High Sobriety (2 page)

The lights turn green and I turn left. I've only travelled a few metres when another wave threatens to run me off the road. I pull over into a side street, head between my legs, willing myself to keep it together. ‘You can do this, Starkers,' I incant, breathing slow and hard, in through my nose and out through my mouth, as I first learned when I was a petrified 16-year-old — half a lifetime ago.

I compose myself enough to continue the short drive. The panic seems to subside marginally when I'm moving; stationary, everything turns to custard. At the drive-through, I pray for a swift getaway. It's not my day. The man in the Ford Falcon in front is ordering enough for a footy team. Fuck him and his four Quarter Pounders, six Big Macs, and three Happy Meals! Resting my forehead on the steering wheel, I manage a wry smile, wondering if Fev's morning-after is filled with similar dramas. Anxiety doesn't like this; it kicks me up the rear end with another surge of panic. Cars are backing up behind me — more New Year's Eve casualties in search of just the right combination of fat, salt, and sugar to ease their pain.

Finally, the hungriest man in Melbourne finishes his order. When it's my turn, I bristle at the sound of my voice. It's distant and disembodied. The girl who takes my money is apprehensive. I wasn't game enough to look in the mirror before I left the house, but I suspect it isn't pretty.

Back home, I curl up on the couch, munching my foul-smelling meal like a rat gnawing on a bone. Still the panic comes, but the waves begin to lap more gently as exhaustion kicks in. I crawl back into bed around 9.00 p.m., the first day of a new year a complete write-off. I'm broken. No party is worth this much pain.

Before

FOR MONTHS, I'VE
been thinking about taking a break from alcohol. When I say ‘thinking about it', I mean toying with the idea for a few minutes in the depths of a raging hangover, before dismissing it as an exercise in planned insanity. But the thought hasn't gone away. Each new morning-after brings another set of what-ifs. What if the Monday-morning condition I've come to think of as ‘wee bit fuzzy brain' is something more sinister? What if those moments where I can't articulate the words that seem to be bogged in a quagmire somewhere between my mind and my mouth are a warning that shit-faced shenanigans can't be sustained as a lifetime sport? Is my body about to express its protest at two decades' worth of abuse by rebelling against me in a way that can't be cleansed with a Sunday-afternoon sleep-in?

My hangovers are no longer carefree retreats under a doona with the weekend papers. They've become fraught with anxiety, pain, and a hint of guilt — the root of which I can't quite place. It pisses me off. All I want to do is wallow in my morning-after, park my arse on the couch, and eat a packet of Tim Tams in front of
The
Biggest Loser
. But the thoughts won't let me rest; they niggle and taunt. The loudest and most persistent reminds me with annoying frequency that my life can be summed up in two words: working and drinking. When I speak to my parents in Scotland and they ask what's new, these are the things that most readily come to mind. I don't drink alone, and rarely at home. But socially, I can't remember the last time I turned down a beer or a glass of wine.

I'm not unique; I'm surrounded by people who drink in exactly the same way. I grew up in a country devoted to boozing, and I moved to a nation similarly enamoured with it. Just like Scotland, Australia's default bonding-ritual is drinking. We use it to celebrate, commiserate, and commemorate. Getting plastered is a rite of passage for teenagers, and it's also the accepted and expected way to mark any major celebration. Drinking is how we farewell the dead and welcome the newly arrived; we drink at the footy, we drink with workmates, we drink on public holidays and on weekends. Booze is the nation's social lifeblood.

Against this backdrop, quitting seems impossible. I cannot and do not want to imagine a life without alcohol. If I have to pick one word to describe what it might be like, it would simply be ‘boring'. The drawbacks of not drinking far outweigh the unknown, and in no way guaranteed, advantages of abstinence; if I ditch alcohol I'll be casting myself adrift into the social wilderness, a place from which there might be no return. Most of the non-drinkers I know are either pregnant or pensioners. As I'm neither, I've opted to keep drinking until whichever of those fates befalls me first.

