I have a slight confession to make even though it is more a statement of pride, in a sense.

Apart from 2 beers on the Backwater boat trip two days ago, taken with lunch in the middle of the day and quite metabolized by about 4pm, I haven’t drunk a drop of alcohol in, now, seven days.
That’s a week, for those of you not up with post-Babylonian events

This is going to be well received by some people, those with an active concern for the state of my internal organs for example, besides myself of course; whose concern has been pretty lax these past 6 years or so; a total nonplus for anyone whose not known me in person or at length, and a mark of shame for a bunch of people back home steadily hardening their arteries as I usually do in daily fashion.

This is the reason I have been so active on the blog lately – it’s called displacement activity; when one pattern of lifestyle is replaced wholesale by another, it’s just about the only quick-fix solution this universe has yet offered, and I’ve done it myself before...

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I used to be something of a pot-smoker: a proper stoner. I stayed in single rooms for whole days, memorably once managing to not leave the same room for the best part of a week, having food brought by people who visited me to smoke with me (and perhaps do a little business ) and, I am ashamed to say, relieving myself of excess liquids courtesy of a handy window.
The body can metabolise an amazing amount when you are young, supposed to be fit and healthy, and a huge quantity of Marijuana is added to the system, and you rarely need to process anything else, if I may make my insinuation without becoming too coarse at this time in the morning, for days on end.

This was in, in fact, the reason I had to leave the room after five days, if memory serves – and it’s incredible that it does serve anything at all after all that weed.
And Charis.
And block.
And Thai stick.
And skunk – lots of skunk, lots and lots and lots as anyone back home reading this who has known me a few years will testify.

To celebrate the Millennium my best friend, Brother and I made 7” or 8”-long joints and sat in a cheerful if semi-tranqilised state to welcome it in, watching something BBC-ish on TV to mark the precise event and, I planned this precisely such was my dedication, after filling my gob with an unhealthy dose of smoke, the very first thing that I did in this millennium was inhale.

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I used to be something of something to reckoned with as a stoner, in fact, such were the vast and copious quantities of Cannabis that I inhaled, and among a few social circles if someone was to be thought of as one of the hard core smokers who would sit for up to 12 hours getting unmentionably stoned and knocking scores of others under the table, along the corridor, and out of the door, then one of those was definitely me.

I decided to stop it one week, having forgotten my name and address just one time too many, and within that week I had almost completely displaced pot with alcohol, better for my short-term memory, far worse for my overall complexion and physique. Unbelievably, a drinker is less fit than a stoner, from the outside.

A little known fact: Stoners have great abdominal muscles and are almost always very thin. How many fat stoners do you see? Almost none. The stoner of fortitude will have great abs through coughing an awful lot, a good percentage of one’s day is spent coughing in fact, because even though they are used to the smoke the mark of a stoner is always pushing oneself to get something back of those first great highs - so through devices known as `lungs` `shotties` or `shotguns`, `buckets` and many others, along with an interesting range of designs and sizes of spliff, the stoner’s lungs and throat are constantly tested for weaknesses, and the brain is constantly harassed with near-lethal levels of intoxication in an attempt to see just how close you can get to sensory overload and throw up, pass out, faint, or perhaps die if we were really lucky.

And coughing, though you may have never thought of it like this; engage yourself in it for a full minute, with gusto, and you will feel the strain in your stomach muscles; is in fact your body trying for a full-on rejection i.e. to vomit, but your stomach muscles keep it in check through reflex, thus we are not plagued with oil-slick technicolour-yawns on every pavement and bus in the city of London

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So this, dear friends, is why I have been so active here on Versive this week, and so inactive in the bars and booze-shops of Kochi (cochin).

It's something of a badge of pride I wear, in fact, because I haven't managed more than one or two mostly accidental days without drink for a couple (read: around 4) of years straight now, apart from an ill-fated attempt to give up for exactly one year beginning sometime about 18 months ago: after running around telling everyone I was quitting the sauce for 12 months in the hope that setting myself up for such shame as would be wrought if I failed I would be kept on course; I managed only six weeks off the drink and had two little lapses where I snuck a couple of cans of lager away (nothing more, mind you - I was drinking a full botttle of spirits and some beer every day usually so they really where quite small lapses) and I also distilled my own whiskey in that same period, reasoning that `If I actually make it myself it doesn't count` so really, it was a bit of a shambles.

Therefor I'm pretty chuffed that I can displace drinking with writing, although I know I'll have to go and get a few beers in a few days because physically my system is in need of it (I haven't been sleeping more than a couple of hours in the early morning each `night` - I usually drink myself to sleep you see) but still, I find this a great deal more enjoyable than drinking which has, like smoking pot before it, become a pretty hollow experience.

As long as I keep reading and learning and doing the occasional stupid/mentionworthy/exciting/picturesque thing, however, I will never tire of trotting out prose