ALCOHOL - ONE
Even before I started to write about alcohol, I guessed that it would take more than a single blogpost. Here, before I start, I would like to pause for a moment to remember all of the thousands of victims of alcohol. You may have known some of those people. They died in car accidents, fights, suicidal leaps, drunken rages, tragic domestic accidents and mostly they died in hospital beds of alcohol-related conditions like liver disease, pancreatic cancer, obesity, strokes, weakening of the immune system, internal bleeding and so on.
Yes, let us remember them for there are no stone memorials nor special remembrance days.
Just as an example - one young man I knew got tanked up just before Christmastime many years ago. Snow was beginning to fall and the pavements were icy. A taxi dropped him off on the estate where he lived. Being drunk, it seems that he went up the wrong passageway between houses and upon realising his error he decided to cross the low wire fence between the two houses. It was a fatal mistake because he tripped or slipped over the wire and banged his head on their concrete coal bunker. He was not found until the sun had risen - lying outside his back door as dead as his ancestors. Much of what had happened was written in the snow. I believe he was nineteen or maybe twenty.
My parents were never big drinkers. My father hardly ever went in one of the two village pubs and the only alcohol we ever had in the house always seemed to be connected with Christmastime. Between Christmases it would sit in the little glass-fronted drinks cupboard untouched. And there was never any wine on the table at mealtimes. Besides, back then wine drinking seemed to be the preserve of the rich and powerful and it was hard to locate.
Sometimes when I walked past the vents of "The Hare and Hounds" after playing football up on the village playing-field, I would smell a repulsive odour of stale beer mingled with cigarette smoke. It was horrible and spoke of a mysterious adult world to which I did not belong. In those days children never went in pubs.
The first time I got drunk I was eight years old. Our parents had driven off to the nearby town of Beverley to do some shopping leaving me and my three brothers behind. I can't remember where Paul and Robin had gone but there was only me and my youngest brother Simon in the house. He would have been six at the time.
Some bottles of "Babycham" were sitting in the drinks cupboard. We probably didn't even know it was alcoholic. It was fizzy and sweet like non-alcoholic "pop". We removed the bottle tops and guzzled the "genuine champagne perry". I think we consumed four bottles - maybe six and when our parents returned we were giggling and swaying around the kitchen - as pissed as delegates at a Tory party conference. My mother often laughed about that scene and confided in me that she blamed herself for what had happened. That's why we weren't really scolded.
I am well aware that three regular "Yorkshire Pudding" visitors have lost loved ones to alcohol. It's not just something you just read about in newspapers or witness in hard-hitting TV documentaries. It can creep into anybody's life and wreak havoc before the final heartbreak. The name on the bottle is "Harsh Reality".
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/DNegMZ6
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