Sunday July 1 - Halfway To Paradise

My name's Will and I'm a social alcoholic. It's been SIX MONTHS and 21 hours since my last drink.

So, I'm halfway there. Six months of needless, self-imposed misery down, six months to go. Only another 182 days - or 4,368 hours - of wasted fun and social isolation left. Er, woo-hoo...I think.

I feel like the marathon runner who reaches the 13-mile mark and allows himself a brief moment of elation. Then remembers he now has to run another 13 agonising miles on aching feet, swollen knees, burning lungs and the very real prospect of coming face to face with Claire Balding.

Despite this residual cup-half-empty feeling, I did intend to treat this weekend as a celebration. So, naturally, God helped to facilitate the party by flooding the country with torrential rain, allowing the cops to discover an Al-Qaida bomb factory some 50 metres from my home (well, a house was raided by anti-terror police, which is nearly the same thing), and striking me down with a rather nasty stomach bug. I won't go into details but let's just say that, like my Jihadist neighbour, I felt like I was going to 'explode' at any minute.

I should really have stayed in bed on Saturday to recover, but I was keen to go out - not only to mark my six-month achievement but also to bid farewell to smoking in pubs. Although not a smoker now, I've enjoyed many a beer-and-cig combination over the years, and I do feel slightly sad that the classic smokey boozer has been killed off by the Nanny state. It's like losing a mate. OK, a mate who robbed you blind and gave you cancer, but still a mate.

Graham and Gregg were also determined to give legal smoking a proper send-off. They thought long and hard about the options, and decided the best plan was to sit in several dingey pubs and chain smoke. Oh yes, and drink copious amounts of lager. Well, it's what he would have wanted.

We stared out in Monro's, on Duke Street, at around 5pm, and moved on to the Jacarana, on Slater Street, from 6-8pm. I've never been that keen on the Jac, but I have to say that sitting at a window table and watching the Saturday night momentum slowly build outside was ideal for me. I could listen to Gregg and Graham's increasingly drunken ramblings, then zone out for a while and watch hen parties of extremely fat women try to run across wet cobbles in high heels. Brilliant.

To be fair to G and G, they did provide a lot of amusement for me throughout the night. Perhaps the imminent somoking ban was lending an end-of-term feel to the occasion, but they became a pair of comedy drunks. I won't recount all the japery but my favourite moment was watching the pair of them get extremely excited at recognising a bloke, Adam Mulcaster, in Alma de Santiago (nee Dovedale Towers) who used to play in a rival football team in their Sunday league some three years ago.
Both of them were hanging over a balcony, screaming "Mulcaster! Mulcaster! MULCASTER!" until the bemused chap - who was apparently trying to enjoy a quiet night out with his lady - eventually looked up and failed to recognise either of them.
Gregg, looking slightly crestfallen, pointed at himself and Graham and shouted their team name: "Inter Me Nan".

Ah, you can change a pub's name and push up prices all you like, but you can't buy class.

It's weird that even after spending the last six months watching my mates turn into dribbling, gibbering buffoons while on the lash, I still want to join them. But I really do.

Ho hum. Only six months to go.