I’m sitting in a friend’s backyard – incredibly grouchy because I only had four hours of broken sleep the night before.
“I don’t get it, I only had two glasses of wine last night and I woke up in the middle of the night – 2.23am to be precise! – and couldn’t get back to sleep. It felt like I was digesting a brick.”
It’s been happening a lot lately. Two drinks break me. The next day it’s like I had been Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, necking a bottle of vodka in the shower, rather than someone having a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.
Alcohol, once a reliable decades-long pal, has suddenly, without warning, turned foe.
I always thought my breakup with alcohol would happen after I’d been arrested or said something terrible to someone important or fallen down a flight of stairs – but the reality is more prosaic. I just can’t process alcohol in the way I used to. I wake up at strange hours. I feel sick. I have hangovers that last until Wednesday. It’s like my body, after years of enjoying drinking, has just ... stopped.
Until earlier this year I had merrily lived according to Winston Churchill’s maxim: “I have taken more good from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me.”
But now alcohol is subtracting good with abandon.
The shift has been so abrupt that I begin to wonder if each person is allocated a number of drinks to consume over a lifetime and I had used up all my rations before I’d used up my years.
Or as Caitlin Moran discovered in her recent book More Than a Woman, she had simply stopped producing the enzymes used to break down alcohol in her gut and all the drinks just sat there “like the poison it is.”
“This is so unfair,” she writes. “Why doesn’t booze work for me any more? It was so cost effective and sociable!”
Once upon a time, when I caught up with friends they regaled me with stories of their big nights. Now all they do is moan about hangovers. I saw one friend for lunch on Monday and he was in a bad way. Eating a pie, he was anxious and jittery, said he had a persistent low-level headache and malaise. He had tried to go running in the morning and found his stride was slow and painful. Even jumping in the ocean at the end of his run had provided no joy. “I think I must be still hungover from Friday,” he said. It was one of those hangovers with a long tail, whose effects were in equal parts physical and psychological.
And this friend is still in his 30s.
But if it’s purely a getting older thing, how could so many of the baby boomers in my life be such lushes? Many 70-year-olds I know can polish off a bottle of wine at lunch, some G&Ts in the late afternoon, more wine for dinner and get up early the following morning looking unfairly refreshed. How do they not just DIE in the night? Are their organs pickled and preserved? Why are they not droning on about hangovers?
Like my Monday friend with the Friday night hangover, I began to wonder if the two or three drinks were worth the pain, the anxiety and moodiness the following day and the foggy half sleep, sweaty and frantic with dreams. Increasingly the answer is no. To get nine hours of deep sleep has become like its own sort of drug experience – waking to feel empowered, invincible, fresh! As if I can handle anything. There’s nothing like it! Perhaps I am addicted to sleep!!!
A friend who recently turned 40 has also developed a sudden alcohol intolerance. “We need to find something new,” she said. I’m in her back garden drinking an Aldi light beer (four of these is the equivalent of a glass of wine).
“So I’ve been thinking … Nangs.”
“Nangs? What? What are they?”
She struggles to explain them properly – but young people are doing them? They sound like things you buy … at a supermarket? And you inhale them? In a park? You get high?
I got a sudden flash of Year 10 – people spraying Impulse deodorant into a plastic bag and then putting the bag over their head to get a mild, nauseous buzz.
“The park is full of empty nangs when I go for a run in the morning – people must be out there having nang parties,” she says, with what sounds like envy.
I know what she’s talking about now. I too have seen a lot of cylinders lying around the beach and presumed they were left behind from a particularly hectic children’s birthday party.
Apart from the absurdity of trying to get high from whipped cream canisters, the canisters themselves are single use. “It’s terrible for the environment,” I tell her. “And it will look ridiculous, like middle-aged people making a TikTok. We can’t do nangs. What if one of us had a nang overdose? I mean – is that even a thing?”
“You can’t overdose. It’s just a gas,” said my friend (though using nangs is not without health risks).
“Anyway – everyone needs a laugh – we’re in the middle of a pandemic.”
We run through the other options available for people whose alcohol tolerance has dropped through the floor, such as weed or Xanax. But in the end, we decide to split a Storm light beer.
