Except.

I dunno. I’m pretty tempted to remain off the drink. I feel much better for the lack of it, and I’ve really rather enjoyed the fact that getting up before 8am on a Saturday and Sunday is now something that just happens naturally. I get some time to get stuff done before the rest of the world is really moving yet. Honestly, the first two weeks off the drink were very strange, and not entirely without difficulty. I mean, not in an oh-god-I’m-an-alky way or anything, just that because I am a gregarious sort of chap whose meeting place of choice is the pub, I had accidentally fallen into the habit of drinking five or six nights out of seven. Not vast amounts, you understand – just two or three pints. But those pints add up, and I honestly hadn’t realised how habitual they’d been, and how much they were slowing me down until I completely cut them out. But after I’d got past those first couple of weeks, I seem to have broken the habit, and sitting in the pub with a lime and soda no longer feels that odd. And I’m taking more exercise, and finding it more effective, than I was. I’ve just got more energy to burn.

On the other hand, I have parties and holidays and other fun things coming up. And frankly, the sort of person who is the always sober one at parties is someone I have always regarded with a little suspicion. I know that “I choose not to get drunk” does not equate to “I disapprove of drunkenness”, but still: if everyone else is having a drink or three, relaxing and letting their hair down, as it is very definitely psychologically useful to do from time to time, if everyone else buying into the social contract that says “this space is an area where it is OK to do something slightly daft/say something slightly stupid because we’re all drunk”, then it is only natural to feel the person who rejects that group decision is someone who is standing in judgement. I do not wish to be that guy. Also, being the sober one at parties is often boring.

“But why not just be sensible about your drinking, Al?” I hear you ask.

Well, that’s more or less the plan. I’m only going to be allowed to drink twice a week at the very most from now on, and with any luck rather, less than I had been consuming. I’m do not intend to switch from two or three pints five nights a week to fifteen pints one night a week, because I am not a moron. But even having allowed myself that, I think I may attempt not to drink at all a bit more often, so that it’s unusual to see me drinking when down the pub, rather than the reverse.

As for single, well, that’s not exactly something I have such singular personal control over, since it is my experience that relationships are most rewarding when there are two willing participants involved. And since I don’t think I know anyone who is all three of interesting, interested and single (hell, being me, and requiring to be hit about the head before I notice these things, I don’t think I know anyone who is more than one out of three), this looks unlikely to change, but as I was saying the other month, I value my free time on my own, so this really doesn’t trouble me terribly much. I just thought it was worth marking off the finish of the year, just as a personal “goal complete” checkbox.

So there we are. This was your dose of completely self-absorbed narcissism for the day. Next goal, to be attempted after my holiday: cut out caffeine for a while.

On a less me-me-me note: I note that the universe is being rather less nice to a number of my friends than they so clearly deserve. This is obviously shoddy behaviour on the part of the universe. I’m thinking of you, and as ever, if there’s anything I can do, you know where I am.

But then we got onto the issue of what it is possible to consent to (the context, of course, being that there are certain acts that law says it is not possible to consent to, and that list will get broader in a week or two). Now, as I say, if you want to let someone at your reproductive bits with any sort of implement, then that’s fine by me. All parties around the noodles were definitely agreed on that. But I do, for example, believe that it should not be possible to give your consent to being killed. (I am of course, thinking of the case of Armin Meiwes in German a few years back.)

Except that I believe in assisted suicide. My friends picked me up on this. And my response was that well, I believe in assisted suicide when someone’s quality of life is so awful as to be unbearable, and, in the opinion of a trained medical third party, is unlikely to improve. But if there’s a chance someone’s life could get back to bearable state, then they ought to keep going and that the urge of a person with a reasonable quailty of life (or a reasonable hope of same in the view of a third party) to simply end was the product of an abberant mental state that could be reasonably held in invalidate consent. (I should make it clear: this is not a judgement on people who feel like this, I simply feel that it is society’s duty to help people who feel like this to not feel like this, rather than to help them to shuffle off.)

“Why?” I was not unreasonably asked. Because, when you get down to it, I am a big communist hippy. Someone dying for no other reason than “just because they wish to right now” removes not just themselves, but all that they might ever be, from the world, and I think we owe it to our fellow man to hang about in case we can be useful later.

“Ah!” my friends then said: “So you’re pro-life?”

But I am not. I’m a good pro-choice boy, thanks. But, of course the death of a foetus deprives our fellow man of all they might be.

Bollocks. So, how do I reconcile this? Honestly, I think it has something to do with sentience. But I don’t seem to be able to nail it down very well, because, well, a foetus in sentience in potentia, isn’t it?

So, either I need to reconcile these views somehow, or I need to admit that it’s OK to help someone top themselves just because they’re having a bit of a bad day. But then, so does our justice system, so I’m hardly alone. But while I’m mulling it over, I wondered if anyone had any clever thoughts on how these positions could be made to fit together?