Passion of the Christ drinking games

Drinking, drinking alcohol to excess, to drunkenness and beyond, is wrong. It’s appalling - a pricey, commercialised and clichéd false sense of elation, a biological deception. It hits your health, your pocket, your life, friends and family. It has devastating and - bluntly - annoying effects for those around you, and on property. Except… despite all of these be all and end all, insoluble problems with drinking, alcohol, drunkenness, and alcoholism are rather like that adage about democracy being the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Alcohol is the worst form of happiness except all the others that have been tried, possibly. Democracy is here all the while it cannot be bettered, and the striving to get drunk and/or stay drunk is here until someone finds a way of guaranteeing the individual’s personal happiness and fulfilment - or even just their feeling real - in the world, financial system and society we live in.

Many other things about alcohol stink of course, such as when it’s used as a rape sedative, or as supposedly Dutch courage prior to fights, vandalism or whatever else people are otherwise ashamed to do sober, like getting their picture in tabloids that are obsessively affronted by Booze Britain drunks. There are also the stated positives, like the daily nip of something that allegedly gets people past 100, or a few drinks with friends in company - the atypical evening of drunkenness that is fun, harmless, and oddly wholesome for otherwise well rounded and fulfilled hard workers.

But I’m talking here about the type of drunkenness striven for by people who want to tear out of themselves in sober life; people who experience a pointless, humourless and ridiculous world inhabited by mindless people or cruel people, all governed by unsatisfying social norms that are followed or broken with equal hypocrisy; people who are utterly in despair in life, or else only ever slightly distracted from that feeling, and who find a better distraction in drink. That they assess things only as potential distractions shows the extent of how bad the world’s array of lifestyles look to them.

It might be easy to think that these people have got it wrong – the be all and end all again. Drinking can’t be classed as happiness; drinkers are losers. They should get a job/better job, have fun, know when they’ve had enough, bother to spend time with their family, or get a partner and start a family, etc. etc. For a drinker, these common sense suggestions sound like a joke alternative. They are in piebald contrast to their experience of sober misery and drunken elation, or at least numbness. Know when they’ve had enough? They know they can never have enough, either to satisfy or suppress the way they feel.

Suggesting the world’s career, familial, cultural and leisure possibilities to a drinker who can’t abide the world as they see it is like a scene in a light hearted drama where a clear-cut normal character has to listen to a geek extolling his or her banal pastime. Someone who tells a drinker that they are missing out on a catalogue of things does so with the same lack of self-consciousness as the caricature geek promoting the virtues of stamp collecting, railways or an encyclopaedic knowledge of anything that insecure writers imagine audiences won’t accept as normal. Both offer the dullest of carrots but present them as, and believe them to be, great. ‘Look, if you lay off the booze you can live in a house like mine and have a family like this. You could be happy.’ Heavy drinkers are a mirror for other people to reveal themselves in. As they pitch for a drinker’s sobriety people reveal their own meanings of life - what they consider as important and worthwhile in humanity.

I remember seeing cool for the first time – I mean seeing it and considering it, rather than letting the all-pervasive stuff go by unobserved. I think it was back in 2003-2004, and I was coming home from work on the train. It was a boy-to-teen who was, fittingly, teen drunk (minimum intake, maximum effect, parental taxi service, no hangover in the morning). He came out into the corridor where I was sitting, dialled a number on his phone and put his head out of the window (this was when trains used to have windows that opened, and manual doors). The young man’s coiffure (barnet) would have invited violent criticism if spotted in our fine country’s more unimaginatively masculine places. His studded belt - buckled six sizes too generous of course - was pulling his jeans down, which showed off his good-name-to-be-seen-in boxers. His drink-slow mouth was struggling with the encouraging words he was offering his friends, trying to further extend his night out. He kept pulling his t-shirt right around his torso as he thought of things to say.

During the journey home he must have called everyone he knew (who am I kidding? They reckon social media gives the average person about 200 contacts in their network. I wonder if they hurt, those iProduct lobotomies). However many of his friends, contacts, or impressive Top Trump networking stats he spoke to, he told them all the same thing: where he’d been, how much he’d drunk and all the crazy stuff that had happened. ‘Cool’ I thought then. I have less pleasant words for it now.

I don’t know, I might have changed my views towards the lowest common denominator of male cool and matching nights out, but I still have some crass love for those characters and drinkers with a more cult cool (only slightly more cult). Instead of the trendy shirted, wannabe entourage sharing a jug of watery cocktails in the chain club, I quickly switched to loving the spirits and real ale world of Keith Moon, Oliver Reed, Hunter Thompson and the like. But liking them for their boozing is still pretty unimaginative; there’s plenty out there who do, and we all sit around telling each other the same embellished anecdotes about them all. Related to this are your Withnail and I or Passion of the Christ drinking games.

Tolerance, endurance, capacity, resilience… impressive, but then I’ve always preferred the complexity of those who are willing to deal with the pleasures and pains of the submission that comes afterwards. It’s the impossibility of the drinker/writer (literature, journalism, music, art…) to separate the good from the bad, bad from the good in their testimony of alcoholism - surely that is more interesting than watching (or emulating) those chasing oblivion in the most notable way possible.