Cheers for fears

'Tis the season for lunches that go on a bit longer than they should. They start at 1pm with mojitos then continue with pink champagne, white wine, red wine and pints. Before I know what's happened, it's 9pm. As I leave I explain to someone smoking outside that I tried to leave three hours ago, but was waylaid. "Waylaid by more drink," they say, and they are not being unkind, they are just acknowledging what happened.

That morbid attention seeker, cocaine, is stealing all the headlines this Christmas. Young people are dropping dead, some known, some unknown, and Morning Ireland is obsessing about our high society and the reporter talks endlessly about how you can get it in every town and village in Ireland, imagine that, every town and village.

Makes you think, sure that's grand, I don't touch the stuff. Makes you think, well if all I am doing these days is drinking too many alcoholic beverages then all is well. At least I'm not in the bathroom hiding out, snorting stuff. I do my drug-taking in public with everyone else and it's not called overdosing, it's called celebrating, no shame in that.

This is how it happens. I get my coat and I'm going out the door from one of those lunches that last all day when somebody hands me a glass of red wine. I've my coat on, my scarf around my neck and yet I can't resist going back inside for another fix, except in polite company we call it one more for the road. One more bottle, as it turns out.

Merry Christmas. 'Tis the season for brunches with the ladies. It starts with white wine and flirting with the handsome waiter and ends several hours later in a hotel bar with endless rounds of mood-enhancing margaritas. The cocktail part of the day-long brunch begins with Long Island Iced Teas and Cosmos and some class of raspberry concoction. Then someone orders a strawberry margarita. It looks so lovely and pink in its curvy glass that soon the table is heaving with them and for every 10 cocktails we buy the waiter delivers a stomach-lining platter of cheese and salami for free.

Really, it's all very civilised and the company is sparkling. Nobody drops dead. I only leave when I develop a gnawing pain in my left side that the fourth margarita only serves to increase. Indigestion, probably.

'Tis the season for alcohol-induced insults and apologies that aren't really apologies at all. How can you apologise for something you don't remember you did? At a Christmas party you might be told by a drunk colleague that you will go far in your job because of, say, the size of your chest and the friendship you have with a senior male member of staff. You cry and go home.

A few days later he rings your home to apologise, saying "If I said anything to upset you, I am sorry". If he said anything. He doesn't say "When I get drunk it seems I have a tendency to insult and offend people. It seems I did that to you. Perhaps I should get some help." And at Christmas parties across the country, these insults will be forgiven, assaults overlooked, indiscretions waved away, because it was the drink and we all know what that does to a person and they didn't mean it, not really. Just don't get caught snorting coke and insulting people at your Christmas party, because it might not be as easily tolerated.

I have a few friends who don't drink any more. This will be their first Christmas without the champagne on Christmas Eve, the stiffener for the morning Christmas day swim, the Sançerre at dinner, the Irish coffees, the blue-lit brandy on the pudding, the sherry in the trifle. Their first without making it a double because it's Christmas, without a bottle of whiskey on the go because of the day that's in it, without the hip flask at the races because it's St Stephen's Day and it's freezing at the track, and anyway it helps you beat the queues at the bar.

I tell them how great their new life is, but secretly wonder how they will get through it, how they will manage to keep saying "not for me", "just a water" or "I won't, thanks" and not be driven mad. And I thought I'd feel sorry for them, you know, missing all the alcohol-induced fun. But in fact I am jealous. Not envious enough to drink only sparkling water with maybe a splash of lime at the endless Christmas functions I have lined up, but kind of wistful for some form of sobriety.

But the thing is, you can get it in every town and village in Ireland. Imagine, every town and village. All year round, and especially at Christmas, it causes misery and mayhem. But sure that's old news.