Drinking is great. Drinking is really great. It’s relaxing, chills you out, gives you confidence. It does for me, anyway. Evenings with people I don’t really know are improved after a few drinks when pretence disappears and we’re all laughing and can finally have a good time. Talking shit, pretending we know more than Gordon Brown and telling knob jokes. Social lubricant, someone’s probably called it.

With depression, life is like a shit hungover Sunday morning where it’s raining outside and there’s only the Hollyoaks omnibus on the telly. You don’t want to do anything, get up, move about or be bothered. All the time.

Alcohol eases that. Your mood doesn’t improve – if anything, you become a massive bolshy wanker – but the difference is that you don’t care. You’re relaxed. The second beer is easier to open than the first, because it keeps making you feel better.

At a bowling alley, there’s generally an offer to get you to play three games. The first game is the start of the evening – you’re sober, nervous perhaps, and have a rubbish game. The second is a bit drunk, more confidence and everything works – a good game. By the third game, you’re pissed and don’t give a toss about the bowling any more, just cocking about, bowling between your legs, backwards, two balls at a time. Destructively.

See where I was going with that last paragraph? The beers got easier to open, but my behaviour was more destructive. Argumentative, watching TV – or even live shows – too pissed to really follow them, cocking up computer games and shouting at the control pad like a fucking idiot. It didn’t help that the supermarket did great deals on bulk buys, so if there were 4 cans in, I’d drink 4. 8 cans, they’d all go too. Maybe an emergency run to the late Spar. 11pm on Sunday, the perfect time to get more beer.

The last time I drank, I popped out at lunchtime for a bite to eat with a friend, and ended up drinking until 4am the next day. Neat rum. I hate rum. Don’t remember much after 8pm. Probably talked bollocks, masked a bit by the others catching up to me at some point. Pointless drinking.

I don’t drink any more. Just stopped. They don’t mix well with my pills. Worse than mixing them with general cuntyness. I’m not a militant anti-drinker or anything like that. Loads of people can drink responsibly (as all those bloody adverts say), but I don’t think I can. So I don’t.

There’s two reactions when I say that I don’t drink – the first is to try and get me to have one, as though I can’t have fun unless I’m a bit pissed. I can, but that first pint will inevitably lead to me not recalling the weekend and waking up on a building site in Wrexham.

The second is “well, I won’t drink either”, like a big principled stand against the evils of alcohol. Stop it! Drink, if you want to. I’d eat steak in front of a veggie. Actually, I’d fucking love to. Smug bastards.

Saturday night was my first big night out with friends, being the only one sober. It was fun for the most part, watching the people dancing and acting like massive fannies in a way they wouldn’t normally was surprising. Normally I’d have been amongst them, looking an equally big prick.

For some reason, a tat shop called Planet Bong (logo: a pot leaf) was open until late o’clock. Two people serving through a grille. For all your late night rizla and Che Guevara t-shirt needs. They sell body studs and rings, too.

My friend, G, asked for a ring. Because he has his cock pierced. Not through the end, through a dangly bit of skin under his cock, next to his balls. I don’t know why. The man in the shop was impressed, though, and asked to see it. He got to see it. In the street. I didn’t know what to do, so I talked to the other assistant. And got my ear re-pierced. To avoid seeing a cock.

I wish I had alcohol to blame for it.