The same resolution every year goes nowhere. Stop fighting battles and just have a nice, quiet life, I tell myself – and by the second day of the year I’m up to my eyeballs in kerfuffles.
Having sworn off helping anyone with anything ever again for the grand total of three hours of 2023, from shortly after midnight until about 3 a.m., I awoke during the night, at that dead of night time when ideas come out of nowhere into your dreams, and sat bolt upright in bed.
‘Oh! That’s it!’ I exclaimed. And I got up the next morning and spent the first day of the year not celebrating my 51st birthday in order to deal with the fallout from the latest assault on my friend the bricklayer, who is being banned from AA meetings.
So far as I can make out, he’s being objected to on the basis that he is too much trouble. In this day and age, a self-help group cannot possibly be expected to deal with the sorts of people who need help.
In Surrey, one finds the meetings are more like coffee mornings with women sharing their childcare problems, their marriage woes, their teenagers’ gender orientation choices, their disappointment with a new washing machine.
The last thing they want in their midst is a recovering alcoholic banging on about not wanting to drink Kronenbourg and get arrested.
The better class of alcoholic in the Surrey Hills have perfected the art of upmarket lifestyle advice gathering, the wellbeing forum, and these are not the sort of groups where they want to risk triggering impressionable young millennials by admitting a common or garden rock-bottom alky who actually really needs to come.
To recap: this man has been informed he is banned from meetings because he has criminal convictions, and because, allegedly, he makes women feel uncomfortable.
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