Getting older and getting drunk

Back when I was in my 20s, I met a wry old devil “on a train bound for nowhere”.

All we had in common was a bottle of 10-Year-Old KWV Brandy and a 28-hour train ride from Cape Town to Pretoria - but it turned out to be an education.

I was travelling on a First Class Government Rail Warrant, as was issued to serving officers who were being transferred from one billet to another. I was nearing the end of my National Service and was owed a quick leave home before the final stretch prior to clear-out and demobilisation. The “system” allowed for “travelling time” on both sides and in the Intelligence Corps. we'd had learned to “bend reality” enough to wheedle an extra day’s leeway on either side.

Civilians usually avoided compartments with soldiers in them but he swung his nondescript suitcase onto the rack and an seated himself opposite me with a friendly nod. It was only after the second tea trolley came around. I’d exhausted the Cape Town newspapers and dispaired of the cryptic crossword. The train had climbed from the coastal plain and ascended the escarpment that led to the plains of the Little Karoo leading to the Great Karoo that we would have to cross to reach the Witwatersrand. Tea, the eternal social lubricant of the British Empire allowed him to break the ice with a polite “one lump or two?” with an avoidance of  aitches and a glossal stop that rang of Bow Bells.

 “You’re a long way from ’ome,” was how it started.

While examining each of the old rogue’s “lessons” in detail would require me to classify this blog as “adult content” with Google (and to keep the automatic adverts descent, I don’t want to do that), he spun a good yarn and there was plenty of truth to be learned from this long-time commercial traveller’s obviously well-coloured stories. Suffice to say that I had encountered (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) a canny old bastard and that night, with only the chilly darkness of the Great Karoo beyond the carriage window, as the bottle slowly left its Hex Valley origins behind and progressively emptied between two men from different generations and different worlds, I learned a thing or two.

“Mark my words, ma’ey,” he ultimately warned me through a vinous mist. “We’re bowf equally pissed now, bu’ in the mornin’, I’ll ’ave an ’ead like a flamin’ medicine ball and you’ll be fresh as a bloomin’ daisy!” By the time the sun rose over the Orange Free State, I realised he was right, so I let him sleep before shaking him after the final coffee trolley came past half an hour out of Jo’burg.

It’s all about recovery time. If you are a normal, healthy and not-too-overweight individual (although when it comes to alcohol consumption, the latter attribute can actually be an asset) there is nothing you can do when you are 25 that you can’t do when you are 45. It just takes longer to recover. And unfortunately, that’s on a sliding scale!

Take an example from a few years ago: I was driving home from the newspaper in the dead of night. Passing the delicatessen of a friend, I saw someone trying to break in. I encountered a severely inebriated individual, several years if not kilogrammes my junior, who took a wild swing at me. Just as I would have on the playing fields of high school, I swung back inside his swing (that missed) and connected him squarely at the base of the solar plexus.

An instinctive fight-or-flight mechanism must have taken over, as he moaned, scrambled up and vanished into the air he was gasping for – that was, as much as I could see of it through the stars of pain that were shooting through my hand. I’d done it a thousand times before. In training and in combat. Ok, it had stung for a while but no sweat. This was different. Fact is that a good ten years had passed since I had southpawed anything more substantial than a nicely padded gym punch bag. This hurt!

I was a big boy in those days and when the doctors at the trauma unit of Groote Schuur Hospital saw my hand, one of them who had a sense of humour put his head out into the waiting room and called: “any multiple mandible fractures or serious cranial trauma?” In the army, we used to call anti-inflammatories “Gyppo injections, ‘cause they initially burn like hell and discourage “Gyppos” (malingerers). This one didn’t burn any less,but by the time I returned to my car the lump on my fist had shrunk from a cricket ball into a golf ball. And I remembered the words of that wry old devil on the train bound for nowhere: “there is nuffin’ wot you can do when you’s 25 wot you can’t do when you’s 45; it just takes longer to recover”.

Now as the wise know, men never outgrow being boys. I have learned and forgotten his next lesson frequently. While there are legions who would attest to my once being able to drink any Cossack under the table, I was never what you would call a “heavy drinker”. Once I started working, my enjoyment of fine wine saw a switch from quantity to quality, but as my career moved into the sphere of hospitality writing and restaurant reviewing, I (and my then expanding girth) soon had ample access to both.

My new way of eating (throwing away all the diet books and listening to the messages my body sends me) has resulted in my losing a third of my body weight. At the same time, I unconsciously, gradually and almost imperceptibly reduced my alcohol intake, so that I’d now estimate it’s at less than a quarter of what is once was. This was partly because my wife does not drive, so for more than a decade, I’ve had to watch my drinks if we went out, which apart for a slight addiction to Diet Coke, certainly didn’t do me or my liver any harm. Also, however, each time I did overindulge, I realised more and more that I simply did not like the sensation of being intoxicated and enjoyed the after-effects (that just seemed to get worse) even less.

So, a few weeks ago, an old university friend (who is now respected musician and poet) and his girlfriend came around for a Braai. It was a relatively warm night on the patio and one bottle of KWV Brandy (it took me more than 10 years to find a reliable source in Continental Europe) led to another. I wasn’t legless, just elegantly wasted. Drank a pint of water with a pinch of salt and sugar before bed, followed all the rules. I’ve done this often enough before….Until the next morning!

The weather had held and a glorious morning was streaming in between the curtains, each beam slicing my corneas like a million knives. Then there was one mean motherf*c#er standing next to my bed with a ten-pound sledgehammer and each time I lifted my the block of reinforced concrete that had replaced my head more than an inch off the pillow, he’d whack me one, the shockwaves measuring on the Richter scale.

I’ve met that mean motherf*c#er before, often, but it just seems that the older I get, the longer he takes to go away. Gone are the days of arriving at 08h00 for a Saturday morning parade or rugby match after a Friday night of carousing (and sweating out any ill-effects of the preceding night’s folly before half-time. I think it actually took me about 36 hours to fully recover! I’ve become a wuss in my dotage.

Now if it had been single-malt Scotch…..  – AMB

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