Pissed (1)

The book I’m reading at the moment is “Frank Skinner” by Frank Skinner. Frank Skinner, for those who don’t know, is a comedian from Birmingham in England who’s best-known for writing England’s 1996 European Championship song “Football’s Coming Home”, having his own chat show on ITV and getting paid millions for it and for being one half of the comedy duo Baddiel and Skinner, who present an unscripted, unplanned light-hearted chat show where they talk to the audience called “Unplanned”. He’s very rude and tasteless but is widely perceived as seeming far too nice a guy to be pissed off with. I have to admit though, I don’t think I ever gave him too much thought. He’s just kinda always on telly now and then.

So imagine my surprise one day in Eason’s when I was entirely swept off my feet with his autobiography. I mean, I’m sure there’s many lives out there worth writing about. But Frank Skinner? Hmmm…..I dunno. Books and me have an uneasy relationship. Actually no, we don’t have a relationship. I mean, I love magazines, literally love them and I buy over a dozen each month. And I’ve been known to latch onto the odd non-fictional book, such as “Killing Pablo” by Mark Bowden last year. But then Frank Skinner’s autobiography wasn’t about cool stuff like CIA agents chasing a Colombian drug czar. I read “Them” by Jon Ronson, but mainly because it, too, was about cool stuff like conspiracy theories. Still at least it wasn’t fiction.

The problem I have with fiction is to do with what it essentially is; it’s made-upness if you will. And at the start of Frank Skinner’s book came the sentence that made me warm to his way of thinking so much I had to buy the book. He said he couldn’t stand reading fictional books because when he read something like “Alan pulled back a chair and sat down”, he couldn’t get over the fact that there is no Alan, there was no chair, none of that ever took place and it was all the product of someone’s imagination. And that’s exactly how I feel. Hell, I know it’s not how the world should live, but I can’t help it. I can only read true stories. Maybe that’s why I’m always at this diary site.

Frank Skinner had a drink problem. And it was all from just going out with mates, just casual social drinking. If you’re from somewhere like the US or Canada, you can’t begin to understand the attitude in this country towards drink (ok, maybe you can if you’re from Canada). What other countries might call a drinking problem is what Ireland would call “Friday night”. Or in my case, Sunday 16 June 2001.

I woke up that day at around 11am. Dad had made a grilled breakfast of sausages and bacon and waffles and all sorts of nice greasy (thought not too greasy) food. I wolfed it down and for the first time ever, my father and I went to the pub on Sunday morning. My Dad and me don’t do the pub thing too much together. Maybe if there was an uncle over from England or some other out of the ordinary occasion but generally we don’t. There’s too many awkward silences and the only thing we talk about are things like property, planning, cars, the post office, pubs in town, Dublin in the 1970’s, some more about the post office and a pinch of politics. But that Sunday, something brought us together. The most unlikeliest subject; football. My family is not sporty. Neither is it musical, but that’s a whole nother entry. Sport only gets a look in when Mayo are in a Connaught final or God forbid an All Ireland final. But the World Cup had taken the L house by storm, so JayeL and DadeL went to a wee pub in nearby rural County Dublin to see Ireland take on Spain.

From the outside, the pub looked a little modest. It only got a proper roof in the last year, having made do with a corrogated iron roof for years. I think it was kept for it’s quaintness, but anyway today this pub has a wall dedicated to the projection of international football onto it. As it was Father’s Day, I bought Dad four pints. I had four pints along with him. Then two more. Then it went into extra time so I had another one or three. Then it went to penalties, during which I had two on the go. Then Ian Fucking Harte happened, and as Jack Geller once said in >Friends when it was still good, “Now I’m depressed!”

At this stage, Dad was talking to this other bloke and I was in the company of my best friend from primary school of all people. The guy, Ralph, had been my circle of friends for most of my childhood and getting drunk with him had a strange novelty value. However at this stage, I should have noticed how drunk I was. The CD was skipping, bits were being left out. And I might have noticed, had I not been so doggedly drunk. Doggedly determined not to notice nothing. We got a taxi back into the suburb and launched a full scale attack on the bar. Consuming, mainly, pints.

Now the suburb isn’t a rough place. I like to keep repeating myself on the off-chance it might come true, but I’ve got to face it. The suburb is as rough and ready for a drunken brawl as the next hole. It’s not a poor, disadvantaged place. Just that bit too far from the rest of civilisation to care about being, well, civilised. So at six in the evening, Ralph was informed by a terribly drunk asshole that he was sitting in the wrong seat and made a suggestion of where he might place the said furniture should Ralph not repent and retreat to the opposite side of the bar. The barmaid came over to us and asked me to step outside. It turned out I appeared to be the soberest, and once outside the barmaid asked me to “calm down your friend”. So I went in and asked Ralph to come over to the other side of the bar, where two girls we were talking to were still sitting. That sounds cooler than it was, it was actually quite stupid, although the girls were lovely. It’s just that when I meet a nice girl, I’d like to think I’m giving it my best shot. And at that stage my blood type was Heineken.