Booze

''Til Burnham Wood shall come to Dunsinane'. The Bard probably meant the Schloss.

Christmas, as we know, is all about the booze, not the baby Jesus, more the wassailing.
Christmas is also the only time of year when I find it reasonable that we can't buy booze in our supermarkets, because that could significantly increase the mayhem. In Britain of course, you have the choice, you can go to the supermarché or your Threshers or Oddbins or any offie really, and this encourages healthy competition.

Our BC Liquor Stores are quite impressive though.
Yesterday, before going to see Mr. Lube, I went to the Liquor Store and bought more alcohol than I had meant to, mainly just because it was there. I managed NOT to buy a bottle of Absinthe, which I was attracted to because of the mention of the green 'Fée' on the bottle, I moved quickly past it, so I'm unsure whether I was just reading the French side or whether they were playing with words.
One of my favourite current Canadian TV series is 'Lost Girl', in which the Fée, both dark and light apparently, live alongside humans and lead fairly normal lives in a completely abnormal, human eating way.

So, the booze. 'Booz endormi'(Victor Hugo, and not in fact about booze).
I realise I've never really been MUCH of an imbiber. I like a glass, I can look forward to a glass, but in recent years, I haven't been able to knock back much more than a glass, two at the most. I overheat and feel very uncomfortable, so my own boozing is more theoretical than real.
Even when I was younger, at peak time for being drunk, I never got to the hangover stage because at a certain point, I would just throw it all up and that would be that.
But I can imagine what a hangover's like because I have been ill and felt like death warmed up. I am fairly sure I can conjure up the memory of something akin to a hungover state.

I have just finished reading a book about alcoholism and I now see that I had absolutely no idea what alcoholism was. My friend lent me the book, she is a recovering alcoholic and she said,
'This book speaks to me, I have lived through this.'
Oh dear, I thought, a book about alcoholics, and set it aside.

Then I looked at it again and realised it was fiction, it was a story, told in the first person, so I started reading. And it was a good read. Glaswegian writer, so in my head, my mind's ear if you will, I could hear her speaking. This was great fiction, that kept me reading in spite of the state the character was in, being just horrible, and I was in the head of someone describing an experience about which I had no idea.
There are a couple of people within the very wide definition of my family, who are alcoholics, have been treated for it, and I had never really understood the phrase, 'it's a disease,' or, 'it's something they have no control over,' or even, 'they do that because of the disease,' until reading this book.
Now, I think, I'm a step closer.
'Paradise' by A.L.Kennedy.