Celebrating viva-vification on 27th April, I was passing around a cobweb-infested cream soda that had festered under the bar in the Aikman’s basement for aeons.

Aeons later thumped and cycled in my head the next day as I plotted the circuitry of my life in my then-cottage in Boarhills. I thought of everything I had been through, that had been through me, in the past couple of years. It had felt like enough to drive anyone to the most well-stocked bar in town.

And I did recall been driven to that same bar more times than I could uncount over the last three years. I had counselled myself that this wasn’t the usual process of moping or mourning or waning that, as teenagers, we had taken the piss out of. I was Writing, even as I endured the whirlwinding warren of a thousand undergrads in various states of kenosis, writing and never drinking or problem-drinking. Even as, thirty I was, I was sat in the most Disney and dingy student bar in the whole of Fife.

But I had been a regular there, and, as a regular, I had found a kind of zen in my solitary drinking, a zen in which the cracks had been able to seep in. Learning of my granddad’s death, one of the few spiritual bulwarks in my life, I had entered questing for the usual Tynt Meadow, beer so strong it was basically wine. The bartender had gently advised me not to drink.

Or, on another occasion, still at the other side of my 20s, I had climbed over a fence into the student union and broke into a terrible student night, only to find myself actually barred for a month or so.

There had been this baleful sense that I had become a meandering cliche. A single dad, separated, inundating every sorrow. I had started to find myself in Aikman’s for a variety of reasons – after a shift delivery cycling (a job I had largely to pedal around the trauma of a failed marriage, a marriage I probably did the lion’s share of failing); after teaching on the evening degree; after finding out that my dad had a degenerative, probably incurable illness; or, a lot of the time, for no reason at all.

I had started to realise that my drinking could be genuinely compulsive a few times, and confront this as an actual problem. I wasn’t getting drunk in the morning, buying strong gin every day, or waking up, comatose, in the middle of the street, or Ninewells.

Or we play the society card. Society gives us no structure or meaning, so we must medicate as armour against it. Or the geography card. No, I was not born in Marrakesh, but in Manchester, where getting drunk is the religion of the majority, a remnant of industrial consciousness that helps us to foretaste what it’s like to clamber down a mine.

People under the thumb of automated death capitalism worldwide manage to be under its thumb and not drink away their sorrows. And, after this carnivalesque celebration, I decided to stop playing cards, to stop throwing excuses into the aether.

For the first time in my life in St Andrews, I had been to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Maybe I had done this for the community or for the warm fuzzy feeling you get from being able to pat strangers on the back. People there had celebrated my sober day, and I had started drinking again.

And so what I’m not your quintessential alcoholic. Alcohol has now hurt and maimed and killed enough people I know to start facing up to it. And so my name is Sam Hickford, and I could, or may be an alcoholic. And, that’s enough.

I cannot stand judgmental, smug people. So I am pouring down every drop of smugness into the gutter, first of all. Then I am pouring down every drop of booze.

And being sober doesn’t make me feel great or make me dance in a meadow of avocados. Quite frankly, it is a pain in the arse. It is lonely.

But it is a pain in the arse I’ve nearly known for two months. I am tired of the ups and downs of drinking, and the way those ups and downs were even fostered and encouraged by the local Roman Catholic church. It is really difficult to stay on the straight and narrow when wine is held up as an exalted sacrament and when you can’t pray to God without being invited to a wine party somewhere.

No more. No, no more.

(Please get this, which was written when I was a fun drinker: https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334. Peace – Sam)