Well, being a homogeneous mixture chemically composed of only one phase, technically it is. But I think we both know what I mean.
Yes. I’m afraid I recently downloaded the NHS “drink tracker app”. Needless to say, it lit up like a fucking Chinese Stock Market heatmap. Oh dear. “Don’t let drink sneak up on you”, the NHS are telling me. Well, it did. And it ran off with my girlfriend. But I’m going down fighting.
Oh.
Honesty. Now there’s a strong word. And quite frightening, if like me you have at points greased your path with avoidances, silences and sometimes downright lies. Lying is probably an addiction, after all. In that it’s a fall-back mechanism. A habit you form to find false comfort in painful situations. Shame. Embarrassment. Awkwardness.
Possibly it’s my final addiction. With an increase in honesty and self-examination has come a cut in the booze. Because liars lie to themselves, as much as they lie to the people they love. Like all addictions, it’s self-destructive and ultimately demeaning. Like all addictions, it damages the people that love you. Like all addictions, it starts as a wall to defend yourself, but quickly becomes a wall that pens you in. Armour becomes a straight-jacket. And similar tropes.
Like all addictions, it’s fucking hard to beat. And painful. And horrible. But I have a solid KO record, and I don’t fancy its chances. It’s going down in one of the early rounds. Just watch.
Slipper-like supermarket sneakers are popular here. Thick socks; overlarge hoodies and sweatshirts. On the whole, the Relapse Prevention Group on a Tuesday afternoon is not the place for couture. Comfort is in fashion on this catwalk. I’m sure if Primark sported a full-body cotton-wool onesie, recovering addicts would queue round the corner.
Everyone takes their seat, and sort of hugs themselves up. For the boys, hands disappear into overlong sleeves. For the girls, knees disappear up the front of big baggy jumpers. Lips are chewed. Fringes are deployed.
You could probably measure recovery here by number of layers. Two duvets down to one. Giant cardigan, to large cardigan; and eventually to one that fits.
An addict develops an armour-like coating. He lies to the people he loves. He lies to himself. He does it consistently, and professionally. A full-blown functioning addict could become guest lecturer at the Mossad school of deception. He could walk George Smiley up and down the garden path until he needed a sit-down.
He needs plate mail to survive this. Enough to let him think he can sort it out tomorrow, or next week. To take control. I mean it’s not really a crisis yet, is it? Enough to let him avoid the self-loathing for long enough to get to the end of the day. Just today. He’ll feel strong tomorrow. Tomorrow everything happens.
In the Relapse Prevention Group, Jane is anxious. She’s a former events organiser for the music industry. She started independently, organising her own events. Negotiating her way onto the scene with the balls of a seven-foot Viking.
Now living at home, her parents have trusted her with fifty quid. She’s 39. She quakes.
Jon is from the City. An ex-hedge fund manager. He is literally shaking at the idea he may have gotten angry with his new girlfriend. No, he didn’t shout at her. Just got terse; but he’s convinced he upset her, and it’s burning him up.
David is a classical musician. He once self-medicated to deal with his anxiety prior to performance. Now his problem comes after the concert. How it makes him FEEL.
Once that armour comes off, it leaves a bare and untouched surface. Everything is so HOT or so COLD. Every touch from somebody else is either velvet, or sandpaper. Every emotion shunts back online like a Japanese maglev train.
And love is like the bolt of lightning that rockets through the Frankenstein set at RKO. The monster heaves, and opens his eyes. He’s come from a very, very cold place. Touch is transcendent. Holding hands is the graze of God. There is infinity in a kiss.
do you want a boyfriend?
The battle these people have fought has been epic. In the true literary sense of the word. They are a hard and resourceful group. They are good in a tight spot. They will attach themselves to you and stand at your side for the merest of affirmation. They will love you, and always remind you of what is most important. They will see your flaws and find you beautiful. And they are wise. You just need to give them the chance. They need you to think about what ‘virtue’ is, in a compromised world.
