The Drunk Fairy

The signs have been there.

An email from a person I have not yet met asking if I'd been involved in any more "drunken shenanigans".

An afternoon phone call from my father that began with
"I'm not interrupting you at a pub am I?".

This conversational fragment:
"I don't always do stupid things when I'm drunk."
"You have a blog dedicated to the stupid things you do when drunk!" she replied, incredulously.
"It's not just about th....shit. It is."

And so it was that I came to realise that I have written with an alarming frequency of the antics my liver has been forced to endure. I feel as though I should apologise to it for this, and to you, dear reader, for what you have been put through. I started this blog with noble intentions, and have spiralled downward to the gutter. As such, I promise that my next few forthcoming posts shall not be about the terrible ruins that accursed elixir has reduced me to. Should I break this pledge, I promise that I shall compose a post entirely from the viewpoint of my liver and remind myself of why I need to cease chronicling the life of a seemingly functioning alcoholic.

That amnesty kicks in after today. For today I must regale you with tales of The Drunk Fairy..

It started with The Pear Tree. Well, more specifically, the not so gradual descent into madness did; that special kind of madness that alcohol fuels. An innocent beginning. It ended, as so often innocence does, with Opium. Opium always has been my tipping point. Sherlock Holmes, I am not. His intuitive investigative skills dwarf my pathetic inability to even find my....self. I should clarify, for the uninitiated, that The Pear Tree and Opium are the names of establishments that trade in the sale of liquid inebriants. And the monikers reflect their differing natures with sublime accuracy- The Pear Tree, famous for its beer garden, is quite light, bright and seems the type of place where life could grow and flourish. Opium underneath a bridge, in an area once famous for its squalid Irish tenements, is cheap, dark and dank in all the right places.

For precisely the above reasons it made sense that we would abandon The Pear Tree after a few pints, given that the weather was grotesque; we're talking rain to sink an ark, and wind to dislodge the gods. With two outsiders (capes and mutants abound in the 'burgh) for company, we took flight and made for the cheapest venue I could commit to thought. Opium is where the vodka lived in a manner of bliss alongside all of the beer. Transferring them to a new home within me managed to destroy the uneasy peace between them. Doom was my reward, yet neither I nor my associates knew so at that stage. I walked them to their residence for the night, taking care to point out a few sights as we moseyed. Then came the simple task of walking the roughly 20 minute path to my own front door, straight line through The Meadows.

At this point I put my transit (and life) in the hands of The Drunk Fairy. The Drunk Fairy is an entity not unlike that one so famously preoccupied with dentistry, only tasked with far more taxing trials- to act as a guide and protector of those under the spell of intoxicants. Caring solely for your survival, making that toothy fucker look every bit the unscrupulous prick it is. That same fairy that, lacking correct change to pay a £5 denture deposit to my young niece, instead had to dole out a tenner. Rightly served. Woken up in your bed with no recollection of how you made it home in one miraculous piece? Found that all of your priceless possessions have made it home with you? You better believe you didn't accomplish these goals under your own power.

Sadly, on this night, Poland had been eliminated from Euro 2012, and her Scottish based comunity were drowning their sorrows appropriately. The Drunk Fairy had its hands full. My need for safe-guarding was of lesser strength than their collective anguish. I was on my own. A wandering drunk in the night with only the darkness and the rain for company.

And my own words. That's right, I was muttering to myself as may a drunken lunatic....because that is what I was. And my obscenity laced one-man show only grew in volume as I began to realise that I had been walking for hours, maybe even days (dramatic licence) and was no closer to my destination. To be exact, I was growing further from it, and it was dawning on me that I had managed to get lost and end up right back where I started. This is what happens when mystical entities are not around to guide you home after a night of drunken delirium- you get lost walking a straight path. I whimpered audibly as despair sank in deeper. Taxi!

Better late than dead in a ditch, the fairy made a welcome appearance at this point. Coaching me through a vomit free journey to my door, up the stairs, and successfully climbing the ladder to my bed* without dying. Anything beyond that would have been a bonus. Sadly, much like many innocent bank employees around Christmas time, bonuses were not forthcoming.

