ALL MY HEROES ARE WINOS

Something happens to many British males in late adolescence that I haven’t identified to the same degree in any of the other cultures with which I have come into contact. We begin to regard the consumption of alcohol not as a complementary side dish to the plat du jour of our social life, but as a bargain bucket main course from Chicken Delight, to be dispatched without regard for the often disconcerting consequences.

My heroes in my late teens were all drunks. I admired Hemingway and Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski and Doors frontman Jim Morrison, winos to a man. To me, tales of Oliver Reed’s legendary piss-artistry weren’t the lachrymose testimony to a wasted acting talent, they were cause for an undeserved Oscar nomination. Despite never having written anything of note, except rambling poems composed after a night out on a bender, and to which I’d spend the next day trying to attribute meaning other than a latent bisexuality, I considered myself a writer, and imbibed accordingly. Of course, to those in my vicinity, I wasn’t a literary giant; I was an immature boob.

TEFL and alcohol are frequently intimate bedfellows, as the desire to socialise with, and clumsily attempt to seduce, impossibly exotic foreign girls often becomes all-consuming after a hard day at the coalface. My TEFL career nearly ended sooner than I expected after I came into contact with my dear friend N, Welsh TEFL legend, talented musician and all-round class act. My mother hails from the Welsh valleys, and I have always considered myself an honorary Welshman, expressing my patriotism through fanatical support for Wales in rugby union and an almost improper passion for male voice choir singing. (I currently warble with a Brazilian group called Camerata Vocal, part of the Academia Concerto.)

Welsh actor Richard Burton once opined, “Show a Welshman a hundred doors and he’ll walk through the one marked, Self-Destruction." (Burton was another one with an enthusiasm for the sauce, remember, and I suspect his comments were acutely autobiographical...) I met N a few months after becoming Certified, and we struck up a partnership that briefly drank the pubs dry, bewitched the passing womenfolk and very nearly ended with me receiving a premature P45. Those were the glory days, spent carefree and carousing, N ploughing into groups of foreign students with his all-conquering charm, with me bringing up the rear like a canny mongrel hovering for scraps.

N, I salute you, and sip a non-alcoholic lager to the treasured memories.