And then you notice how the reminiscences about drink have changed. Once, a few years back, they were all happy stories about getting really blasted and taking fire extinguishers off walls and having massive hangovers and forgetting people's names and getting sick in taxis on the way home. But if you drink with alcoholics, they're different.
"I had three blackouts this week. I think I might check back into the Mental."
"I lay down on the road last night because I wanted to see if the cars would go ahead and kill me."
"Remember the time you puked all that blood all over the place and we had to bring you to the hospital to get pumped out."
"I had part of my intestine cut out last week because it was so damaged."
"I couldn't eat that fry, I thought the food was going to attack me."
"I can't settle. Just leave me alone the lot of ye. I can't ****ing settle. Stop looking at me."
"Has anyone got any of those ****ing anti-depressants, I'm having a bad morning?"
And so on. And so forth. Even if sometimes the stories have their own crazed logic.
"I got some of these anti-depressants and I asked the doc how many I should take. He said one a day but I was feeling desperate so I took six. I woke up in the bath with a shovel in me hand."
You just get a bit dissociated. I went to a party in London once which was so swish that you got thrown out if your name wasn't Guy or Miranda. Drunkenness does a better job on your self-image than if you'd hired Saatchi and Saatchi for a multimillion pound campaign to tell you how great you are. I was chatting up a woman whose laugh made her sound an attractive each-way bet for the Epsom Derby when I decided I'd go and refuel both of us with wine. When I arrived back, I continued our conversation for about 15 minutes until I was told "I'm very sorry. But the woman you were talking to is standing on the other side of the room."
The English. They're very polite. I'VE done dope, speed, E, acid, mushrooms, jellies and tablets which have been prescribed for anything ranging from backache to period pain. (OK, only some of them worked but I've steered clear of Corega-Tab denture cleaners and Bob Martin dog worming pills and some people haven't.) And none of them have had the effect drink has on me. For good or evil. Mainly for evil.
Like most Irish teenagers, I was subjected to a Drug Education Programme when in secondary school . . .
I went to school in Boyle, Co Roscommon. I'm from Gurteen, Co Sligo. The guys who sat beside me were from places like Frenchpark, Castlebaldwin, Geevagh and Corrigeenroe. Heroin addiction wasn't really a serious problem in Frenchpark. And they never really got into "smoking the dragon", as a well-meaning religion teacher of ours used call it in Corrigeenroe. I might be wrong, but I doubt if the number of heroin addicts who once attended school in Boyle is massive. The number of alcoholics would be a different story.
So there we were wasting our time going on about a drug which most of us would never be offered, before going out that night to get stuck into one which some of us, at least, were destined to have problems with. Strange one. Gurteen is no better or worse than any other village in the country, but drink has been responsible for an amount of suicides, deaths, mental illness, violence and marriage break-up that's fairly frightening. Drink, to put it plainly, is the heroin of rural Ireland.
And no, I'm not saying you should prohibit it or stop people enjoying their pints just because some people can't handle it and will eventually die way before their time because of it. But then I don't think you should ban E because some people have died because of it. What people put into their own bodies is their own business. That's my line. But how do you square the fact that the National Vintners' Association recently announced that they were going to help the Gardaí to stamp out drugs in rural Ireland with the fact that they've been shovelling beer into alcoholics for years? Drugs in rural Ireland generally means a few young fellas smoking dope. It might even be better for them in the long run.
In John McGahern's short story Crossing The Line, an old alcoholic teacher explains to a younger teacher: "During the times I don't drink, I read far more and feel better in every way. Unfortunately, drink's very pleasant."
And that's the problem with it. Because I can still go into Harry's Bar, where they have the cheapest drink in Sligo at half-ten on the morning of a game and have a couple of pints there. And go across the road to McLoughlins with its long wooden bar and then to Hargadons which is a maze of snugs lit by a strange blue light when the sun shines and head up to The Stables or McGarrigles and then to Carrs and then to Harloes before the match and afterwards hit The Arches or Shoot The Crows, which was once The Opera House but is now full of hippies and motorbikers and too loud Miles Davis music and has a new stained-glass window at the front every week.
And maybe go to the club where you throw stones up at the window to get let in late and the same two lads in Dunnes Stores sweaters seem to have been playing the same game of pool for the last 10 years and you usually meet earnest young females vaguely connected with the arts who are the same the world over because when they invite you back to their flat for a few cans there is a poster of Bob Marley in the jacks and probably some amusing poster vaguely connected with cannabis and a poster for some gig which when you ask them about it they say they weren't at but their friend who has now gone to America was and there are empty wine bottles in the kitchen covered with red wax at the side and short stubs of candles stuck in the top of them and a guitar lying behind the door as well as dishes with traces of something pasta-like in the sink and books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter - always Angela Carter - and A Suitable Boy well I started it and I enjoyed it but I never got around to finishing it on a coffee table and while you're there and listening to Achtung Baby and calculating how many cans are left and saying yes, I went Inter-railing too and waiting for the neighbours to start banging on the wall and reading the little Post-Its asking anyone who makes a phone-call to enter it in the book and people to leave the kitchen tidy as we all have to live here and it doesn't take much of an effort, it strikes you that it's great.
Drink is great. It is. While you're at it. That's the problem.
There's Only One Red Army by Eamonn Sweeney is published by New Island Books (£7.99)
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