They have been addicts. Then they were recovering addicts. Now they’ve been recovered addicts for a while, and are tired of telling their story.
They are now potential. Glorious, glorious potential. Bless them all.
It is election eve. Tomorrow a lot of people put a lot of paper into a lot of boxes, and then we get to spend the next two weeks wondering who’s in whose gang, and who isn’t. Marvellous.
So anyway. Who wants to hear a story? It’s an improving one. With a stout moral core. And it’s got drugs in it.
All of you? Good. Bring your chairs around. And your drinks. And someone turn that thing off.
Right. Ahem.
Imagine a man. An addict. He no longer takes his fix to feel good; that stopped a long time ago. He now takes it to not feel awful. If you look in any thesaurus, one of the synonyms for addiction is ‘enslavement’. This man is no longer his own master. He is miserable to the core. He knows that these days, after every fix, there’s a chance he might not wake up. And he knows something is very wrong, because he doesn’t care. And he loathes himself for it.
He has tried to stop by himself. He would rather die than let anyone else know he has a problem. But within 36 hours of stopping, he feels so physically fucking awful that he can’t get out of bed. Or shower. Or get his kid to the nursery. Or work.
And he knows that one tiny fix will prop him up for a bit longer. So he weakens, and fails. And then he fucking hates himself more, and is out to punish.
If he’s lucky, he will at some point realise that he can no longer stop this by himself. He needs other people. He needs someone to believe that he wants to get better more than anything else he’s ever wanted. And he starts looking around.
This man finds a website, which talks calmly about treatment options for parents. He discovers a walk-in centre, that is in the heart of his community. He doesn’t even have to make an appointment.
He walks past the door for two straight days in a row. The third time he walks in.
The guy who met me was Johnny. He was a short Scotsman, thickly built, and with tattoos on his arms that showed he had been a Guardsman. Yes, he told me, the army had taken him all over the world. Brunei, and Germany. And in 1982 it had dropped him on the side of a shallow mountain (“more of a hill, really, sir”) called Tumbledown in the South Atlantic.
There, at night, he had slithered up that rocky incline on his belly, watching the tracer fly far above his head. Until the sun came up, and then they were all sitting there in plain sight, under the Argentinian guns, like some sort of appalling duck shoot.
Johnny had done okay, though. He’d done alright. Came out without a scratch, or so he thought.
But he took that battle out with him when he left the army. He’d taken it on to the streets when his wife had kicked him out. He’d taken it to men’s shelters. And ultimately to community rehab.
And now he was looking after me. Efficiently. With clipboard in hand.
When Johnny put his hand on my shoulder, and told me it would all be alright, I wept.
He quickly put me through triage, then explained the titration process.
Within 48 hours I had my script, my plan, and Johnny’s number.
And now I work, voluntarily, as a drugs and alcohol counsellor. It’s my turn.
But here’s the punchline.
The website that directed me home was closed in March due to ‘cuts’.
That walk-in centre was closed last year, in an effort to ‘centralise’. There are no walk-in centres at all now.
Proper, qualified people like Johnny have been let go. It’s now all agencies and volunteers.
If I were to ask for help today, I would be told to fill in a form and wait three weeks for an appointment letter. If I ask what I am supposed to do for the next three weeks, I’ll be implicitly told to go back to my dealer. Or website. Or whatever shit-awful place I had decided that morning to never go back to again in my life.
Look. Here’s the point. These changes have only happened in the last SIX YEARS. There is a plethora of independent research that says these kind of cuts aren’t necessary. They just feed an ideology.
So I have to tell people to fill in a form. Crying is okay, because I understand. Trying to punch me in the face is even better; at least I know that you’re motivated.
It’s the quiet ones that haunt me. The ones that nod, and look at the floor. And walk right out of the door.
Please vote.
x
[update] save some lives, Corbyn. Work at the middle ground. For all those dead people I met. The dead weather.
online dating is shite 