In hindsight, it was hilariously dramatic of me to be so terrified of my parents the first time I realised they were drunk. We’d been baking in the heat of July at my aunt’s house in southern France, an obnoxiously large villa that once an annum my family and I would terrorise for a week, usually joined by Taryn and Andrew and their two sons, clad in neon orange swimming shorts that somehow would end up in the topmost branches of the willow tree. I reminisce fondly at the chaos we created each year; the Olympics I organised where the winner was given a golden spoon, the lethal fart Jared did whilst we hid in the upside-down kayak, and of course, that night the tropical storm hit and I cried in my bed because my parents were wildly drunk and I didn’t understand why some liquid from a bottle was making them so incredibly happy. Lightning struck the horizon magnificently, brighter than the sun that had melted into the rolling hills for a well-deserved sleep just hours before. Andrew, always the joker, labelled each fork of electricity with a morbid ‘there goes Paris’, ‘there goes Lyon’, and my parents fell about on the steps howling with laughter, eyes streaming. Feeling abandoned, I carried my sorry 6-year-old self to bed not long after they began telling each other to ‘flock off’, or to ‘flocking shut up’ (any guesses of what filled their glasses?), wallowing in self-pity at their lack of attention to my departure.
I’ve grown up in a house of alcohol. Never one to deny himself a drink, my dad’s favourite time of day is when he rules the kitchen, a bottle of red to accompany his playlist which develops from Elbow to Rage Against the Machine the more he drinks, tapping his feet audibly to the beat whilst the girls of the family exchange giggles and glances from the living room, turning the TV up an inch more with every new song he queues. Mum, the gin lover,blooms with energy and extroverted sparkle when the second tall glass is finished, her speckled irises light up like a lantern and every now and then I catch a ‘fuck’ leave her lips, much to my delight as a child.
The runt of the litter, I started drinking earlier than my two big sisters. They would refuse to buy me more than a 4-pack of Kopperberg whilst feigning protective concern, so I would strop and plot alternative ways to get some vodka or some peach schnapps, and by sixteen I had a pretty foolproof fake ID that I’d bought through a blind payment of £65 to an Arabic man on Paypal. It turns out I barely had to use it, living in St Agnes was a blessing for underage drinking. The little Cornish town I still call my home has witnessed many an underage pint being served, justified by the fact the bartender knows the thirsty minor’s brother or dad or goldfish, or simply that they couldn’t be bothered to go through the effort of asking for identification when the surf is pumping and their mates are on a day off, taunting them through videos of the waves, just out of sight down the hill. The friends I made in my single digit years I am lucky enough to still have now, and to this day we laugh and drink in the same gardens we used to throw up in, glad to be back to our roots after months in a hot, sticky city with undergraduate debts looming over our hungover heads. Our houses are dotted over the cliffs of Aggie, a short walk from one to the next is the blueprint of our early years of drinking, usually from my garden to Adam’s tiny weeny living room, where what seemed like a hundred of us would pile inside and hide our crate or litre bottle of spirit for fear of it getting drank by someone else. Alcohol was as precious as our pocket money back then, but with a tolerance as weak as our understanding of the world we would dance, to Olly Murs or Katy Perry, and we’d snog the same friend behind a bush before running in a stampede of boozy euphoria to the next house on our list.
My beer obsession stemmed from my first bar job when I was 17, and I place the blame for which partly on San Miguel (I still can’t get over the fact that spoons don’t sell it anymore), but mostly Skinner’s Brewery. A cold pint of Lushingtons (named after the stretch of beach that appears at low tide on the left of Porthtowan, two coves over from Aggie) was a daily occurrence, and more often than not led to my young colleagues and I drinking on the tables outside until the beach disappeared into darkness and we couldn’t remember who had the key. It was so much fun, and so out of pocket; we used to call our friends once the last customer had vacated and they would swarm inside, unbeknown to our manager, to drink and dance our shifts of the day away with the falling tide. The sun would rise and we would roll down the cliff to Trevellas Cove with raging headaches, cured only by the Cornish ocean and the singular cans of lager we could swipe from our parent’s stores. Beer, that was all we drank. Spirits have been a few and far between indulgence for me since I realised I could sink a pint as quick as my male friends, especially rare since I went to my first college party on a beach in Falmouth and woke up the next morning in Scorrier with an empty litre bottle of vodka, one shoe and no memory. To this day, I still wonder what became of my beloved left foot Nike blazer.
My two best friends and I spent a couple of months drinking our way through Europe, spending an ungodly amount of time on Spanish cobblestones with condensation-soaked pints of Birra Morreti, or trying to sing along to the chants and whoops of beer houses in Munich, stein in hand, independence flowing through our veins as fast as the beer flowed from the many, many taps. Ljubljana welcomed us in late October with stormy skies and a pub directly across the street from our hostel, serving 2-euro pints of Loo-Blah-Nah pale ale. I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that we’d drank most of their kegs of the stuff within 3 days; our holy pastime was pints and games of shithead. I saw Europe through tipsy eyes and loved every minute of it, wreaking havoc with the boys, falling from pub to pub and getting overcharged constantly by sneaky bartenders who saw the opportunity to benefit from our drunken states. In Portugal we fried ourselves on a beach and then stumbled to one of the Banana Cafés littering the streets of Lisbon, tired and happy, ready to spend the evening watching the big wide world go by whilst sipping our stupidly cheap pints, never once lacking in conversation or thirst.
Still at an age where I can claim hangovers don’t affect me, I drink as much now as I did back then, except I’ve ventured into the higher percentages and revel in the new beers that Verdant releases as I organise the stockroom of Schooners. It’s a cushty job, thanks Verdant. To spend my days delivering huge pizzas to gobsmacked visitors with the wild Cornish sea just metres away, to love my community and the products of our parish, so impressive to those who live afar. I even beat my dad to drinking craft beer, he has learnt to love the taste of hops only in the past year, and now I will bring him home a can and we will talk of its smoothness, equals in our love of beer and the way it quietens our fast-paced minds. We connect so beautifully through our shared levels of ADHD, and both have learnt from each other how to harness the power of neurodivergence (best accomplished after a beer, or four). Scientifically, because my dopamine levels are lower than a neurotypical person, alcohol has a wacky result of supressing my ‘disability’ and bringing me to the level of those around me, a potentially dangerous yet personally welcome notion. I almost exclusively drink Verdant in the summer months when I return home from Cardiff; in south Wales I drink any pint less than a fiver and my mind will drift away to the Cornish sea side where the beer is better and the core of my being belongs.
--
Hiya, I’m Ru - I’m 21, Cornish, and at my happiest when I’m at the beach or the mountains with a cold beer in one hand and a good book in the other. Growing up I was always the kid who did wacky stuff, like chucking myself off huge rocks into the ocean or convincing my friends to get up at sunrise to climb a hill. Thank god I did, as I now have an unprecedented amount of stories to tell in what I hope will continue to be a life of pissing off my mates and then writing about it later.