One for the Road: Pen and pint misadventures?

If the 150-odd columns I’ve had published in this paper amount to a self-portrait by a hundred thousand words, then my ma reckons the image I’ve rendered of myself over the last three years has been far from flattering.

At the start it was always: “People are going to think you’re an alcoholic.”

Then at some point, when she’d decided the reputational damage was done, it simply became: “People think you’re an alcoholic.”

Class, I wanted to say, that means people will buy me free drink wherever I go, like MacGowan or Bukowski.

But I knew what the riposte would be: Aye, but people liked them.

So instead my reply was always two-fold: “Well I’m not an alcoholic. And even if I was, who cares?”

“I’m not even saying anyone would care – or that anyone should care,” she’d say earnestly.

“But people usually pretend they’re not alcoholics; and you’re letting on you are one.”

The argument mutates each time it’s had, but, her being my ma and knowing I’m too thick to take advice directly, it always ends in supplication or maternal mind-games.

“Would it really do any harm to say something about how sometimes you exaggerate how much you drink?” or “I don’t care what ye write about, I’m not going to be the one going into job interviews worrying about whether the interviewer has read one of my 45 columns about being a drunken eejit.”

“Away with that. Rumours only help build mystique around a writer, and that sells.”

“Aye, that’s what the Belfast Telegraph and Irish News are after – mystique. Forget the politics, writing style and contacts. When you inevitably score an interview, you should land in dressed like Stevie Nicks and put the editor under a spell with a swish of your scarf.”

Anyway, last week I was chatting to her on the phone – my ma, not Stevie – and she was telling me she was chatting to somebody in the town who told her she’s a big fan of the column.

“She takes the paper to her reading group and they read your column,” my ma said.

“Jesus, tell her I’ll do a guest appearance at Christmas for 50 quid.”

“Naw, what she actually said was ‘literary group’.”

“Ooh, fancy. Eighty quid then.”

Then her voice changed, assuming that slightly performative, self-assured tone I know so well; the one that communicates that there is something coming your way that you’re not gonna like, but she is going to love.

I hadn’t yet realised it was an overture of that broken record starting to spin yet again.

“And was I telling ye who else I was chatting to recently, on about your column, too?”

“You met the Dean of Harvard in Dunnes and he was asking if I fancied a fellowship?”

She let out a polite laugh and prepared to launch the maternal missile.

“Funny enough, no. Mind Jackie used to come to me to get her haircut?”

“I do, aye. And let me guess…”

She looked at me, unnerved yet unchastened.

“She thinks I’m an alcoholic.”

Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened and all her cockiness curdled into blusterous indignation.

“How’d ye know that?” she demanded.

I held her eyes for a second.

“Because I met her in Bogan’s last weekend and she said the same thing to me.”

And for your information, Jackie, for a columnist, there are no poor lifestyle choices or misadventures; only research and material.

And just because I’m drinking like a fish doesn’t mean I’m not working like a dog.