A farewell to alcohol

Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid.

Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants committing all the seven deadly sins. A changa’a drinker isn’t just drunk, he’s catatonic with the onset of blindness. Late on Saturdays in the middle of nowhere you’ll pass a man tottering about, quarrelling with the night air, pointing and stumbling. In South Sudan they make an evil spirit from cassava that turns a man’s eyeballs bright pink.

I first got drunk on Inch’s scrumpy in Devon at the age of 15. I was among the last boys to be caned in Sherborne’s history after I consumed a bottle of whisky with a comrade who had to be stomach-pumped. At Balliol I was among those lucky undergraduates who fell into the Svengali-like grip of punk poet and gatecrasher Stephen Micalef, who made us drink great quantities of the stolen bottles of Bollinger he retrieved from the flowerbeds where he buried them in all the finest colleges. While at SOAS, I drank more than I served at the bar of the 100 Club on Oxford Street, where the bouncers were two broken-nosed twins known as Ugliness in Stereo.

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