But still, the niggling thoughts prevail. What would it take for me to stop drinking? Why does the idea of doing so scare the bejesus out of me?

Those thoughts were first planted in my mind almost a year ago, after meeting Chris Raine. This party-hardened young advertising professional from Queensland's Sunshine Coast gave up drinking for a year — partly as a social experiment and partly because his friends told him he couldn't — and documented the experience on a blog,
Hello Sunday Morning
. His insights into his relationship with alcohol inspired some of his friends to follow suit. Soon the site became home to a community of those taking a break from drinking. When I looked at it, I was struck by the potential of what he'd started. Here was a network of young people all enjoying life and achieving their goals, simply by cutting out booze for three, six, or 12 months, and blogging about their experiences. This public commitment was the key to the movement's success, helping to keep people accountable, and therefore boosting their chances of making the distance. Posting links to their blogs on Twitter and Facebook had a ripple effect, encouraging others in each writer's social network to take up the challenge.

There were fewer than 50 bloggers when I first visited the
Hello Sunday Morning
website, but the unflinching honesty in their posts was powerful. These were young people, largely in their twenties, drowning in a culture that implored them to drink at every juncture. What I found disarming was how dissatisfied they were with the culture they'd inherited — but they knew no other way. They drank to fit in; they drank for confidence; they drank to deal with difficult emotions. They drank because it would be social suicide not to. I realised that in all of the alcohol stories I'd written, I hadn't come close to capturing what Chris had harnessed. He'd figured out what politicians, journalists, and health experts had failed to: why young people from Cairns to Castlemaine were regularly drinking themselves into oblivion.

Public-health experts have been telling me for years that, if we are to have a chance of reducing the enormous medical, social, and economic burden of alcohol misuse, we first have to change Australia's entrenched binge-drinking culture. We can no longer debate that there is a problem. Every week, four Australians under the age of 25 die, and 60 teenagers are hospitalised, due to alcohol-related injuries. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of young people treated for alcohol-related brain damage grew five-fold.

But working out how to reach these drinkers has proved a tricky proposition. Governments have thrown money at campaigns demonising booze, and warning young people that drinking will see them arrested, maimed, raped, or killed. The testimonies of Chris and his fellow bloggers reveal that this approach has left young people feeling patronised and alienated. It's given them no incentive to change their drinking habits, and may well have encouraged them to veer in the opposite direction in protest. While I'd be flattering myself to think I'm in the youth demographic these campaigns have been trying to reach, I've been equally turned off by messages which imply that drinking is inherently dangerous and unpleasant, when my own experiences tell quite a different story. I could see how what Chris had come up with might well be the road map to reach a disillusioned generation.

When I first interviewed him over the phone, where he spoke to me from his Caloundra home, I was astonished by his level of insight into the complex connections that Aussies have with alcohol. His ability to articulate his own motivations for drinking was even more impressive, especially for someone who was just 23. I remember wondering where I'd be now if I'd had that degree of clarity about my own relationship with alcohol at his age.

In early 2010, Chris and I met in person. Relentlessly upbeat and energetic, he had a passion for his work that coursed through him so violently he was practically luminous. Here was a man on a mission — to change our drinking culture and to unlock what he believed to be Australia's greatest untapped resource: Sunday mornings. And his pitch was convincing. ‘We live in a country where we're hung-over for a seventh of our lives. If you binge drink for two nights a week between the ages of 18 and 28, you'll have drunk for 10,000 hours. We're creating a culture of drinking experts,' he told me. ‘The cost of that expertise is 3000 people a year dying from alcohol misuse. That's 57 Australians every single week.' Chris reckoned that three months off the booze was the minimum time it took to fundamentally shift a person's relationship with alcohol.

I admired what he was trying to achieve, but I was also a little suspicious. Was
Hello Sunday Morning
a modern-day temperance movement? A slick front for God-bothering puritans?

But there was something about him. On some level, even then, I knew that meeting Chris was a game-changer. I quizzed him on his year without booze. Didn't he get bored? How could he enjoy parties without a few beers? A whole year? Seriously? I accused him of being a lentil-loving tree hugger on a mission to change the world one booze-ravaged soul at a time. He would offer only a chuckle and the suggestion that I should try it for myself if I wanted to find out how it worked.

