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30 days, 30 drinks day 10: old places, new faces
No comments · Posted by Richard Carr in Challenges
My drinking so far has taken in solitude and excess, two extremities which I’ve found interesting. It was quite novel appearing to be suicidal and the hazy recollections of being wazzocked on 7% Scottish ale made me laugh the next day, so it’s a thumbs up all round. Unfortunately this means that thinking of something to top these experiences is quite difficult, so it took me having a guest drinker to come up with something new and niche to match them.
To the golf course we go. Five minutes from home but a world away. Terraced houses turn into long lines of trees and homes seem twice as large. This is a typical northern town, crafted at a time when you lived and worked near the mill or you owned the mill and lived on the green hills overlooking the endless terraced streets. Revidge golf course sits at the top of one of these hills, two minutes from my house. Even though the mills are gone, the difference is still distinct.
And so we go back to a place I spent many nights during my youth. Right back at the beginning I drank whatever I could afford, normally either two bottles of red wine for a fiver or whatever cans were on sale. A few years down the line I had money and started to buy drinks I actually liked – two bottles of red wine for a fiver and whatever cans were on sale. The company changed over the years but not much else – I’d quite happily just go out there to sit and have a drink with whoever was around that night.
I went back to the golf course after years away. Nothing has changed. The path down still covers mud, concealed dips, aggressive branches and the house that looks like a millionaire footballer’s. At the bottom you still come out to clear skies and the smell of fresh grass, an expanse of green opening up before you whichever way you look. To the right are the holes where I used to play javelin with the flags and to the left are the men in polo shirts talking about business. Nothing has changed in all these years I’ve been away.
We went to the left, to the steps by the trees lit by the club car park. In the distance is Blackpool Tower, the sea and the sparkling lights of the motorway heading north. In a sudden rush all of this comes back to me. The grass in front of me fills with my friends leaping about, laughing, bottles clinking on the floor. The old tensions come back to me even though I don’t feel them any more – wondering what she thinks about you, wondering if he found you funny, old neuroses bouncing back like balls thrown to the bottom of the sea bed hurling back up to be seen again.
The bottle of lager in my hand feels unfamiliar and I’m with someone who wasn’t there back in the day, but everything else feels the same. The view hasn’t changed and it’s still eerily quiet when you stop talking. The only thing that’s really changed is me. My instincts associate this place at this time of night with a chaotic lifestyle, romantic uncertainty and building up the friendships I still have to this day. But those things don’t feel real any more – they’re just cold memories of being someone else. Drinking here, with a different drink and a different person, feels almost like fraud – trying to latch myself today on to something that belongs in yesterday.
Drinking on the golf course was not an unpleasant experience, but it did feel wrong somehow. It was like watching a cartoon from the 1980s and discovering it was really quite bad – it’s not nice to have your rose-tinted memories tarnished unexpectedly. As much as I love the place, I think it’s somewhere that really belongs in my past.
The day: 10.
The drink: two giant bottles of lager, one mostly thrown across the golf course, and an organic ale.
The place: Revidge golf course.
Positives: enjoyed the view on a pleasant evening.
Negatives: experienced a strange series of flashbacks to a drink-fuelled chaotic youth.
Conclusion: I’m glad I’m not still 19.
Blackburn · golf course · Revidge
