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Jeremy Clarke

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Jeremy reports on his Low Life

I can go for fortnight without a drink — three weeks at a push. After that I begin to feel disconnected. I try to ignore the feeling, hoping it’s a symptom of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the onset of a cold, or overdoing it at the gym. But it persists and, after several days, changes into a consuming, impotent rage, at which point the penny drops and I know that it’s time for a drink. And then comes that tremendous, slightly nerve-wracking moment when I present myself again at my favourite bar, reacquaint myself with the lovely young ladies loitering behind it and settle in for an evening of self-medication.

The rage subsides about three quarters of the way down the first pint of lager. By the time I’ve seen the bottom of the second glass, the buttoned-up old misanthrope of the past few weeks is gone and I’m a human being again and back in the swim. I talk to this one and then that one, then to those people over there. And soon I’m genially greeting anyone who catches my eye, whether I know them or not. My sober view is that the world is a ship of fools. Two pints of lager and I’m back on the poop deck, spray on my cheek, wind in my hair, happy to listen with sympathy, energy and imagination to the succession of unhappy monologues that one is inevitably subjected to in this particular pub, which is full of New Age gurus and druggies.

But I’m a good listener. What makes a good listener? A perception either that you are a servant or that you are a spectator and owe it to the committed to let them do the talking. When I trained to be a psychiatric nurse and mingled with those who were committed under the Mental Health Act, desperate patients on the admission wards would sometimes form an orderly queue to talk to me, once they’d noticed I was a listener. It must be awful to go mad and suddenly no one wants to listen.

Last week’s bout of self-medication was fairly typical — instantaneous mental equilibrium, followed by a succession of people singing their same old songs to me — except that my crisis this month coincided with the full moon. The pub in the nearest market town is a dingy affair, though after weeks at home the string of multicoloured lights on the wall-mounted jukebox struck me as glamorous. I stood at the bar and drank alone until fully restored, and then I was open for business, as it were.

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