This morning the Chief Medical Officer for England has come out and said that parents should never give ANY alcohol to children under the age of 15, to which my first reaction was 'good. more to go round for the rest of us then'. I then quickly had second thoughts and decided that perhaps this was a rather less than public spirited attitude and that maybe someone should devote some valuable blog space to a piece on the dangers of booze. I therefore considered my record in these matters and concluded that if there was a better person for the job they haven't drunk me under a table yet and therefore I am the ideal candidate.
I have always been what you might call an adventurous drinker in as much as as long as it is liquid and has an ABV on the label I have probably got pissed on it at some point. Guinness, bitter, falling down lager, cooking lager, decent cider, 99p 8.5 per cent kiss goodbye to your liver cider, red wine, white wine, rose wine, homemade 'guaranteed to have you talking to god on the great white telephone' wine, white rum, dark rum, spiced rum, brandy, bourbon and vodka have all at some stage passed my lips in quantities that go way beyond stupid.
And of course in the duration of this alcoholic odyssey I have done any number of silly things from snogging best mates girlfriends and budgies to failing to notice, until it was way too late, a garden feature as prominant as a fish pond. I have delivered less able booze buddies back to the bosom of their loved ones and gone straight back out and started again. I have woke up with hangovers so severe even my hair hurt and I have sat around any number of kitchen tables nursing cups of coffee and headaches you could photograph while 'friends' reminded me in graphic and grusome detail exactly what i got up to, and with who, the night before. And of course I have taken great delight in returning the favour when said friends have similarly dropped themselves in the shit.
The adventurous nature of my drinking hasn't even been limited to variety and quantity either. Oh sure I have got a little Oliver Twist in your usual places such as pubs and clubs but loony locations are what seperate the men from the boys in these matters. Two that spring not so easily to mind were the party half way down a cliff that we somehow managed to get a wheelchair bound mate both to and, more scarilly, back from, and a famous session sat in the awning of a metal framed tent in Paris watching a lightening storm. And of course in the aftermath of these disgraceful occurances I have woke up in my bed, others beds, on sofas, in tents, in a barn and on one memorable occasion on a table in a beer garden.
This was the evidence on which I based my assumption that I could be the most qualified person to write about the perils of alcohol, and believe me I fully intended to. until a mate dragged me into the pub at lunchtime and now I have no recolection of what I was going to say.