This doesn’t bother me as much as say, knitting or reading. It’s mildly embarrassing but, I am happy to live with it.
If drinking alcohol was boxing, then I would be light-flyweight, at best. Generally speaking, I can take one glass of wine, or one gin and tonic, and that’s it. A second drink would see me slide under the table, and out for the count. A third drink would probably warrant an ambulance call.
Even with a single G&T or a glass of wine, I have to drink a prodigious amount of water before going to bed otherwise, I wake up with a shocking headache. This laughable level of alcohol tolerance is almost homeopathic in comparison with the average person’s intake of alcohol and it begs the question: why bother drinking at all? A very good question. The answer is simple: I really like the taste of G&T and if chosen well, I enjoy a glass of dry white wine.
Sitting on the sidelines of a world that drinks more than I do, I am sometimes impressed, sometimes amazed but often shocked by people’s capacity to consume alcohol in quantities that vary from: ‘oh my, that’s impressive’ to ‘How the hell are you even still alive’ kind of thoughts I experience. What I could never get over is seeing people drink champagne in airport lounges and on flights, as early as 7:00 am! I find water intoxicating at that time of day.
At university, I shared accommodations with a Saudi and then a Sudanese. They were lovely chaps most of the time. However, when night or weekend descended, the Saudi chap liked beer and the Sudanese liked mostly whiskey, but they would drink paint stripper if they had to. They would start drinking early evening and finish when the alcohol ran out. Their drinking can only be described as ‘industrial scale’. And then there is me, nursing a single glass of something while they gradually descended into oblivion and on the way there, they would go through a number of anti-social phases, the most alarming of which is a belligerent attitude towards me, but never seriously.
I guess one advantage to being a light-weight drinker is there will be no danger in me becoming an alcoholic. Still, one of my all-time favourite opera arias is ‘The Drinking Song’ from La Traviata, which celebrates boozing and partying. Weird, isn’t it?
