For someone who got into quite a few drink related scrapes when I was younger, I've always been pretty self-righteous about other people's drinking.
Whether this has anything to do with having a drunk for a step dad, who used to pass out in the living room before 6 pm every evening, and who used to spend two or three hours a night shouting out in his sleep I don't know.
This atitude did lead me to almost leaving two unconscious friends on a ferry in a Belgium once, but thankfully some of the other people on the trip were better friends to them that I was, and got them off the ferry onto a bus.
It seems strange now, in these days when teachers are often too scared to take children on school trips at all, that the seven of us (Me, another Jonathan, John, Andy, Paul E, Paul H and Stephen) were sent off to Germany without a teacher at all. I think it was assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that we were all pretty sensible lads.
Five of us were pretty sensible, but the other two managed to sink a whole bottle of Southern Comfort between them on the four hour ferry crossing from Dover to Zeebrugge (John and the other Jonathan)
I'll never forget finding John face down on the deck of a ferry in the early hours of the morning. He had a mustardy yellow jacket which he was very proud of, and when I opened the door onto the deck I found him face down, not only with a yellow jacket but with a stream of yellowy vomit coming out from his mouth to one side. The only way I can describe it is that it looked to me like his head was an egg that had been smashed against the floor and there was a trail of yolk issuing out from his head.
When we got into Zeebrugge at 5 in the morning, with the 2 of them still out for the count, the other 5 of us took a vote about what to do with them. Leave them on the ferry, was my decision. I think Paul H might have agreed with me aswell, but there were more votes in favour of dragging them off the boat, than there were for leaving them on it. Hooray for democracy.
I bumped into Andy about a year ago, and we talked about our decision making process. He said he would have left John but he and Jonathan had been friends for years, and he couldn't in all good conscience leave him there.
It was lucky for the two of them, that there were better friends than me there, or they might still be there.
A couple of years after this incident I found myself in a similar state of drink related incapacity. It was my first Christmas at TSB. I was 20. We had a drinks party after hours at work before heading off to the pub. Partly due to my own naivety, but also largely thanks to the stupidity of some of my older colleagues, I became the unwitting victim of some drinking games, which involved drinking paper cups full of mixed spirits. I don't remember much about it, except I probably broke the world record for the shortest time elapsed between a pub opening its doors and one of its customer's being ejected for drunken-ness. I almost got thrown out on the way in. Being sick on my new boss wasn't the ideal way to kick start a career in banking either.
My lovely new colleagues, having had a good laugh at my expense, then left me propped up outside the pub and went back in to enjoy their evening. Thanks guys! Somehow my homing beacon still worked, and I managed to get on a bus and get home, although I scared my mum half to death when I got in. She thought I'd been run over, and I was then sick some more, narrowly avoiding being sick on the cat's head.
Not only have I never had much tolerance for drunken-ness, I haven't got much tolerance for alcohol either. Now I mostly avoid it, especially since the hospital put me on some drugs which most definitely don't mix with it, and which could kill my liver all by themselves.
It seems strange to me, that we are so alarmed by other forms of drug taking, yet we think getting smashed out of our skulls on drink is in some way just a great big laugh.
I've never found it very funny.
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