I’ve got a friend who’s been temperance-total as long as I’ve known him. When as young kids we all pretended to enjoy alcohol until we actually developed a genuine taste for it, he just wasn’t interested. For whatever reason though, rather than just not drinking the stuff he doesn’t like when he can help it, he decided to go the whole hog and never touch a drop. He’s told me that at his wedding he intends to appear to be drinking champagne but actually spitting it back into the glass.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like for him on our drunken lads’ nights out, when he seems to stand very much at the sidelines once we start getting tipsy. What he must see… And of all of us he can actually remember the night.

He says he can’t go back now because he’s set himself a challenge, and that’s something that appealed to me. I can’t back down from a challenge and so I decided that for two weeks, I too would go temperance-total and see where it got me. It’s very much the kind of project that appeals to me (despite my love of beer, ale and whisky) so I thought I’d try it. Furthermore I’d heard the health benefits would more than make up for it and that I’d be saving my liver and my brain. Up until the a certain age our brain produces more brain cells, but after that everyone you lose – from drinking or from banging your head on things – is one less towards your overall total. Furthermore, drinking can make you feel terrible the next day, can cause you to do things you might regret, pull horrible faces that end up on Facebook, and can lead to addiction. So there are the reasons against drinking, I decided I’d see if they added up to enough reason to stop.

Once I tried giving up there were certainly positives and negatives for the whole thing and I’ll go into them here. I’ll start with the positives first. Firstly, being sober allowed me to enjoy the nights in a different way. It let me see my friends in a drunken stupor and it meant that I could take embarrassing photos and poke fun at them. My temperance-total friend and I became the ‘sensible’ ones who could mock the others. Furthermore, while I thought my lack of dutch courage might limit my ability to chat to girls it actually improved them. I wasn’t so ready to approach them or to make moves, but while I was actually talking to them the fact that they were drunk and I was sober made me instantly into Oscar Wilde. It was the opposite of that time a hot girl started groping my chest and I was too drunk to speak, making me look rude until she left.

As well as having positives on the night out, being temperance-total also meant I was able to offer lifts home which earned me some cash. And then the amount I saved in buying alcohol on nights out was amazing. It’s definitely a good decision financially. Overtime I also began to feel more energetic and healthier. It’s a subtle difference but if you suffer from a low mood you might consider cutting alcohol out for a while.

But still it wasn’t worth it. The thought of a cold beer in the beer garden still called to me as the ultimate way to unwind. I wanted to stop mocking the fun in a superior manner and actually be having fun again. When you spend all day completely sober worrying about bills and work it’s nice to forget about them for a while and feel your whole body relax. And while bars might be fun sober – clubs really aren’t. Clubs are horrible, noisy, sweaty places with nothing to do but jump up and down. And alcohol has it’s own health bonuses, being good for blood pressure and for antioxidants. So yeah I passed the test, I proved to my temperance-total friend that I could do it. But that it’s certainly not for everyone.

Mack LeMouse

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