Monday, August 16, 2010

Friendlessness is the friend of sobriety

One of the things that's making it surprisingly - distressingly - easy for me to give up booze this month is that I have no-one to go out drinking with anyway.

Everybody seems to be away on holiday. Or cutting down on their drinking too. Or just perennially inaccessible or unreliable.

At the weekend, I was going to go and watch an early-evening football match with The Choirboy - but he dozed off, and slept right through the engagement. (He woke up to apologise, but then nodded off again.... Poor chap must have been working too hard.)


I'd tried to make similar plans for fun & footie on Sunday with The Chairman - but he got the time of the match wrong, 'forgot' that he was tied up for most of the evening with another engagement, and then told me we should put things off till next weekend (although he subsequently told me that he hadn't meant to say that, and was miffed with me for standing him up!!). Ah, Chairman - you make disappointment into an art form!


So, yet another weekend devoid of any pretexts to go out and do anything..... If things carry on like this, I might never drink again.

2 comments:

The British Cowboy said...

When I drink alone I either drink in extreme moderation (2 beers and a sandwich and then home, such as was my wont on Sunday night) or to complete debauched excess (significant intrusion into double digit beers, 2/3 of a bottle of Mount Gay, memory lapses, such as was my wont on Monday night).

The solo drink seems never to result in the happy medium. I wasn't alone for the whole night, making friends in each bar I entered, but there wasn't that kind of restraining influence that is present when one drinks with people one already knows.

Froog said...

On a school night?! Shame on you, Cowboy!

One of the things that militates against attempting a solo night in the bar(s) here is the other punters - who are mostly non-English speakers, or arseholes, or simply not there (business is VERY quiet the first half of the week almost everywhere, especially on a Monday). I'll consider 'solo drinking' at my established local, 12 Square Metres, because there are almost invariably a few people that I know there. But otherwise, I only go out to catch a gig, or because I've arranged to try to catch up with some people. Social life and the music calendar are both very slow during the sultry Beijing summer: everyone takes a break in August! (Well, everyone except me, this year.)