* My bed is atop a ladder. It means I now sleep in what can be described as equal parts bed, obstacle course and the perfect metaphor for loneliness (it's more or less the top half of a bunk bed, without the bottom). So many cold and lonely nights wasted, clinging to the third rung, too frightened to ascend, descend or rotate counter clockwise....

Polish preoccupations had otherwise garnered the attentions of my alcoholic abetter to sufficient degree as to render the job incomplete. I may have woken up in my bed, and in full possession of all my goods and virtues. Alas, my phone was not granted such divine favour and fortune. It could not be revived; not waving, but drowning. And just two days to go before retirement....or rather the opposite. Just two days before I would have been able to finally use it on a regular basis again, as my Irish phone contract had run its course. At long last I had dreamed of being able to avail of all the services open to a smartphone owning person, rather than merely paying monthly costs for a shiny and expensive egg-timer. Yet now it had been rendered useless as anything other than a paper-weight. Bollocks! I TRUSTED YOU, DRUNK FAIRY!

Worse still was the resulting hangover. Once your sobriety returns, you're on your own. There is no all powerful deity to help you crawl from that chasm, the alcoholic's abyss. Three hours it took for me to work up the courage to attempt the climb down from my bed. It took the rest of a day spent crawling on hands and knees solely for the purposes of vomit venting to muster the strength of character necessary to clamber back up again.

And right then and there I made a pledge to myself:. A pledge that no more liquid death would pass my lips. I was going to stay sober, at all costs.

One week, one bottle of wine, a couple of whiskeys and several cans later I suspected I had not been entirely honest with myself. Still, it was a double birthday bonanza, and I am but a simple, easily corrupted man. Throw in a long distance shout out to Mongolia, and a John Williams medley sing-along as we walked from the Lebanese restaurant to the tiki bar and you've got yourself a recipe for an excellent night. Also, an opportunity for my body to fuck me over in typically extravagant fashion.

Attempting to imitate a flatmate being dragged across a road by his girlfriend as though a toddler being escorted by his mother was not, on the face of it, beyond me. "On the face of it"- exactly where the bottle of wine consumed at that juncture designed to put me.

My mind and body don't work well together. Putting the simple movement into action caused my legs and torso to have a conniption as they struggled to comprehend my mind's simple requests.

"Running? We're in danger....combat roll!"

Yet, on this night, The Drunk Fairy was poised. The Drunk Fairy had been primed by the previous week's chicanery. The Drunk Fairy was positioned to cushion my impact from imprinting me with the evening's regret, and even to catch my flailing pocket-watch as it hurtled from my waistcoat (a transparent, but also entirely true, attempt to suggest dignity in the face of my pathetic concrete collision).

A stray arm flung about with reckless abandon, a spaghetti string tethering a brick in a hurricane, as I shuffled to the dancefloor was timed to catastrophic perfection. My future children fading from photographs in their DeLorean as the fist struck my innocently jangling testicles (picture it....picture THEM!). Thank you, Drunk Fairy, for deflecting the blow to a marginal extent.

Clearly the reason I walked five minutes out of my way, avoiding The Meadows, was because some outside element was guiding me home. Once more I awoke the next day with minimal recollection of how I had succesfully navigated the path home and skyward. Incredibly, my brain bore no ill will. My mind was free, fresh and devoid of devastation. More astonishingly, venturing that perhaps The Drunk Fairy giveth in addition to taking away, I approached my still lifeless phone. Cautiously, as if sudden movements may damn my faint hopes for its revival, I neared its resting spot. Cables unplugged when the life-support machine had finally been deemed superfluous days before, were re-inserted. A flicker. Nothing new in that, as had been the case several times in the week. A further glimmer. Brief hope rising, falling with the silence that suggested she was not to wake fully. I turned, heavy with dismay, shoulders slumped under the weight of my aching despair, and made to trudge out in further rain. Beep. IT'S ALIIIIIIIIVE! And the sun- shining! I embraced it deeply, held close to my heart, swore never to endanger its existence again and playfully lobbed it to my mattress....*bounce*....*bounce*....*CRASH*

Fuck.