That was me, that was
I met up with a friend in a pub last night. I was drinking ginger beer I hasten to add. There was a guy who was sat at the bar all evening and everytime I was ordering a real ale for my friend he would start telling me all about the finer details of the beers on tap, how the taps should be maintained and so on and so forth, etc., etc. He knew a lot of facts on the subject and some of them were even true! The last time I was at the bar he pointed out a particular bottle to me and said he was planing on taking four of them home. He actually got the name of the beer wrong - his good buddy and he forgot his name. What a desperate life. I went back to my table and caught a glance of a woman at a nearby table who was smiling and laughing with her friends over a glass of wine and I thought what a contrast. The contrast was absolute. A line somewhere had been crossed by the guy at the bar, presumably he wasn't born on the bar stool and hadn't been there all his life, and his relationship with alcohol had become something that the woman would not have been able to really understand.
The encounter brought home to me the fact that my own relationship with drink had become like that of the guy at the bar. I don't think I'll ever be able to relate to drink again like the woman was - I'll never be able to come back across the line I had crossed the same person who has gone over it. But I believe that there is another line you can cross and that I crossed it when I made the defining decision to never drink again.