Alcophrenicism / working pub lunches

When I was but a student, running around partaking in student vices, I always wondered what the big fuss was about pub lunches. When you are a student, you can make a decision to go to the pub whenevever the hell you want and if you stay there all afternoon then no-one's fussed. This suited me down to the ground as, assuming people split to pub or club, I am a pub man. Most of the best nights seem to have been spontaneously started by wandering to town at 11:40(am) and, well, getting on it.

However...

This casual description of the time you go to the pub turns in to a phenomenon once you start working full time in the city or, at the very least, in walking distance of a decent pub that serves food. Working in London, I think it's fair to say that there are one or two are within walking distance.

Suddenly, the pub lunch becomes massive. It becomes the kind of event that shapes your day, perhaps your week. Even on the simplest level, you go out for a few beers and as long as your superiors don't ask anything too taxing, your afternoon goes a lot quicker as, has probably been scientifically proven but not certainly, a drunk minute goes quicker than a sober minute. You're not drunk so hopefully you won't lose hours at a time but the 300 minutes between 2 and 7 will certainly seem much more like the 18,000 seconds it is. An afternoon that looked about as interesting as Bolton Blackburn or a thorough examination on the finer points of cress suddenly becomes more exciting as everything tends to after a couple of pints.

Now, don't get me wrong, I do like a drink. I'm not going to spurt some bravado about how much I can drink and whether I can do thirteen pints in 3 hours and you can't and if you reckon you can, go for it, let's have a contest, glug-glug, I've won cos your body has caved to it's natural reaction and dispelled the poison from your system while mine is stubborn enbough to keep it, whoooargghh! That sort of drinking talk really makes as much sense as writing a sentence as though it was a direct but poorly recorded monologue. I can't stick people who seem to judge the quality of their night in numbers of drinks. What I can do, though, is look at my consumption in a rational way. Basically, you can test your alcohol tolerance as you would in any sport. Test yourself against your peers and if the goalposts are kept still, albeit a little wobbly, you know how much you can drink. From such contests, ridiculous as they may be, I know I can (or could) drink a lot but also that there are plenty better. The whole point of this paragraph was to say that I can drink a bit but I seem to have rambled my way through some thick fern, over some fallen trees and eventually arrived at somewhere I could have walked to in minutes.

To expand that, I can drink a little bit. As soon as you start drinking in the day though, and when you know you have to return to a situation where you have to work, each pint is almost as good as two. The most I have done in a lunch break is three. On a normal night out, three would be a solid enough start but you wouldn't notice the effect. When you've had three pints at work, man, that's a killer. Drunken eyes certainly weren't designed for staring at one spot for so long, drunken legs weren't designed for sitting still for so long and drunken vocal chords/brains weren't designed for not blurting out everything you feel like saying for so long. In short, it's like having a drunken friend at work that you have to keep control of for the rest of the day or else you get your P45.

I didn't even mean to head this way but perhaps the pub lunch has fuelled this progression towards my feeling that when you get drunk, it is almost like having an alter-ego who steps in to the situation. Characteristics of most people seem to change so vastly when people have had a few beers that they might as well be an alcohol fuelled schizophrenic. An alcophrenic if you like. In fact, that's my phrase now. Everyone has an alcophrenic side but it varies in terms of its severity. The ultimate alcophrenic is one who is quiet as a mouse when they are sober but becomes an untamed lion when they are out and, frankly, are an unexpected liability to your night out. I won't name names. In my experience of how much I personally change, I don't think I am that much of an alcophrenic. I seem to maintain what I'm happy as being virtuous when I've had a few drinks so I don't have to feel shame at what I've done the night before per se. I have felt that sort of shame but I've also been ashamed of sober acts so it would be unfair to chastise one state of mind over another.

Damn. In one of my many intermissions I have taken whilst writing this, I have discovered that the suffix phrenic actually means 'of the mind' whislt Alco is a commonly used late twentieth century prefix denoting alcohol (ok, that much was more common knowledge). As a result, my new word means alcoholic mind which, whilst partly true, is also not at all what I meant. Fuck it, I'm going to pray on ignorance and use it anyway as though it means what I want. Expect to see it in the urban dictionary.

In case anyone is unsure, I went to the pub for lunch today. Apologies for the lower case 'i's. I tried to correct as many as possible.

****Just for the record, Alcohol is derived from Al-Kuhl (arabic), a powder for painting the eyelids. Apparently we found other uses for it. Don't take the gamble on mascara in desperate times, mind.****