I was not drunk – enough.

Sometimes I drink alone – lots of times.

Occasionally I invite people to parties – not often.

It’s a funny stuff, alcohol. It makes you want to dance naked in the back garden, put on women’s clothes and lie in a bath full of sugar; it makes you want to chuck your stomach lining into a bucket and jig to a polka, played on a trombone before you waltz off into the sunset of liver failure with Mister Brian-Cell emigration and Lady Grey Doesn’tmatter.

After hunting my way through the jungle of Tia Maria and Bailey’s bottles that made up the cupboard’s supply of unsatisfactory alcohol – having come up with nothing but a dubiously unlabeled bottle of home made wine and an understandably full bottle of terrible brandy – I decided to vent my annoyance in the emergency quantity of gin harboured on one of my shelves, next to and propping up a 1951 copy of The Works of Lewis Carol. Some tit had drunk all the good stuff; probably at the party, the vomit from which I was still finding in new and interesting places in the kitchen. I hardly ever venture into the kitchen… …what with the vomit and all. Whatever Carol might have had to say in complaint at my removing what was keeping him upright, in death at least, would have been quickly muted: I remembered, to my disgust, that I hate gin almost as much as I do Baileys and Tia Maria. Exactly why I keep an emergency half-bottle of it is quite beyond me, but I suspect that the first half of the bottle had been consumed prior to my decision to do so.

It’s a funny stuff, alcohol. It makes you want to dance naked in the back garden, put on women’s clothes and lie in a bath full of sugar; it makes you want to chuck your stomach lining into a bucket and jig to a polka, played on a trombone before you waltz off into the sunset of liver failure with Mister Brian-Cell emigration and Lady Grey Doesn’tmatter. You keep repeating yourself too; when you’ve been drinking. And you – I – use all this funny punctuation that only ever sounds good when you’re – I’m – talking, as opposed to in writing.

Once, when drunk, I went out to a party. I can’t really remember if I was invited or not but I do recall returning home at three thirty the next day, without a hangover; see, I had had to have another drink after having got over the shock of waking up on that boat.

And that’s why I do keep that bottle of gin I suppose. Not in case I wake up on boats – it happens all the time, honestly; it’s really rather stopped being a shock at all these days. No, not at all; in case I want to go to a party.

Don’t. Please gods don’t dare go to a party. By all means turn up at one, but don’t for the love of you go to one with the intention of it. …Horrible affair. Especially if you’re invited to one, honestly; no one ever turns up.

And if you do insist on going to one then, please, for your own sake, take a half empty bottle of something. See, taking a half empty bottle not only means that you get to drink the first half yourself, free of all those scrounging bastards that parties generate, but you have an excuse to drink someone else’s. That’s one of the highlights: raiding the alcohol cabinet.

Anyway, the gin, yes; because there was nothing good in the cabinet. So I went to pour myself a shot of tonic water to go with it.

When I tasted it, it was decidedly lacking in “tonic to water” percentage, totally lacking in gin and oddly like water and tonic. I pondered this for a couple of seconds. …Damn. Either someone had been very clever at that party, or I had been one step ahead of myself, as I was now, a few days previously.

Never mind; I think I remember thinking that I was likely to have a bottle of something or other on the boat. I haven’t been on the boat in ages.