The real reason I don’t drink

00:00 05:23

Damian Thompson has narrated this article for you to listen to.

It’s been 30 years this month since I last touched alcohol and I still can’t face the prospect of a social event without drinking.

Other people drinking, that is. I’m terrified by the thought of going back on the sauce again, but that doesn’t mean I want to hang around with teetotallers who’ve never had to apologise after a party or suffered an apocalyptic hangover.

One of the leitmotifs of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time is that you can’t trust teetotallers. They’re control freaks who love seeing other people make fools of themselves. They spend the whole evening gathering ammunition. The slimy Kenneth Widmerpool barely drinks, of course.

Or they’re sex-obsessed. I can think of one populist politician and one middle-ranking celeb who never turn down a party invitation but just ‘don’t like the taste of alcohol’. That’s because they prefer the taste of something else. God forbid they should miss the opportunity to corner the teenage intern because they’re draining a glass.

I make an exception for the non-drinkers called Pioneers, though it’s been decades since I ran into one. They’re Catholics who abstain from alcohol as a gesture of their devotion to the Sacred Heart. Or something like that. I remember them as pious but gregarious Irishmen, a vanishing breed in today’s prickly, sanctimonious republic.

One of the teaching brothers at my school was a Pioneer. Brother Athanasius, known as ‘Beef’, was always invited to sixth-form parties. Never having tasted whisky, he had no idea how strong it was and dispensed it like holy water. At Christmas he’d reach into one of the layers of his black habit and produce a bottle of poitín, an illegally brewed Irish potato spirit that we called ‘potcheen’ in the days when Anglicised spellings were permitted.