Sobriety, Talking Bollocks and Kathy Burke

I once stayed sober for a whole five months. Oh yes I did. And it wasn’t too bad packing it in either. Granted, come day four or five, I got a bit snarly and had a tendency to bare my teeth at various humans. And my sleep went belly up too. But come day eight/ten (there or thereabouts) I woke up with a saintly glow around me, did a backward flip out of my pit, threw back the curtains and announced, “Hello new day! I’m ready for anything you throw at me!” And then I jogged downstairs to partake in a highly nutritious and flavoursome breakfast.

            It was really weird shit; my energy levels went through the roof, I developed a can-do approach, I began being nice to people (I distinctly recall smiling at a child-type thing on one occasion) and the whites of my eyes became white.

Fuck me! I'm sober!

            I even went to the pub and would smugly nurse a diet coke while everyone around me got their faces in the trough. Fools, I would think, as I eyed their drunken behaviour. How weak of them to need alcohol to have a good time. Look at me – look at the fun I’m having without alcohol.

            But therein lay the problem; I wasn’t. And that’s what did for me, in the end.

            Thing is, I like drinking: I like going to pubs (cos I can be a dead sociable fucker, me) and I like the act of having a drink and talking bollocks. I do bollocks very well. But not so well when I’m sober. And I do drinking very well. For starters, I don’t get morose and start snotting and wailing all over the gaff like some. No, give me a flagon of vodka and I’ll still be grinning like the village idiot at the end of the evening. Although (and it must be said) I can get a bit over excited sometimes and let myself down.

            So five months of sobriety came to a halt. My skin had never had it so good and pleaded with me to not go back to my old ways. No can do, I told it. I’ve been bored as arseholes.

Look at this dozy mare. She's been on the wagon for a fortnight and the

boredom's made her come over all queasy and howsyerfather.



            Sometimes I make a list up of famous people I’d like to get pissed with – a top ten, as it were. Graham Norton’s always up there, there or thereabouts. Him and Paul O’Grady. It’s hard to pick between the two (what with me being such an old fag hag and all), but what a scream a night out on the lash with either of those two would be. Then there’s that geezer who’s very wise about things, the dog whisperer – bet he’d be good value after a Bacardi Breezer. He fixes humans, wouldn’t you know?  And Derren Brown – now that would be different – he’s a real smart alec (although I’d have to keep an eye on my wristwatch/knickyknackynoos and vodka level to make sure he’s not surreptitiously tampering with them). Who else? Too many sportsmen to fit in a pub sadly, but Lawrence Dallaglio is a deffo and Jenny Pitman looks like she’d spin a good yarn after a yard of ale. Michael Caine and Robert De Niro are simply crying out to be my new bezzie drinking buddies, whilst the multi-talented Kathy Burke is obviously itching to have a snot and guffaw with me over a gutful.

            And you can’t do all that stuck indoors clutching your mineral water to yer knockers. No siree. You take my word for it, you're better off up the pub having a guzzle.

Whilst waiting for her real muckers to front up for a drinking session

of Biblical proportions, Kathy ruthlessly phones me to cancel our

pre-arranged quaff, citing a bout of the shits after a rogue curry...