Getting sober is the best fun I've ever had

I was scared that life without booze and gear would be tedious. The opposite is true.

When I was a kid, school holidays felt like a drag. I’d read all those Enid Blyton books about posh kids having adventures and picnics all summer long. I assumed that’s what most young people were doing while I was sat indoors on my own, cowering from the hot sunshine like Gollum, eating chocolate digestives and watching The Sullivans. It was boring, lonely and miserable.

Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Poor me. I spent summer holidays all lonely and glum. Yes, I now realise that my story was nothing special. Sitting about being bored was what most other kids were probably doing too. Or maybe they weren’t? I don’t know, I didn’t ask. All I know is that my mum had to work so from the age of about twelve I tended to wile away those long summer holidays skulking about the house on my own, feeling sorry for myself, too lethargic and unimaginative to get out and about (and that was before I discovered wanking, after which there barely seemed any point in getting out of bed at all).

Sitting about doing sod all really did get me down. I was a bored, lazy and chubby kid who let days, weeks - sometimes months slip by anonymously then looked around bewildered when school started up again and my peers all seemed taller, older, wiser, more worldly while I had just got fatter and paler.

Anyway, why am I telling you all of this sorry bollocks? Well, I think it might be one of the reasons I eventually got bang into doing loads of gak.

When I hit sixteen I went the other way.

I was making up for lost time; determined not to ever let myself fall back into my sad and idle ways. I tried to fill my every waking second with some form of stimulation. I was playing catch-up wanted to go to all the parties, drink all the drink, kiss all the girls and take all the drugs.

When adulthood approached I ploughed the same amount of excessive energy into work. When I landed my first job in journalism I told myself that the best way to succeed was to never stop. When I finished at the office I would go home and write down ideas, do bits of research, read other newspapers and magazines obsessively. I was a product of Thatcherism - totally in thrall to my own productivity. I didn’t just want a steady job that paid the bills. I wanted to create great things constantly and be defined by them. And I also wanted to get totally shitfaced every weekend (plus sometimes on a Thursday).

I rarely rested. I had no interests outside of work and getting on it.

I told myself that football was my hobby. But going to football was always as much about getting twatted as it was actually watching the game. Similarly, playing Monday night 5-a-side was only really a ritual we endured prior to the post-match beers.

Cocaine started off as an occasional thing in my teens then became a semi-regular thing in my twenties. By the time I was in my mid thirties, busy with fatherhood as well as career stuff, booze and drugs were officially my only hobby. I craved stimulation at all times. I was terrified of even fleeting moments of boredom. I thought of myself as being constantly on the run from lapsing into that fat bored kid I had once been. The truth is, I was probably just scared of ever being alone with my own unfiltered thoughts.

I used to worry that getting sober would be boring.

Back then, I had no idea how to have fun or keep myself interested without the distraction of work, physical exercise, drink or drugs. I had never learnt how to fill my time up in more wholesome ways. I had never learnt how to relax in my own company. I had an extremely narrow worldview. My ability to actually live life in a meaningful and enjoyable way was pretty limited; I was about as good as being a human as a baby who only knows how to shit itself, eat and cry. I had command of only the very basics.

I wish I’d had some hobbies when I was a kid. If I had, I would have been a better adult. But in the 1980’s, ‘hobby’ was a dirty word. Hobbies were for spods: they played chess or watched birds or collected stamps. Taking up a hobby was a sign of giving up. I would watch those weird kids on Why Don’t You telling me how to build things out of shoeboxes and Fairy liquid bottles and I would pity them. ‘Dickheads,’ I would laugh to myself as I sat in my dressing gown munching my fifth digestive of the morning.

When I knocked all the drink and drugs on the head six years ago I was bored for about three days.

But, luckily, the boredom was overshadowed by all the anxiety, fatigue and profuse sweating. Once I white-knuckled it through those initial 72 hours, I started to feel energised and excited about a life that was suddenly full of possibilities. I had a ton of energy and acres of time to fill with it. The problem was, I didn’t quite know how to fill it.

That was why my first three years of sobriety were the busiest of my life. I trained for and ran a half marathon; I lost almost two stone; I started my own company, launched my own TV programme, hosted a daily three hour radio show and took on all sorts of other daft projects - all the while trying to plough as much time and energy as I could into raising my kids. I said yes to almost everything. And in the end I crashed. I found myself physically and mentally exhausted. Mercifully, I didn’t fall off the wagon but I must have got close at times. I had a therapist who was there to point out that I was overstretched and overwhelmed and had simply replaced the hedonism with yet more work and exercise. The mind can only take so much before it starts spilling over.

These last couple of years have been the most fulfilling and content of my entire life.

I am still very much a work in progress. I still over-do it sometimes. I still say yes to things I shouldn’t. I sometimes fill dead evenings with chocolate and make myself an espresso at 8pm at night because…I don’t know why - it’s just something to do, innit?

But I have hobbies. I really do play chess. I really do have a bird watching book that I have been known to take up the local wetlands centre with me. I read more than I have ever done. And aside from all of that, I just enjoy the seemingly ordinary stuff that surrounds me every day: from the peculiar activities of the local cats that hang about in my street to the humble ritual of making myself a pot of tea in the afternoon. I stick records on and try to listen to them without distraction. I put my phone on airplane mode for long stretches of the day. I switch off. Learning to do so has been tough; in some ways, tougher than the initial challenge of stopping drink and drugs.

I have had to train myself not to fear idleness but to embrace it. I have had to discover beauty and fun in the day-to-day. It is all there in front of us. Norah Efron, the famous Hollywood screenwriter, once said ‘interesting stories happen to people who know how to tell them.’ Nowadays, I spend most of my time telling people stories. Sometimes they ask me how come so many interesting things happen to me. They don’t. The same amount of remarkable, funny or stimulating things happen to me as the next dickhead. It’s just that, these days, I am clear-eyed enough to see them.

Peter Bleksley on The Reset Podcast

Thanks for the kind responses to the podcast. This week’s episode featured my chat with former super-cop turned writer and broadcaster Peter Bleksley. Bleks is a legend: I met him 20 years ago when he’d just published his first book, Gangbuster - about going undercover in the IRA and the Mafia. He is smart, funny and as hard as nails. The stress of his action packed life led to two breakdowns and a drug habit. These days he is very much back on track - and has one of the shrewdest takes on mental health you could ever listen to. Plus his tales of adventure are absolutely batshit crazy. Have a listen here.

Thanks

For all of your feedback, comments, tweets and emails every week. It means a lot. I enjoy writing this and it’s great to hear that people enjoy reading it. Please stay in touch and by all means let me know what other stuff/experiences you would like to hear about. As you might know, I don’t give a fuck what I write about and have no filter.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/