It is usually at about a week into any experiment in living that I ask myself whether it is all worth it. After those first heady days — the clarity of sobriety, the serotonin boost of gymgoing — the reality hits you: nothing has changed. You may have cleaned up your cell, but you’re still imprisoned for life. Melancholy grips you and you think what a waste of time all those good intentions were. Why not just follow your instincts and pour yourself a small glass of Talisker?
But no. If there’s one thing I know about my instincts it is that they don’t always act in my best interests. It reminds me of the murderer who said to Theodore Dalrymple: “I had to kill her doctor, or I don’t know what I would have done.” You have to distract the instinct until it subsides, not indulge it. Last night I did this by drinking a cup of camomile tea and Look Who’s Talking, a combination that made me deliriously happy for some unknown reason.
Do you know that line about non-drinkers, about how when they wake up that is as good as they are going to feel all day? It is supposed to make you think that alcohol elevates your dull workaday consciousness, but it just reminds me of how disorientated I feel in the morning after a night of booze. That and the fact that I can change my conscious experience without drink.