I don’t drink much these days. One glass of wine with a meal is my limit, on doctor’s orders. And I must admit, abstemiousness has its upsides, quite apart from keeping me out of A&E.
Being off the sauce has given a tremendous boost to my energy levels, although I’m not sure everyone in my family is convinced this is a good thing. Sometimes I suspect they’d prefer me quiet and hungover rather than bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and trying to sing harmonies to every single song on the radio.
One consequence of not really being a drinker these days is I’m far less frequently at drinks do’s, launches and receptions of various kinds. The reason is simple. Drinking is much less fun when you’re not, well, drinking.
The whole dynamic is different. You don’t get that sensation when the second drink kicks in and the night seems to accelerate with a momentum all of its own. Whoosh. Here we go. That can be a great feeling, full of possibility. And it can be hard to replicate when sober.
It doesn’t help that some people can be really weird about the fact you’re not drinking. Some people take it as a personal affront. This astonished me the first couple of times I encountered it, but I find it’s surprisingly common.
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I’ve had good advice on how to deal with this from an unusual source — former prime minister Tony Blair. Not from him directly, you understand. I’ve met Blair a few times down the years but never to discuss my drinking. The advice came via his former political secretary, John McTernan, who said Blair would always carry around a glass of wine at a function, even if he never drank a drop all evening. Blair said it helped put other people at their ease.
And he was right. It works. Cheers, Tony.
In rude health
The final week of the Edinburgh Festival left me in absolutely no doubt that Scottish theatre is in rude health.
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Rude is certainly the right word for Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, the deliciously profane adaptation of the Alan Warner novel about a choir of Catholic schoolgirls from Oban who go off the rails on a trip to Edinburgh.
The show teamed the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) with Lee Hall, the Geordie who wrote Billy Elliot, and Vicky Featherstone, the Englishwoman who used to run NTS and is now artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London.
In a column last month, I had my say about the foolishness of Liz Lochhead’s complaint that there was a “shortage” of Scots at the NTS and, by the same logic, too many non-Scots.
Our Ladies is a far more more eloquent response than I could ever muster.
Lochhead questioned whether non-Scots could fully grasp the “gutsy, upfront, borderline” traditions of Scottish theatre, with its “rough and ready relationship with variety”. She singled out the late, lamented 7:84 Scotland theatre company as a classic example of that form.
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Well, the phrase “gutsy, upfront, borderline” could have been coined for Our Ladies, and the production paid more than a nod of acknowledgement to the variety techniques of 7:84.
A lifetime ago, at university, I did my honours dissertation on 7:84 and its inspirational leader, the playwright John McGrath. It truly is a tradition that deserves frequent revisiting.
Just as it’s worth remembering that John McGrath, hero of working-class Scottish theatre, was born in Birkenhead, schooled in Clwyd and took his degree at Oxford.
Twittering rigor
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Writers can see into the future. How else can you explain that back in 1981 when Alasdair Gray published his great novel Lanark, one of the illnesses treated at his dystopian hospital, The Institute, was called “twittering rigor”. It caused a chuckle in the audience watching the stage adaptation at the Lyceum last week. An increasingly common affliction in 2015.