peanut shells that fill the floor. Or gulping down schooners of Toohey's in Bundeena RSL (NSW), knee-deep in Aussie testosterone, while watching England begin to win the Ashes. Or maybe going head-to-head in a drinking competition in 1985 with my old mate John Carrott in the Spread Eagle on Walmgate in York; for the statisticians amongst you, John won by a fall and a submission, 13 pints of Theakstone's XB to 12. Or, perhaps, my annual Christmas Day binge with my father, especially the one that lasted 15 hours and reached the bizarre crescendo of a bottle of red wine mixed with half of a bottle of dark rum; (please don't try it, because it's foul and pioneers like me have only taken the time to go on ahead to check it out in order to save you the discomfort). What about my ground-breaking experimentation with a cocktail called 'Windolene', (made with champagne, vodka, cointreau and blue curacao), that turned out to be more intoxicating than actually drinking proprietary glass cleaner? And all those pubs. Such fantastic hostelries. The George and Dragon in Wentworth, the John Bull in York and the oasis that was a pint of black-and-tan in the Cleaver in Rotherham. Most of those pubs have long since morphed into faceless Starbucks, a fact that should now make me feel grateful, but it doesn't. If proper pubs still existed, (places where old-hands taught adolescent greenhorns to handle their sherbet), we would have less on-street kamikaze drinking. But it's too late to turn back that clock. It was swept aside in a tidal wave of Bacardi Breezer and 16-cans-for-a-tenner deals. And for me, it's taken too much of the fun out of it.

So, what was the last tipple? As it goes, it was a serious measure of Talisker single malt. 45.8% of fiery peatiness. Well, I wouldn't want my drinking legend and legacy to be ruined by rumours that I'd lost it at the end. Would I? Mine's a diet coke, please.