Gradually, as my doubts about Chris dissipated, I could see what I really doubted — my ability to forgo alcohol for what seemed like a preposterously long period. I'd given up booze before: prior to meeting Chris, I'd just finished Febfast, in which participants give up drinking during February to raise money for young people with drug and alcohol problems. But it was a white-knuckle ride. I put life on hold, waiting out my booze ban like a footballer pacing the sidelines, desperate to get back in the game. I struggled to imagine how, if I removed alcohol for an even longer period, life could be anything short of two-dimensional. Don't the best nights out usually happen after a skinful? Hedonism rarely springs from soda water. I had more faith in the transcending power of beer than I did in myself.

The hangovers continued after meeting Chris, and the what-ifs lobbed into my mind with increasing regularity. I did my best to ignore them. That's not easy when you spend your working life writing about the health consequences of a society sickening itself on a noxious diet of booze, fags, and fast food — the public-health world's axis of evil. Health reporting can induce the sort of hypochondria that would make Woody Allen proud. But some health messages I chose to ignore; I had only stubbed my last cigarette out a couple of years before. It had taken several weeks of waking up in the middle of the night with coughing fits that made my abdominal muscles ache before I finally called it a day. Sometimes the only way you can change is when the future slaps you in the face so hard it leaves a handprint on your cheek.

But smoking's not like drinking. These days, it's almost more socially acceptable to marry your cousin than to light up in a public place. With alcohol, the opposite is true. If you want to be a social pariah, try refusing a drink in an Australian pub at six o'clock on a Friday evening. I've had no doomsday warning with booze — and even if there had been one, I've mastered the art of selective hearing. I paid scant attention to the implications of a story I wrote about research which warned that as little as eight drinks a week could shrink the size of your brain. But a study that found regular drinkers have above-average happiness and wellbeing scores, while non-drinkers are the most miserable, was digested in great detail and posted on my Facebook page.

For me, being drunk was not a fast track to ill health and calamity. I was binge drinking before the phrase was even invented, and so were most of my friends. We're all still alive and healthy. We haven't been in car accidents, been assaulted, or assaulted someone else. We haven't woken up in hospitals, contracted communicable diseases, lost jobs, committed crimes (barring crimes against music in karaoke bars), ruined relationships, or gambled away our life savings on the pokies as a result of our drinking. For the most part, being drunk is fun for us. It brings texture to our lives, and leads to new friendships, dancing, romance, sex, belly laughs, and bonding. The stories I write for my newspaper about alcohol-induced carnage simply don't resonate with my own experiences. The soaring rates of alcohol-related injuries and liver disease, the brain-damaged women, and their kids being born with foetal alcohol syndrome — I might as well be writing about life on another planet.

Reporting on alcohol might have become the defining issue of my journalistic career, but I merely convey facts. I can't comfortably be likened to the politician who preaches family values while secretly committing acts of depravity with leather-clad call girls. In my mind, I'm no more obliged to drink responsibly than the transport reporter is obliged to ride his bike to work to ease Melbourne's traffic congestion.

Still, I have to admit that my two worlds sometimes collide. A year or so into my coverage of Australia's binge-drinking epidemic, I had a boozy Saturday-night dinner party with some girlfriends and got to bed around 2.30 a.m., waking up, with a scratchy throat and a sore head, around six hours later to go to work. I was hoping for a quiet Sunday shift, with something light and inoffensive that would glide its way inconspicuously onto page 12 — perhaps a colour piece on a charity fun-run, or a discussion on the best treatments for baldness. Instead, I learned that overnight the federal government had announced that taxes on pre-mixed spirits, colloquially known as ‘alcopops', would be raised by 70 per cent, effective immediately. As I was the resident expert on all things binge drinking, and alcopops had been blamed for turning kids into drunken delinquents, I had approximately five hours to write a 1500-word feature on the ramifications of this war on lolly water.