I only drink at funerals now

A good colleague of mine went through a slightly harrowing experience giving up alcohol recently, and while I've been as encouraging as I could be, I didn't want to dwell on the fact that I don't drink anymore as well, because it was just so fucking easy to give up the booze.

Like way too many people, I coped with the stresses and confusions of young adulthood by getting absolutely fucking plastered at least three times a week. It was just a thing that you did with all your peers. It was fun, it loosened you up, and I could drink a fucking tonne of it.

I went through three special fold-out drinking chairs, and I knew what he best booze to price ratio in town was, without resorting to meths (it was a cheap bottle of port, for those in the back row). I walked 20 kilometres over farmland in the middle of the night, full of the sweet grossness of peach schnapps.

Man, I would get so fucked up and sit on the beach reading Michael Moorcock books and endless Invisibles comics. Twice I got way too emotional with a bottle of scrumpy and a Doctor Who New Adventure novel, that I had to crawl out of the sight of decent people. I climbed a small mountain in central Mongolia and drank a bottle of apple vodka and read Love and Rockets strips and felt fucking GREAT the next day.

It got messy, I destroyed an issue of Sandman with an almost unconscious vom, and tried to do the Withnail and I drinking game one New Years Eve and ended up in the back of an ambulance. I still feel really awful about the mean things I said, and that's just the ones I remember. I'm sorry everybody.

I danced really badly and it never fuckin' mattered, I made a fool of myself more often than I really should have, and I've thrown up in the gutter far too many times to count. I didn't get violent, because I'm not a violent person.

I drank less and less over the years, and haven't drank to the point of throwing up in more than a decade and now I haven't had a drink in three years and it's no big deal.

It was mainly for health reasons - guys I used to drink heavily with back in the 90s are now literally dying of liver failure and shit like that - and definitely also because I could not afford the energy of a hangover as a new father. (I never used to drink that much when we travelled for similar reasons.)

All my friends are good people and think it's fine. Peer pressure doesn't matter at my age, and they're all good cunts who don't do shit like that.

While it sounds like the most cliched country song ever, I only drink at funerals now. The only time I'll have a beer is out of respect for some dearly departed, and there's been a couple of those in the past few years. I guess there's always time for one last round, even when you say you've had enough.